Donner Party is a group of American migrants to California in 1846-47. Two families, the Donners and the Reeds, accounted for most of the 87 members of the party, which left Sangamon County, Illinois, in 1846, under the leadership of George Donner. After considerable difficulty crossing the Great Salt Lake in Utah, they were trapped by heavy snows in the Sierra Nevada in November. Forced to camp for the winter at a small lake, now named Donner Lake, about 21 km (about 13 mi) northwest of Lake Tahoe, they suffered enormous hardships, and members of the group resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. Forty-seven of them were eventually brought to California by rescue parties over what is now known as Donner Pass.
The story of the group of emigrants who came to be known as the Donner Party is a fascinating, but unrepresentative, story of the experience of Americans who traveled west in the mid- to late- 1800s. The Donner Party was one of the many groups who participated in the Westward Expansion of the United States, traveling the Oregon Trail to what was then the Mexican province of Upper California. Members of the Donner and Reed families set out from Springfield Illinois in the spring of 1846, traveling with a larger group of emigrants. Both George Donner and James Reed had read a guidebook written by Lansford Hastings, The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California. Hastings described a “cut-off” from the Oregon Trail that he claimed would save three hundred miles on the trip west. Reed and Donner decided to lead their party along Hastings’ Cutoff, where the group encountered disaster.
They endured a month of backbreaking travel to cover what Hastings claimed would take an easy week. They were exhausted by the
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People could do as they pleased in California without any interference from the Mexican government..........
