The Donner Party with Chelsey Weber-Smith

You may:

1. Travel on the established trail
2. Take the Hastings Cutoff

What is your choice?

Chelsey Weber-Smith (American Hysteria) tells Sarah about the Donner Party. 

Here's where to find Chelsey:

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Links:

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Transcript

Sarah: Most of us don't want to commit murder. That's my weird hypothesis about people. 

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, I am Sarah Marshall. Today we are learning about the Donner Party, and we are learning about it with Chelsey Weber-Smith, host of American Hysteria, one of my favorite podcasts and probably one of your favorite podcasts. If you're a fan of this one, you just might not know that it's one of your favorite podcasts yet, but it will be. Both Chelsey's show and this show are often about American folklore and the stories that we grow up knowing, but that may be changed completely when we learn the details. And this is one of those stories. 

So I was really happy to go farther back in time than we often do, and to have Chelsey try and separate myth from fact, and also to look at the areas where that has become impossible, because that's one of the things we like to talk about as well. We did an episode on the Dyatlov Pass Incident not long ago, and this is a survival story as well. And a story about people who found themselves in circumstances that it might be impossible for us to imagine, and what they did in those conditions. And I think these are certainly stories that are always interesting to me. It's part of why I watch so many horror films. I think there's something for all of us in asking ourselves how we would react and how we would like to think we would react. And maybe the distance between those two things when we think about situations like this one. 

We have really tried to stay out of goriness for its own sake. That's a theme in the show that when we talk about scary stuff, our goal isn't to scare you for the sake of it. But we also aren't trying to hide the scary stuff either. So if you're not in a place where you want to hear about people in survival situations, extreme physical duress, or cannibalism, this isn't going to be a good episode for you. But that said, our focus in this episode is really on the people who were involved in the story and what we can learn about them now, what their relationships were like, what they were trying to do to maintain some kind of a social order in the face of annihilation. And we want to talk about the people and then what happened to them is secondary to that in our telling. 

I had some technical difficulties with my recording equipment this week, so this episode was an even more valiant effort than usual by our producer Carolyn Kendrick. And it came out sounding very close to normal, but again, a little bit different than what you're used to. And as always, we have bonus episodes at patreon.com/yourewrongabout, or you can subscribe on Apple podcasts. All right, everybody, we're going out with the Donner party. I'll see you on the trail. 

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, where we tell you how the west was won. 

Chelsey: Perfect. 

Sarah: With me today is Chelsey Weber-Smith, legendary friend of the show. You were with us to talk about killer clowns, and now you're going to tell us about the Donner party. And Chelsey, you have a podcast as well. For the uninitiated, what is your podcast and what happens over there?

Chelsey: Over there. Well, American Hysteria is the name. And we cover things like moral panics and conspiracy theories, urban legends, and general American fantastical thinking. And now we're also saying national misunderstandings. So we cover everything from the Puritans to the present and try to draw some through lines through history.

Sarah: So I would love to start by telling you what I know or think I know about what the Donner party is. And then you can just tell me what happened. 

Chelsey: Perfect. What do you know about the Donner party? 

Sarah: So my understanding is that the Donner party, I think this happened in the late 1840s. It was basically a wagon train that comprised primarily two pretty prosperous families, the Donners and the Reeds. So you also sometimes hear people referring to the Donner Reed party, which is very confusing because Donna Reed was in It's a Wonderful Life.

Chelsey: Right, right, right. Very easy to mix those two up. 

Sarah: But basically, they were a wagon train that set out to go - I forget what their starting point was - but that their goal was to end up in California. And that they went over the Sierra Nevada mountains. Which is where Chris Pratt lives with his clone daughter in Jurassic World: Dominion. And it looked very chilly in that movie. Basically, there had been a lot of wagon trains that had taken this route, and everything had been fine. And therefore people were maybe a little bit overly casual about it. They were like, we'll be fine. I think it reminds me a little bit of stuff you hear about the Franklin Expedition, where they're like, we're going to find the Northwest Passage or the North Pole or whatever, and we're going to bring a piano to do it because we just think we'll be fine. 

Chelsey: It's the American way. 

Sarah: Yeah. And also the British way. 

Chelsey: Well, that's our mom. 

Sarah: Yeah. And that basically things did not work out for them. They were caught by weather. I believe they were just stranded over the winter and just had no food. What I'm curious about primarily is whether it is still open to debate the degree of cannibalism that took place. Because of course why this is famous is not because these were people who starved while trying to travel west in a wagon train, but that they resorted to cannibalism. And I've heard it said the last I heard there was a fair amount of ambiguity about did it even happen, or did it happen to the extent that we tend to imagine it happened. But that's why we talk about it, I think. It is because we have this idea of essentially that we cherish stories that seemed like outliers to us on this individual extreme of human behavior, when actually they probably represent something that isn't as rare as we would like to believe.

Chelsey: Can we start just with a little context of what's going on at this time? 

Sarah: Yes, please.

Chelsey: Okay. We're gonna meet Lansford Hastings, and he is the man who wrote about the shortcut. And the shortcut will be their great demise. The Hasting’s Cut off, it's called. So Lansford Hastings wrote this book. The book was used as a guide. It was called, The Emigrants Guide to Oregon and California. And it was used as a guide that everybody used when they were going to Oregon. And it was basically also him trying to convince people to go to California. The reason being that he had a lot of land there. It was in the middle of the Mexican American War. So Lansford Hastings, along with this man named John Sutter who runs Sutter's Fort, which is the goal of the Donner party, just follow me here. They want to create a bloodless revolution. So they want to convince as many white people to come to California as possible to wrest control of the area. So that's part of what's happening here. 

Sarah: Okay. So they're like, hey, we got a shortcut. Come do our political bidding. Wow. 

