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Allison Holmes
Anth 332
12/9/12
Glenn
The Donner Party
Imagine you are freezing; you can’t even feel your fingers and toes
anymore. It has been snowing none stop for the past week. The worst thing
about it, you are hungry; you haven’t eaten a real meal in months, let alone
anything in the past few days. You may be even to the point of desperation
where you would be willing to eat another human. Was this what going through
the minds of the Donner Party when they became trapped in the Sierra Nevadas
in the winter of 1846? That is the very question some archaeologists have set
out to find. The stories of the Donner Party are always associated with
cannibalism; even in newspapers from the 1840s tell about how they ended up
eating each other. Was this just propaganda for newspapers and campfire stories
or did these unfortunate emigrants actually end up resorting to cannibalism? The
emigrants stayed within two camps, the Donner Lake camp and Alder Creek
camp. There is evidence of there being cannibalism of the dead at the Donner
Lake camp but was there cannibalism the Alder Creek Camp? That is the
question I set out to find.
In the winter of 1846-47 a groups of emigrants became stranded in the
Sierra Nevadas near Truckee, California. The group of eighty-seven emigrants

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came across the country on the California Trail from Illinois. They were just one
group of emigrants of the estimated 300,000 emigrants that crossed the trail
between 1840-1860 (Hardesty 1997). George Donner, a sixty-two-year-old
farmer, was nominated captain of the party, set off in late May with three other
families to Independence, Missouri where they ended up joining groups with the
Reed Party (Hardesty 1997). In July of 1846 the party reached the Little Sandy
River just beyond South Pass, Wyoming. Here they needed to make a decision,
this decision is just one of the reasons that lead to the Donner Party’s fate. They
decided to take a new “short cut” called the Hasting Cutoff. The Hastings Cutoff
went from Fort Bridger, through the Wasatch Mountains and across the Great
Salt Lake Desert to the Humboldt River where it rejoined with the California Trail
(Hardesty 1997). The trip through the Wasatch Mountain proved to be much
more difficult than the party excepted. Instead of taking the canyon route marked
by the Hastings cutoff, the decided to make a new trail through the crest of the
mountains (Hardesty 1997). The new route required cutting a path through
heavily wooded areas with just had axes (Hardesty 1997). This easily could of
contributed to the early deaths of the men within the party.
Zoo archaeologist Donald Grayson points out some very interesting
information about the rates at which people die when put in varies situations. He
shows that mortality rates vary by gender, age, and the size of the social network
(Alderson 2001). Males compared to females, have a disadvantaged by their
larger size, higher Metabolisms and higher body core temperature (Alderson
2001). All this requires more energy to combat the cold. Females on the other

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handed, are smaller in size, have slower metabolisms than males, and have
subcutaneous fat that keeps them more insulated in the cold weather (Alderson
2001). This means that if rations are low and resources are share, men are less
likely to meet their energy needs. Having to cut a new path required lots of
energy and without the right amount of nutrients and calories needed to keep the
men remaining healthy. By the time they got stranded they were energetically
spent and died quickly (Alderson 2001). Biology implies that the youngest and
eldest should have passed away first, leaving the males to perished next and
lastly the females. The first five trail deaths were males, along with the first
fourteen deaths at the camps, twice as many males died as females (Alderson
2001). Grayson explains, “What these groups teach us is what happens when
human groups are largely stripped of their cultural means of dense against cold
and famine while at the same time retaining the ability to share resources within
family groups” (Alderson 2001).
After passing through the Wasatch Mountains the group reached the
Great Salt Lake Desert where more difficulties awaited them. The diversity and
cultural composition of the group, along with clashing personalities, fragmented
the party (Hardesty 1997). Making the wagon trail stretch for miles, their lack of
social cohesion also contributed to their stranding in the Sierra Nevadas. They
ended up having to abandon several wagons, including the rather large wagon of
James Reed (Hardesty 1997). On September 26th they reach the Humboldt
River where the cutoff joined to the California trail, two members had already
died of illness and James Reed and Walter Herron had been banished after

