Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West

On a journey into the unknown, perfect progress is perfectly impossible.

Of the eighty-one people who had been trapped by the early autumn snow at the eastern edge of the Sierra, thirty-six had died and forty-five had survived. No one remained at the high camps. For the Donner Party, the journey was finished.

They could neither go back nor remain in place. Like their wagons, they had no brakes, no way of stopping the high-stakes journey on which they had wagered their lives and fortunes.

Clyman trying to warn Reed about the desolation he had just seen in the Great Salt Lake Desert. Remembering the conversation years later, Clyman said he told Reed to “take the regular wagon track, and never leave it—it is barely possible to get through if you follow it, and it may be impossible if you don’t.

Tamzene Donner was a woman at peace with the vagaries of life: “I am as happy as I can reasonably expect in this changing world.

But the most significant reason for staying at Truckee Lake may have been their ignorance of the territory into which they had wandered. Back at home, Midwest winters froze noses and turned fingers numb, but a storm was fierce if it dropped three feet of snow. For the most part, the men and women of the Donner Party had no experience with the kind of mountain climate they were about to experience, no idea that snowstorms could bury livestock or buildings or a decent-sized tree. In the end the extraordinarily deep snows of the Sierra Nevada would have much to do with their suffering, but in the beginning their expectations were a blank. The families must have stayed at the lake, in other words, in part because they knew so little about it. Had they understood more about their surroundings, they might have left.

In 1859 a woman was raped by five apparent Indians, although she was able to identify her attackers as white men because, in the words of a government report on the incident, “They had not taken the precaution to paint the whole body.” We