Chelsey: In fact, I believe only one group had ever crossed the cutoff. And the Donner party is made up of 80 people in wagon trains, oxen. It's a huge thing. Anyway, he's convincing people to go this direction. So then the Donner party is really into this idea. Jacob Donner, along with James Reed, who you mentioned. These are our two main dudes. So they read this book. Lansford Hastings' descriptions, it's basically like candy will fall from the sky and your flowers will grow to the heavens, and you'll have everything you could ever dream of. That's our very basic context. This is the 1840s, and this is a couple years before the gold rush will change the entirety of California. 

Sarah: But yeah, I would love to meet some of our people. 

Chelsey: We have James Reed who is the de facto leader for most of it. The thing is, is it the Donner party? Is it the Reed party? It's all very boring because they're switching up leaders and this is a long trip. There's a lot of time for things to happen. But James Reed, he's bullheaded. He boasts himself up as a big, rich dude. He has a wagon that's two stories that his daughter calls the Pioneer Palace Car. It has its own stove inside. Wow. I think of him as a CEO who's going to Burning Man in one of those fancy camps. He's glamping his way across.

Sarah: That seems structurally unsound.

Chelsey: Yes. But secretly he is broke. The Donner party's a bit of a Fyre Fest actually, because to go on this trip, you had to be able to afford it, which seems wild. It's like sending out rich people into the unknown woods, but it was the only people who could afford it unless you were a teamster or a hired hand. 

Sarah: That's such a good point. So like the people who are going into this situation where they have to think on their feet and problem solve are also the people who demographically are most likely to be like, somebody else will do it for me. It'll work out all by itself. Somehow. It always does. 

Chelsey: But I will say it depends on the people, because eventually, there are 80 people in the Donner party when they're stranded, and it fluctuates. And I think a lot of people think, oh, the Donner party's a family, it's small and wagon trains are enormous, and they span miles and they come in and out. And we just don't actually realize, you had to be so tough. And so these people, though they were middle class or upper class, also that meant something different because they were living in rural areas. So they were hard workers. They're fleeing typhus and cholera and just horrible shit in the Midwest. It just was horrible. 

Sarah: I'm sure that everybody who does this tends to have the same thought of just let's start over. I'm sure I can find some space that nobody's using and if they are, I can construct a very elaborate narrative about how it doesn't matter. And then I can create my own society and it'll be better than the last one. 

Chelsey: That's exactly true. And again, Hastings’ guidebook was just basically saying land is up for grabs. It was so cheap. They just wanted to get people there. And then whoever got there first, they got a bunch of land. And then of course they're gonna sell it off however they want, and then they're gonna get rich. So they're fleeing this pretty hard life in the Midwest, despite them being middle class. But in California, gold is gonna grow from your trees.

Sarah: Lemons, have you seen the price of lemons?

Chelsey:  I haven't even wanted to look. Well, once the gold rush happened, the people who were there were charging - and I am not kidding you - hundreds of dollars for a single egg. 

Sarah: They were like, look it’s surge pricing. I'm sorry.

Chelsey: Okay. So James Reed, we got a little off track here. He's got his whole family, right? Virginia Reed is his wife. So then we got Jacob Donner. He's kind of, duh duh duh, is how I think of him. He's just way nicer than James Reed. He ends up being elected because…

Sarah: He's here to make friends. 

Chelsey: Exactly. He is here to make friends and just a benign guy. And then his wife is Tamsen Donner, who I think is my hero of the story. With of course the admittance that all of this is problematic for what's going on. But Tamsen Donner, she was an abolitionist and wanted to move out of an area where it was still legal to have slaves. So her shtick was collecting plants and drawing all the new foliage, and then sending it back so that people could learn about what was happening. And she was a schoolteacher who just really believed in education for everyone. And she was just a badass. She did all kinds of stuff. She lived a really hard life before she lost her husband and kid, before she married this much older Donner man. 

Sarah: So we have our wagons heading out. One of them has two stories. Where are we leaving from?

Chelsey: They are leaving from different places, but most are kicking off from Independence, Missouri. Right now in our story, everybody's gathering together. The Donner and Reed party are like, “Hey, we want to do this. Let's band together. Let's put something in the newspaper. See who else wants to go with us and gather everybody together.” 

And then here's something real fun. You know who wanted so bad with all his, bless his little heart, Abe Lincoln wanted to go with the Donner party. James Reed was his best friend ,and he was so close to going. But of course his wife said, no, Mary Lincoln. 

Sarah: Very smart. Listen to your wife, Abe Lincoln. 

Chelsey: And Abe Lincoln did not do anything Mary Todd did not say ‘yes’ to. So the day that the Donner party kicks off, he is nowhere to be seen. And Reed is well, where's my best friend, Abe? He's not even gonna come and say goodbye to me. And you know what he's doing? He was too sad. He was too sad to go. So he just went riding on trails with his horse, Tom. 

Sarah: Oh, Abe Lincoln. And I would imagine having a lot of survivor’s guilt about this potentially. Yeah. And then you think about who would've been president if he had died? 

Chelsey: Yeah. okay. Leaving Independence. All right. Everybody is stoked. People are seeing this as a grand adventure. And with that very specific American mindset that nothing bad is gonna happen. This is divine providence. I think the story is a story of hubris, and of the confidence that comes from a colonized nation built by rogue individuals that had to be people who were ready to take risks that were completely outrageous. 

Sarah: Right. And going into nature with an attitude of, that's mine, that’s mine, that's definitely mine. 

Chelsey: Yep. Definitely. I love the idea of the sublime in poetry where it's beautiful terror. So you come upon these new landscapes, and you're overwhelmed by just the majesty of something. But being so fearful of it because it's unknown. And just to imagine seeing animals you didn't know existed. Because it's not you're like, oh, here's the guidebook and all the fun things that are gonna happen in my like picture book. You had Hastings’ guide and nothing else. And then you're just, there you are. 

Sarah: Well, and even though we’re both from the west coast, and I do think there's this funny thing where when you grow up in the west and then you see the rest of the country, there's so many things that you don't have that are extremely exciting, like diners, obviously. But then in terms of landscape, I remember going to the mountains in New England and being like, that's cute. You think these are mountains. 