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killing a group member (Hardesty 1997). James Reed later helped to rescue the
trapped emigrants. They reached the Truckee River in mid- October with only
fourteen wagons, when they start with twenty-two wagons.
By the time they reached the base of the Sierra Nevadas three more
group members had died, one by an accidental firearm discharge. After stopping
to rest for about a week they set off through the Sierras in three separate groups,
the Donner family leaving in the last group (Hardesty 1997). Right around the
same time an earlier October winter storm begun, continuing only with short
breaks until earlier November (Hardesty 1997). The first two parties reached
what is now called Donner Lake on October 31st and the Donner family reaching
what is now called Alder Creek Meadow, some five miles from the Lake,
sometime after (Hardesty 1997). The first two groups tried to press on but the
snow was too deep and they were forced back to set up camp at the lake. The
Donner family had troubles with a broken axel and George Donner severely cut
his hand fixing it (Hardesty 1997). This cut made him worthless and contributed
to his death.
A group of seventeen left the lake camp on makeshift snowshoes, two
turned back after one day, a month later only seven survivors made it to
Johnson’s Ranch in Bear Valley, about seventy miles away (Hardesty 1997).
The snowshoers seemed to be the first to resort to the cannibalism of the dead
(Hardesty 1997). The first relief party came on February 18, 1847 and left with
twenty-three members mostly children (Hardesty 1997). A second relief came
on March 1st to find only twenty-eight people still alive and found mutilated

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remains of Milt Elliott at the Donner Lake camp (Hardesty 1997). They left with
seventeen people on March 3rd and got caught in a storm having to leave thirteen
people in temporary camp. When they finally organized a third relief party for the
three had died and the others survived on cannibalizing the dead (Hardesty
1997). The third relief continued on to the camps and found ten still alive and left
with five people, four of them children. A month passed before the fourth relief
finally made it to the camp on April 17th, they rescuers did not believe that
anyone else would still be alive, so the focus of this trip was on salvaging some
the goods left behind (Hardesty 1997). When they reached the camp they only
found one alive, and of the other four only the body of George Donner was found
(Hardesty 1997).
In 1989, the University of Reno started an archaeological study, headed
by Don Hardesty, at the Donner Lake camp and Adler Creek camp. The Adler
Creek camp is where the Donner Family stayed. They had many questions to
answer including the layout of the camp and how many shelters were there. But
they found no clear evidence of there being cannibalism at the site. In 2003, a
group of archaeologists went back to the camp to answer that very question and
hopefully give an insight on what they might of actually ate to survive. The
expedition was headed by Kelly Dixon, an archeologist at the University of
Montana Missoula and Julie Schablitsky, from University of Oregon. They were
looking to, “confirm, contribute to, or contradict the written record” (Goodyear
2006).

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Thousands of bone fragments were found at Alder Creek camp,
distinguishing them from nonhuman and human provided to be very difficult
based on the fragmentation, butchering, burning, and other effects that took
place after burial (Dixon, Schablitsky, Novak 2011). Of these some odd sixteen
thousand bone fragments, most were badly burned and nearly incinerated bone
(Goodyear 2006). Schablitsky explains in letter written to Archaeology
Magazine, “ I sacrificed a few bone fragments to a DNA laboratory in California,
but the results were inconclusive.” The bones were burned and fragmented so
badly that they could not retrieve any DNA.
The bones fragments were then taken to Guy Tasa at University of
Oregon, who was an expert in identifying skeletal remains. Tasa explained that
the bones fragments weighed less than five pounds making it nearly impossible
to tell home many animals were actually found (Goodyear 2006). He only
managed to pin point about fifteen fragments, classifying them under even-toed
ungulates, cow, deer, or elk (Goodyear 2006). Of the bones that he could
classify, about two thousand were put into class V; a size group including bears,
deer, humans (Goodyear 2006). “He put three pieces in class VI (cow and elk
size), fifteen in class IV (dog or coyote size), three in class III (rabbit or fox size),
and one in class II which appear to be a rib of a rodent,” Goodyear explains. The
fragments that were of most interest were those of class V, as you might guess
why, they could be that of a human. Tasa then sent the fragments, including
those under class V, to a forensic anthropologist, Shannon Novak, at the
University of Idaho.

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Novak sampled over three hundred pieces and explained that they
“screamed trauma,” the fragments had cuts, chops, and saw marks (Goodyear
2006). The V-shaped divots created when the cuts were made, indicated that
the cuts were made by some sort of knife, unlike the U-shaped marks that would
indicated that there was carnivore activity. The discoloration of the bones
suggests that they were boiled repeatedly to get every ounce of nutrients out.
There was one fragment of special interest from the very beginning,
nickname “The Bone.” The bone was about an inch long fragment with visible
signs of butchery. The chop marks to “The Bone” were made with a thin blade,
such as a bowie knife (Goodyear 2006). The fragment also had gray and
brownish discoloration, which is a condition that occurs when heat gets
underneath the tissue and smokes the bone, meaning the bone was cook twice
once with flesh and once without (Goodyear 2006). Could this fragment be that
of member of the Donner Party at the Alder Creek camp?
“The Bone,” was then sent back to Gwen Ribbon Schub, an anthropologist
at Appalachian State University, who can identify animal species by observing
their bone structure. She set up a criteria for that of a human bone: lack of
plexiform bone, a substantial amount of secondary osteon remodeling, Haversian
canal diameters of 240-500 micrometers, and an average of one or two
secondary osteon canals per square millimeter of bone surface (Dixon,
Schablitsky, Novak 2011). Schub sanded a piece of “The Bone” down until it
was about hundred micrometers thick to look at it underneath an optical
microscope (Goodyear 2006). She notice similar characteristics to that of human