Chelsey: Right, right. Yep. 

Sarah: And they're wonderful. And I couldn't climb them, but to an Oregonian they're hills. And so imagining having that experience in reverse with no precedent for it, with no indication of what it would be like, I know that it had, for some people, some degree of a humbling effect to mitigate that sense of that's mine. That's mine. 

Chelsey: Yeah. And I think if you read letters, they're very humbled because they really believe in like God, the beauty and the majesty and the smallness of humanity is all remarked upon while they also barrel forward to take as much land as they possibly can with no consideration for, what they consider to be people who are not fully human. All right. So most people who are going on the Oregon trail or California trail, which far less people are going to California at this point. Very few. But everybody says that you cannot leave Independence later than May 1st. Because you are crossing the mountains where there is snow, and you have to get across before the snow comes.  The Donner party did not leave until May 12th. 

Sarah: Oh, you guys.

Chelsey: Taurus season. 

Sarah: Taurus season, which says let me do it on my own time. I'm sure it'll all work out.

Chelsey: And you're not always right, Taurus. But you are a lot, not this time. So they're going along and at this point it's fun. They're having fun. They're playing music every night. They're dancing, they're circling the wagons. They have so much food they packed, they're cooking these amazing dinners. And everybody thinks that, this is it. This is how it's gonna be. And they're walking like 15 miles a day. A lot of people are walking rather than riding in the wagons. It's grueling work, but you know, they're not to the mountains yet. 

So they're still in the Midwest. And then something happens that I think is our moment in the horror movie that sets the tone, right? Somebody hits a deer. James Reed's mother dies and she's already really old. Nobody really expected her to make it. The doctors were like, you're not gonna make it if you do this. But then when she dies, they all gather under a tree. They bury her, everything's still fine. They keep going. They have to forward a river. Things are trying to get a little more challenging, but it's still a grand adventure. 

And then Tamsen Donner writes in a letter to her sister, probably the most famous Donner quote that you will hear in everything. And she says, “I could never believe we could have traveled so far with so little difficulty. Indeed, if I do not experience something far worse than I have yet done, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started.” They arrive together at the first Fort that they're going to. So there's gonna be like a series of forts. 

Sarah: And can you actually explain what a Fort is? Because my field trip knowledge is scanty at this stage. 

Chelsey: Yeah. It's basically a place where people can go and rest and renew their supplies and meet with other people and hang out. 

Sarah: Like a truck stop.

Chelsey: Yes. It's like a really big truck stop. 

Sarah: Because to me, Fort implies that it's protected, that it's like some kind of military outpost. But is that true?

Chelsey: I don't think that's necessarily true. I think it's just used, I could be wrong though. So I don't know a ton about forts unfortunately, but now I’ll go learn.

Sarah: Un-fort-unately. 

Chelsey: But basically, you're just trying to reach each Fort, like it's a market where you're like, okay, now I'm at Fort Laramie. Now I can up my supplies. We've made it far enough. If we need to buy oxen, if we need to buy flour, if we need to get more water because they have to carry everything.

Sarah: If you need to go to the bathroom and get a slim gym and get like a sweet tea with nugget ice. 

Chelsey: Yeah. We're not stopping until California, so you need to go now. So they arrive there and this, Sarah, is where they meet their harbinger. And their harbinger is a man named James Clyman. He's like this chiseled, rough, real buff mountain man who's pretty famous for his travels over the mountains and his writings. And he's just, he's a man about the woods. He's everywhere. So he is an old friend of Reed’s, an old military buddy of Reed’s. And they tell Clyman that they're going to take Hastings cutoff. And he goes, no, do not under any circumstances take that cutoff. There were no uncertain terms. He was like, don't do it. He described the geography. He said, there's absolutely no way, I've done this cutoff on horseback and I barely made it. There's no way you're gonna be able to do it in a wagon, let alone a hundred wagons. So do you think anyone listened?

Sarah:  I would imagine that people could have listened, but it wouldn't matter anyway, but maybe nobody listened.

Chelsey: You know who did listen. One and only Tamsen Donner. She's like George, no, no. Because, just don't. 

Sarah: This is the listen to your wife episode.

Chelsey: We'll get into that. Yeah, this isn't the decision time yet, they have another fort to get to before they decide for sure if they're gonna take the cut off. Here's some more hubris, they were supposed to reach independence rock before July 4th. Right? So everybody's like partying there for the 4th of July. And then where are they on July 4th? Do we think they're at independence rock? 

Sarah: No.

Chelsey: No they are not. They are still one week away. However, do you think they're not gonna celebrate the birth of our nation, the 4th of July? No, they're gonna party their faces off. They party so hard together on the 4th of July, they're shooting shotguns into the air, just pouring, whatever they drink, rum. I don't know, down their gullets. 

Sarah: They’re partying Philly style very appropriately. 

Chelsey: Yep. At one point James Reed, I wish this was with Abe Lincoln, but it wasn't, although I don't know, it could have been. He had made this plan with his friends. He had this special bottle of Brandy and so did his friends back where he's from. So at the prearranged time, he faced east and held up his cup to toast his friends in Illinois, and they at the very same moment were doing the same thing while an old pine time band played what was then called Just music.

Sarah: Wait what's just music? 

Chelsey: Old time music is now just music. 

Sarah: Oh. Oh, I get it. It's just music. It's like, play a jam, you guys. Yes. All right. 

Chelsey: Okay. 

Sarah: That's lovely. I got to say, I find that adorable. 

Chelsey: Yeah. Adorable. If they weren't a week behind and about to…Hubris 

Sarah: Adorably a bad idea. Yes. Incredible to be this confident. Yeah. 

Chelsey: And we have this image of like the stern plotting group of people, but they were partying. They were definitely having sex, not necessarily with people, they were married to. The women had condoms. They had medicines to induce abortion. They had ways to control pregnancy. But they were like living full lives. These aren't just Puritans. It's just a wild thing. It's honestly a giant real world.  80 people pick to live in a wagon train.

Sarah: It does seem like burning man where you're living in this ad hoc community that's going through a land that you think of as wilderness and think of as being in brand new, because it is to you. And I assume that there would be just a feeling of loosening of societal constraints for people and just not being surveilled the way that you were used to, and maybe a kind of, some euphoria mixed in with the whole, all of the other flavors. 

Chelsey: It's a human story, which means it's all parts of the human story. So there they go, at least a week behind schedule plotting along. And then a lone man on horseback approaches them from the distance ahead and he brings them a copy of a letter from Lansford Hastings. And it says to meet him at Fort Bridger, which is the next fort they're going to, and that he will personally guide them through the cutoff. So they're really excited about that. That revs their engines right back up about the shortcut. 

So then they eventually get to Fort Bridger where they have to make this decision. And they're hanging out at Fort Bridger, lollygagging as always, but something's happening that they don't know about that is the most sort of consequential moment. And that is that Lansford Hastings, a few days later, realized there's no way that I can take this group. It's not gonna work. He sends a letter ahead to the two men who own Fort Bridger. They then are supposed to deliver the letter to the Donner party, but instead they keep it, they hold it, they don't deliver it because if the Donner party gets across the pass and it becomes a real trail, they're going to make hella money. And if no one uses the cutoff, then their fort is gonna fail because everybody's taking the upper pass. Because these guys out of perhaps desperation, I don't know them, but I don't think it's really forgivable to do that. But, so it's yet, again, this kind of a cash grab at the expense of 80 people's lives and whether they thought they'd make it or not, I don't know. But if they would've gotten that letter, I do believe they wouldn't have gone because Lansford Hastings was the man that they always moved toward, right, his ideas and stuff. So some split off some don't and they start on Hastings cut off. 

Sarah: Wow. And how many start on Hastings cut off. How many head off?

Chelsey: The total that would get stranded eventually is 81. So at that point it's locked in. Donner party, 81 heading to California. Almost immediately they run into their first problem. And that problem is that on the trail, the trees are so thick that they actually can't move through the trees. So for two days, men just spend the entire day chopping down trees. And then moving an inch forward. So they're still doing this. They're still moving forward. They're cutting down trees. They're moving forward. They're moving, so insanely slow. 

Sarah: Are they thinking this forest will thin out and then we won't have to do this? Because it seems like a mathematical certainty that this won't work out for them?

Chelsey: Each obstacle that they encounter, they say, oh, if we just get over this obstacle, it'll be fine. And then as soon as they get over that obstacle, they see an obstacle that's way harder. 

Sarah: Yeah. You weren't kidding about the Fyre Fest thing? 

Chelsey: No. I was not kidding about the Fyre Fest thing. So right now they're in the Wasatch Mountains and they're climbing mountains so steep that they have to lock the wheels of the oxen and the oxen are pulling, their feet are slipping, right? It's a nightmare. And at one point it's so steep that the oxen can't get a grip and suddenly a rope snapped that was holding up the wagon and it just cartwheeled over itself, oxen and all, until it fell off a cliff.  

Sarah: Oh God. And is this in what is now Utah? 

Chelsey: Not quite yet. We're getting really close to Utah at this point. Tamsen Donner, bless her heart, sees something in the brush. And she puts together this letter that Lansford Hastings had left for whoever was following, because he ended up leaving because - I didn't mention that - but he ended up leaving before the Donner party got there because they were so late.

Sarah: They kept texting him and they were like on my way, but they were still drying their hair. Yeah. 

Chelsey: She puts together this letter, realizes it's from Lansford Hastings and it says, “two days, two nights, hard driving cross desert reach water.” So what they're about to cross is the Great Salt Lake desert in Utah that they have to cross 80 miles of with no water and nothing. They have to bring everything with them. So they fill all their barrels full of water in the spring. They walk for 24 hours straight, and the wind is blowing salt in their faces, cracking their lips. They're getting blinded by the sun glinting off the salt during the day. 

And at night they're just so cold. Right. And they don't know where they are because it's just this flat expanse that is like producing visions for certain people like mirages. And then just all hell breaks loose. And it starts to feel like a bad mushroom trip. The cattle are just running, they're gone into the distance. They start freaking out because they don't have water and they're all sinking into this salt crust, and they can't move. And they're in this gummy mass and trying to plot forward and they're leaving their wagons and they just start on foot. They're losing all their oxen. People are trying to go forward to get water. It's just absolute pandemonium. And it takes a total of five and a half days to get across the desert.

Sarah: Oh my God. And did people die of thirst on the way? Did they have casualties?

Chelsey: No, I don't think anybody died. Wow. They were really resourceful. At one point it was freezing that night and they piled the children under all of the blankets and then they put all the dogs on top of the kids to keep everybody warm. Their dogs were named Tyler, Barney, Trailer, Tracker, and cash. 

Sarah: Tyler, Barney, Trailer, Tracker, and Cash. Those also sound like Sarah Palin's kids, but in the best way possible.

Chelsey: That was a good one. Oh man. Okay. Then when they finally get out, they stay another week just trying to get over that bad mushroom trip.

Sarah: You know what, you got to take time for self-care. Yeah. Nah. 

Chelsey: But you know, in their defense they had left like a bunch of their wagons and their cattle were all gone. So they were trying to go and collect what they could because the cattle is their food. And so once you lose oxen, you're also losing probably your primary food source, which is scary and also sad because maybe the kids love those oxen.

Sarah: Oxen seemed very nice. I always got oxen in the Oregon trail game. The two things I learned was get oxen for your draft animals and for God's sake, don't call your wagon when you go across the river, just pay for the ferry, even though it seems too expensive. 

Chelsey: You know what’s more expensive? Your wagon sinking. Buy the insurance for your rental car. 

Sarah: That was a good life lesson. If you can afford it, do the safer thing, even if you don't want to. 

Chelsey: Yep. So yeah, at this point, things are fracturing. There were pretty decent bonds. People still fought and everything, but there was some fusion between this group of shared goals and, we're gonna get along. We have to get along like the real world. So then we have a big drama happen where James Reed gets in a fight with this guy named John Snyder who's very beloved in the group. He is known for getting up and dancing and shoeing and violin’in and doing all the kind of stuff that, people love it. They're trying to get up yet another hill with their oxen and Snyder is like screwing up Reed’s oxen in some way. There's a mess that happens and then they pull out weapons. Snyder hits James Reed on the head with his bull whip. And then James Reed pulls out a knife and stabs him in the heart. He dies. Yes. He's immediately remorseful, allegedly. There is a split in the recollections of people who were there who say it was in self-defense or it was murder. So we'll never know. 

Sarah: And I'm sure that is the kind of thing where yeah, the different eyewitnesses would have different reads of the situation based on their impressions of the two principles going into it, but wow. Yeah. And then to this point, how long have they been on the trail? 

Chelsey: Well, let's see, this is October and they left late, right? They left May 12th. 

Sarah: Okay. Almost five months. 

Chelsey: Yeah. So this is a long time they're crossing hundreds and hundreds of miles. It's wild. And at this point, this is a very bad thing to happen, especially because James Reed, as horrible as he is, has kind of emerged as a leader. So they have a little trial. They were very democratic. 

Sarah: Wow. But I'm impressed by that. 

Chelsey: Democracy was real important.

Sarah: Yeah. We used to love that in America. I don't know when we stopped.  

Chelsey: I don't know when that happened.

Sarah: Now we’re very against it. 

Chelsey: I know. I know. It's weird. They have their little trial. Some people want him excommunicated. Some people want him forgiven. One person, Louis Keseberg, wants him to be hanged. And Louis Keseberg is the Donner party's ultimate villain. So keep that name in your head.

Sarah: Louis Keseberg. Okay. I'm thinking of Paul Dano in There Will Be Blood, where it's oh, having a nice boy face has turned you twisted inside. 

Chelsey: He still looks too young. Keseberg I'll show you a picture of hum, it looks like a ghoul. He just doesn't look good. So they decide to banish him. So they give him just a horse and say, get the fuck outta here. The funny part is that the Donner party had chosen to move ahead, because they were able to move at a faster pace. So they had no idea what was going on. James Reed, just clopped up on his horse and they were like, oh Hey James. And had no idea what was going on. So he got to kick it with them and get some more supplies and stuff before he said he was like, I'm gonna move forward so that I can get us extra rations and bring it, bring them back. But really, he was just gone. He's gone forever.

Sarah: I'm gonna go up ahead now fore I'm, not a murderer reasons. 

Chelsey: And like I'm a hero because I'm going to go get rations.

Sarah: Wow. So well played. 

Chelsey: Yeah. Lucky for him, I'll say. So then they come across a Paiute tribe and the relationship is so complicated between the wagon trains and indigenous people. In some ways it's not complicated at all. Obviously get the fuck out of here, but the relationships were really different. And a lot of times attacks that happened on wagon trains from different tribes were retaliation for things that happened with other wagon trains that are now up the trail. So basically a lot more of their oxen are stolen as they're crossing Paiute land. A hundred cattle are gone at this point, just in this stint. So they're running out of food. They're running out of provisions. At this point they know they're in trouble. 

And so they're sending people ahead to get supplies and then Charles Stanton is one of the guys from the Donner party who went ahead, and he brought back two Miwok guides. And that was a tribe that was local to the area that had a good sense of how to get around. And everybody says, “Hey guys, it's not gonna snow till November, got to haul and maybe we can get across before the snow”. So they're feeling okay about that. And then somebody dies, accidentally shot, a young man. They're all standing around his grave. Very sad. There haven't been a lot of deaths yet. And just as they're all looking down at him, they start to feel on their skin, the first snow. And they just look up at the sky and they know. 

Sarah: I bet. There is something so enduringly fascinating to me about the power of snow, that it is this sort of silent, powerful, and deadly, the same way that the desert or the ocean or a mountain is. We talked about this in the Outlaw Pass episode, not long ago. Just how to humans, one of the scariest things is not somebody is out there to get you, but nature doesn't care. Nature has no thoughts about you at all. And this through a combination of various factors, you will just get completely screwed by this very picturesque thing. 

Chelsey: They camped that night hoping, oh, it's just a fluke, just a little bit of snow. It's okay. And then in the morning the description is that their heads start popping up out of the snow, like Prairie dogs. So it literally had snowed so much that night that everything was buried. That was the first big winter storm, six feet or something like that. And at that point they panic. They're like, okay, what do we do? If we don't keep going, we're gonna have to make camp. Some people want to make camp and hope for this to pass, or just say, we're not gonna make it. We have to camp for the winter until the snow melts. 

So they decide to stay because they move a little bit forward. They're like, there's no way, everything is sinking into the snow. They can't pull oxen through. They can't do anything like that. So they set up three camps. And they're all set up pretty far away from each other, which shows you how they were done with each other. One's a mile away from the other. Some of the families find these old log cabins that were there from a previous person, but they're really crappy. They make them into something livable. Keseberg builds like a lean to against the cabin and tries to use oxen and all different stuff to create a roof. There's another one that is tents that they made but each one of these has 20 people in it. 

So this storm that they're preparing for lasts for 18 days of just snow. At this point, their oxen all run away, or they're buried under snow. They don't have any food left so everybody's just stuck here and at some point they're eating their shoes. They boil the leather from their shoes to eat. They take the bones of the oxen and they boil them and drink the broth and boil them again and drink the broth until they're like mush. And then they're eating the mush of the bones. Sometimes the bones are like turned into dust that they eat. They're eating the carpet. Anything that's made from anything organic, they're eating because there's just nothing. And they have some oxygen they're saving them. They're trying to do this, but they see that there is no hope. 

Sarah: I always thought that a boiled leather shoe could be relatively appetizing. And then I watched Verner Herzog Eats his Shoe. 

Chelsey: What did it look like?  

Sarah: It sucked up all the water and it came out looking like black, but he did eat it because he's a champ.

Chelsey: It's creative, you're doing what you have to do. They're eating the ox hides, but they have to be careful. Cause that's also the roof. 

Sarah: This is the only part I've retained any memory of, by the way, because this is what I fictionalized I was like, they were eating the ox hides, which were also the roof. That's all, of course I remember something that is both very grim and also about interior decor. 

Chelsey: Little missions have been like, okay, we're gonna go, we're gonna go get help without the wagon train, on horseback or on foot or whatever, and they keep failing, there's about three tries. They get a mile and they're like, we can't do this. It's not possible. So finally in December, they're just like, something has to happen. And Franklin Graves, he is real smart. He fashions a bunch of snowshoes out of wagon parts and tree limbs and whatever. Right. And they work, they actually work really well, and people can walk on top of the snow. It's not easy, they're heavy and cumbersome, but they can stay on top of the snow. So they decide, okay, we are gonna do it. We are gonna get out of here no matter what it takes, because more than half of the Donner party were children. The mothers and the fathers have this will to keep going that a lot of people have pointed out probably was the thing that kept them alive. Because they had something else they were responsible for. And there's this real dedication to saving the children but in a good way for once, right? 

So 17 people decide to go on what's eventually called the Forlorn Hope. It's 17 men, women, and children, people who are strong enough to go, who said, I will do this who just couldn't bear to stay there anymore. Anything's better than sitting in this cabin watching people starve to death, right? So they set out, they strap on their snowshoes. They take six days of rations, rifle, blanket, hatchet, pistols, and they say, okay, let's go. And imagine this, you're in a snowshoe and the snowshoe is so difficult to lift already because you're in 12 feet of snow.  And you're barely floating on top, and you have to climb a hill. So you have to take your snowshoe, you have to jam it into the side of the hill and lift yourself up and then jam your other one to decide and lift yourself up and it's taking forever and you're moving so slow. And during the day the sun is like beating down at this point and it's hot because of the sun and they're going snow blind, which is something that happens when there were no sunglasses back then and it causes all kinds of symptoms and makes you feel like you can go nuts and have all these physical symptoms. At night they're freezing, obviously it's so cold, then during the day they become really hot because they're walking and doing all these things, and their clothes are just covered in sweat over and over again. And then they're freezing and it's just this never-ending onslaught of discomforts that you and haven't experienced, I guess I shouldn't speak for you, Sarah. I don't know if you've ever- 

Sarah: Yeah, I have not been in a wagon train situation. 

Chelsey: Yeah. I got a splinter the other day. 

Sarah: Right, exactly. I had heartburn the other night, so I was like, please God, make it stop, my heartburn. 

Chelsey: I've camped when I'm too cold. And I've done like the shiver at night. And just the way your body feels in the morning, really stiff if it's colder than you think it's gonna be. And just times that by every day, four weeks. It's just something that I can't understand or imagine. And a lot of times when I'm having my problems and I'm not suggesting this, but a lot of times when I'm having one of my little problems, I'm like if the Donner party can get through that, then I might be able to get over a mean thing somebody said on the internet. 

Sarah:  I can wait in this line at the DMV. Yeah. 

Chelsey: I think I'll survive. 

Sarah: God, yeah. Well, and also what are they eating? Is there any game at all? Yeah. 

Chelsey: Well not really. At one point they end up being able to shoot a deer and they're so hungry and desperate that when they run over, they just drink the blood right out of the deer. The other thing that's going on is that they're slowly actually making enough progress where things are warming up. There's still snow and everything, but what starts happening to them is that the brush they're beginning to encounter is so thick and their clothes are so rotted that it's actually like ripping their clothes off. So they're not wearing a full amount of clothes. They don't have shoes. They ate their shoes. So then everybody just starts going a little bit, like losing it. And they start to decide, we need to draw straws because we have to eat somebody. 

Sarah: Well, it occurs to me, first of all, that, in that situation, it's an interesting move because you said there's children on this. And I assume they're relatively old kids because they're able bodied enough to do this. But it is interesting that we've reached the point where it's like everybody gets a straw. Children are not exempt from getting eaten. 

Chelsey: No, they were, it was just the guys, don't worry. 

Sarah: Oh it was just the guys. Okay. Yeah. Because we would never eat a woman.

Chelsey: Yeah. Patrick Dolan is the guy who says we got to draw straws. We got to get this going. Guess who draws the straw?

Sarah: Patrick Dolan. Oh, Patrick.

Chelsey: Patrick Dolan. Yeah. Right. And then he's, “Well maybe, well, hold on. Hey, come on you guys. I wasn't serious.” But then they end up having enough humanity to say, okay, we're not going to do that, we're not going to murder this guy. And they knew that someone was gonna die soon. 

Sarah: Yeah. If death is so all around you, why take it into your own hands when you can just let it do its thing. 

Chelsey: And they didn't want to.

Sarah: Most of us don't want to commit murder. That's my weird hypothesis about people. 

Chelsey: So that night after the straw drawing, it's just one of those hits, just keep on coming stories. And for some reason, this sticks in my head so much as one of the worst moments and that the way that they had to keep warm was they had to cut down pine branches as they went and build fires every single night. Right? So every night the guys, the men are cutting wood, building a fire. This night, he's chopping wood and suddenly the hatchet head flies off and is immediately lost in the snow. 

Sarah: No, no, no, no. Oh my God. Ugh. 

Chelsey: That's the reaction that I had when I first heard the story. 

Sarah: I think this is so stressful, because it's so relatable as somebody who tends to drop her keys. You're just never getting it back. yeah. Oh my God. That’s horrible. 

Chelsey: I know. And so that night, the only thing they could do is they would light entire trees on fire. And like branches would just fall. And it was just like, this is what we're doing. We're just here, around this fire. The first person to die is Franklin Graves. And he has several kids, and he tells them to eat him. 

Sarah: He tells his family or like everyone?

Chelsey: No, he tells his daughters. 

Sarah: I would prefer to be eaten by family. So that makes sense to me. 

Chelsey: Well, that's really interesting that you say that. And I'll get to that in a second. So they don't do that right away, but they're staying in the same place right now. 

Sarah: And they just put him on ice. 

Chelsey: They thank you. They put him right on ice. So then the next person is Patrick Dolan, straw drawn Patrick. He is ranting deliriously. That thing happens and I think you guys talked about it in the Dyatlov Pass episode. But correct me if I'm wrong, when you start to get so cold that you rip all your clothes off. So he's doing that thing. 

Sarah: The paradoxical undressing. 

Chelsey: Yes. There it is. Paradoxical undressing, runs into the woods, passes away. That's the next person. What they generally did is that once the people were made into something that could be eaten, they would always make sure that no one was eating their own family. So they created a system. Because that was very important to people that they don't consume their own family members for whatever reason. But I guess you're different. 

Sarah: I'm ghoulish. Well, it's interesting because my first thought was like, oh that's nice. If you want your children to be sustained by the calories inside of you, then it would make sense that you would. As with funerals, it's all about what the living desire. I do know that they used a similar system to that in the Uruguayan rugby team that crashed in the Andes. They derived a system where there were people who were in charge of butchering, I guess, harvesting the meat from the people who had died and then making sure that nobody, I think actually what they were doing was making sure nobody knew who they were eating. Keeping it anonymous in the way that executions are actually where people didn't have to have a feeling of responsibility and the degree of organization that they were able to have is very impressive. 

Chelsey: There's still at this point, a lot of intention. 

Sarah: I think it bothers me that we have this as a story of what a creepy, gruesome, unbelievable thing. It's so creepy and gross. Really these stories about people being extremely compassionate and intentional, as you said, in this extreme situation where maybe we expect them to just have gone on a cannibalistic free for all. And it's like, no, there was like a lot of care and a lot of love really going into this.

Chelsey: And something we don't know how we would react in this situation, oh, I'd never eat someone like, yeah, you would. 

Sarah: I’ve never said that about myself. 

Chelsey: I've never said that either. Yeah. 

Sarah: Thank you. 

Chelsey: And it's like, if I don't eat then my children that are my life shouldn't be horribly harmed at minimum.

Sarah: This is also why one of my favorite horror movies is Open Water 2, because it's about people who jump off of a yacht and then nobody remembers to put the stairs down. And so they start fighting, a bunch of people just give up basically and the sole survivor is a mom who has a baby on the boat. And she's just like, yeah, I just have to survive. I just have to.

Chelsey: Yeah, it's just an instinctual thing, I guess, okay. So then a 13-year-old kid is the next person to start to lose it a little bit. So at one point, this kid sees a mouse. He grabs it in his bare hand and just shoves it in his mouth and eats it whole, right. This is where we're at. And then that night it's like just eating that mouse made his system start going. So he was found chewing on people's arms and saying, give me my bone. Very scary. And then he ends up dying as well. And so they prepare the meat of him now, Franklin Graves, Patrick Dolan. So they have that to share between them for a while. They try to continue on the only people who refuse, and I didn't mention that they were on this forlorn hope mission is Lewis and Salvador. The two Miwok guides. So they say, we're not eating people. They turn their backs. They leave because one of the guys who brought them back, who has developed a relationship, is like look, I think that they're gonna kill you. You need to go. Because of course, who are these people going to look toward first is the non-white people. 

So Lewis and Salvador leave because they're like, fuck this. And they know the lay of the land and they're like, we don't have to show you anything anymore. So they leave. But then they end up being found later by one of the people who does not have that compassion and in the story, Lewis and Salvador are so close to death that it didn't matter either way that Charles Stanton ended up murdering these two Miwok.

Sarah: Yeah. I have to assume that neither of us believe this near-death story anyway. Okay, it's awfully convenient. Yeah. Yeah. 

Chelsey: Maybe if they're near death, you could give them some of the other meat or something. I don't know. So at this point there are seven people left in the forlorn hope and all five of the women are alive. None of the women died on the forlorn hope, but only two men lived. 

Sarah: And I assume that there was some amount or a combination of women and children first plus just the idea of like women as primary caregiver or as, the entire caregiver and just well, we got to keep you alive because then Hiram Jr. will make it.

Chelsey: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. The snow has melted enough that they can start to see the ground and imagine that just that relief alone and they realize they're out of the worst part, at least. And then they see a human footprint. So they follow these footprints until they get to a trail, and they actually come to what I believe the pronunciation is the Maidu tribe and they are just overcome by seeing any type of sign of human life. And you see running in just seven people who are in taters and are described again and again as ghoulish, is the word they're using. And they terrified the children, the children thought they were monsters from the way that they looked.

Sarah: I'm picturing the dancers in Thriller. 

Chelsey: So the tribe welcomes them in and is like, okay, we're gonna help you. And they make them this acorn mush that is their staple food. And hear this: one of the guys is too grossed out to eat it. He says, I don't like it. He didn't like the acorn mush and it wasn't enough to sustain them. They needed more food than that. So then some volunteers from the tribe say, okay, we'll take you to Johnson's Ranch, because that's where they need to get to. That's the closest ranch that can give them supplies and then can send word forth that there needs to be rescue teams to come in. 

So they get there. The west is buzzing with this news and then they start forming reliefs. And people are just in the same dire straits back at the camps. There's been cannibalism. Like you said, it's debated who ate people. Archeologist group did a study of all of the remains, and they couldn't find any evidence of cannibalism. I personally definitely think the cannibalism happened because I don't really understand the point of making that up because it ruined all of their lives, right, the people that admitted to it. And it's pretty well established that people ate each other, at least on the Forlorn Hope we know that happened, but maybe not back at the camps, but yeah. The first relief gets there and people are like, take my kids, take all the healthiest people. There's actually three reliefs that come through eventually. So it takes a long time to get everybody out. It takes a really long time, and actually John Sutter did help fund these missions. So that's the one good thing he ever did, in his miserable life. Louis Keseberg, our villain, is left along with Tamsen Donner who decided to let her kids go ahead and to stay behind because George, her husband, George Donner had at one point cut his hand and it was so infected that he was gonna die. Because if you got an infection back then you just died. That was it. You could rub a cobweb on it. 

Sarah: You're like, if only there was some kind of topical cream I could put on this.

Chelsey: You guys got any CBD cream? So she just couldn't bear to leave him. And that's beautiful. I do understand that. So when they left Tamsen was with her husband and Louis Keseberg was also there and a few other people as well, who, for whatever reason, couldn't have gone with the other reliefs. When they get there, Keseberg is eating Tamsen Donner.

Sarah: No. 

Chelsey: Yes. George had died. And so the greatest mystery of the Donner party is, was Tamsen Donner murdered, or did she die on her own? Louis Keseberg says that she died and that he ate her because he had to, but of course it's up for debate, but I'd like to read to you really quick, the first report of the people who wrote about what they saw at the Donner party. And this went out to everybody who read the newspaper. “The bones of those who had died had been devoured by the miserable ones that still survived around their tents and cabins. Bodies of men, women, and children with half the flesh torn from them lay on every side. A woman sat by the side and body of her dead husband cutting out his tongue. The heart she had already taken out broiled and eaten-”

Sarah: Broiled?

Chelsey: Not the way you do it. “The daughter was seen eating the father, the mother, that of her children, the father of the mother, the emaciated wild and ghastly appearance of the survivors added to the horror of it. So changed had the immigrants become that when the rescue party arrived with food, some of them cast it aside and seemed to prefer the putrid human flesh that still remained.” 

Sarah: Right. It is the image or the idea that I feel like we still need to counteract, which is just yeah, everybody had a giant corpse eating party. They just got super into it and this image of people like surrounded by bones and specifically eating your own husband. What is your response though to that? 

Chelsey: Well, that's exactly what it was. A guy being like, I can get a bunch of attention if I tell this story in an exaggerated way. And there were human body parts around. He said something like the day before the party arrived, one immigrant took the body of a child about four years of age in bed with him and devoured the whole thing before morning. And the next day he ate another about the same age before noon. 

So he's eating two entire kids in one day. You can't do that. It shows how a story can take on a life of its own so fast and become far more than itself and take true details. It's gruesome enough that there were bones around and there, but to turn them into these people who can eat an entire child and seem to have no empathy and seem to have not done this as an absolute last resort. There was not a moment's joy taken in this. It was the most shameful moment of anyone's life. 

Sarah: Yeah. Which really reminds me of a question I ask myself a lot, which is like, why do we manufacture these stories? Why do we so often turn stories that are really just sad into stories where there's this sort of sensationalistic evil at the center of it and is based on this idea of yeah, if given the opportunity, people really want to kill you and eat a whole four-year-old. Yeah. And just this idea that people have become something else. And I can see why that's comforting, that there's a certain amount of trauma that you withstand. And at a certain point, you just turn, you become not human. And it's no, you're just stuck being a human who's very sadly subsisting on the bodies of your dead companions.

Chelsey: You're the most human. 

Sarah: Yeah. You're the most human in tragedy. 

Chelsey: It's a story that shows the limitlessness of the ability to survive if you have a reason. And I think that we focus so much on the bad things that they did to survive, we don't think about the ways that they helped each other, they did everything they could before. It's one of the first stories that I feel like we can really see the sensationalized true crime aspects of it. I mentioned before that Charles McGlasson was the first person to write almost a You’re Wrong About-ian book. 

One part is that he believed Lewis Keseberg to be innocent because when Lewis Keseberg came back, he was the villain. He was a cannibal. He sued somebody over calling him a cannibal. There was a whole drama about Lewis Keseberg trying to clear his name and being this huge Western pariah. And then McGlashan didn't think that was true. So he got Eliza Donner who is Tamsen Donner's daughter together with Keseberg, and Keseberg got on his knees, crying his eyes out to Eliza Donner and said, “I did not kill your mom. I didn't do it. I didn't do it.” And then she believed him. They buried that together. But you know, of course we'll never really know because Tamsen Donner's diary is lost. 

Sarah: No. Oh God, I bet somebody ate it.

Chelsey: Well, they think it's under the monument that they built on Donner Lake to the Donner party because they built it and where they thought the cabin was. But it turned out that was where the people buried all the artifacts and bodies. The secrets lie underneath the giant monument.

Sarah: That seems appropriate.

Chelsey: And that is most of the Donner party story. 

Sarah: And joy isn't the right word here. But to me, there's something very sustaining looking at these stories where the worst-case scenario comes true and then we see all of the avarice and cowardice and various seven deadly sins on display. And yet alongside that, there's always people making hard choices with love and dignity. And I don't know, I think maybe that we are ashamed of our survival instinct as humans, or we associate it with the desire to trample other people to save ourselves. And certainly there's no shortage of that behavior on planet earth. But as we move into the future, we are gonna find ourselves in more survival situations and we will join people in history who've done the same. And we will find that we stay human the whole time. 

Chelsey: And, they point out that was the moment that things fell apart was when the fragmentation started and some historians say things could have gone a lot better if they had been able to stay in some kind of solidarity, which if that's not a lesson for these times, I don't know what is. 

Sarah: Exactly.

And that was our episode. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much to Chelsey Weber Smith for explaining this chapter of history to us. I hope you have a better sense of America based on this episode. Not that you think, any particular thing about it, just that you feel like you understand it a little bit more. You can find much more Chelsey Weber Smith at their podcast, American hysteria, or on Twitter @Amerhysteria, where they're always a barrel of fun. Once again, if you want bonus episodes, including a couple with Chelsey, you can find them at patreon.com/yourewrongabout or subscribe on Apple podcasts. Thank you so much to Chase Potter for editing this week. Thank you so much as always to producer extraordinary Carolyn Kendrick. See you in two weeks.