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bone, but she was not quite sure, so Schub decided to take another sample from
“The Bone.” She could see the formations of osteons with thick cement like lines
around them, which is a sign of secondary growth; this process starts at infancy
(Goodyear 2006). With the new sample Schub conclude that there was a large
amount of osteons that did not have the cement like lines around them, which is
uncommon in humans (Goodyear 2006). Schub explains in An Archaeology of
Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party’s Alder Creek Camp,
“Histomorphometrics demonstrated that none of the bone fragments had
measurements consistent with human tissue. Osteon diameters were limited to a
range of 48-250 micrometers … In addition, none of the samples studied
demonstrated the tightly packed, overlapping osteon pattern expected in human
bone tissue.” “The Bone” was sadly that of a horse.
Schub did however manage to identify remains from horse, deer, cattle,
and dog (Dixon, Schablitsky, Novak 2011). This gives an insight on what the
starving party ate to survive and that they consumed every inch of nutrients from
these animals. But there are some limitations to these findings; it cannot be
determine how many individuals are represented and how old they were when
they died (Dixon, Schablitsky, Novak 2011). This research displays only a
portion of what the Alder Creek camp members diet was, there was mostly likely
other species that contributed to the group food source.
These findings do not necessarily mean that there was no cannibalism at
the Alder Creek camp. Human remains may have been missed during
excavation or not in the area that was excavated. If the Donners ate only organs

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and flesh, the bones then would be mostly likely unburned, leaving the bones to
decompose in the acidic soil (Schablitsky 2012). Another explanation is that the
bodies were processed away from the camps (Dixon, Schablitsky, Novak 2011).
It is also likely that cannibalism would have only occurred during end of the
inhabitance of the camp, making it likely that the bodies were not processed
down to the bone (Dixon, Schablitsky, Novak 2011). This makes it easy for
carnivores to scatter the remains over many miles.
In conclusion, there has been new light shed on the tragic story of the
Donner Party. The emigrant party trapped in the Sierra Nevedas in the winter of
1847 met an untimely fate with only twenty-eight surviving from a group of eighty-
seven. There are accounts of cannibalism of members that had perished within
the Donner Lake camp and in escape attempts. There are many accounts after
the rescues that travelers that came through the camps saw mutilated bodies
and newspapers and word of mouth plagued the Donners as cannibals.
Archaeological expeditions to the Alder Creek camp have demonstrated that
there are no signs of cannibalism thus far. Through research conducted by Don
Hardesty in the early nineties to both the Donner Lake camp and the Alder Creek
camp, with no findings to cannibalism at the Alder Creek camp. And in 2003, an
archaeological study headed by Kelly Dixon and Julie Schablitsky found no
evidence of cannibalism either. Yet this does not mean that it did not happen,
there are many theories to why there are no human remains. It could have been
possible that the bodies were processed outside the excavation sites within the
studies. Or that the remains were not completely processed leaving what

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remained accessible to scavengers to carry away from the original site. I believe
that this will stay a true statement, based on my research it seems that there was
not an abundance of food but enough to not have to resort to cannibalism. In
journals from members of the rescue parties’ state that the Donner children
looked reasonably healthy, meaning that there was no need for cannibalism at
the Alder Creek camp. There is always more research to be done and maybe
one day we will be able to truly uncover the story of what happened at the Alder
Creek camp.

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Works Cited
•Alderson, B. (2001). The donner party: sex and death on the western
emigrant trail. Inside Chico State, 31(15), Retrieved from
•An Archaeology of Desperation : Exploring the Donner Party's Alder
Creek Camp. (2011). Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
•GOODYEAR, D. (2006). What happened at alder creek?; american
chronicles. The New Yorker, 82(10), 140.
•Hardesty, D. , & Brodhead, M. (1997). The Archaeology of the Donner
Party. Reno: University of Nevada Press.
•Kelly, A. (2006). Cannibalism in the sierra nevadas: The donner party.
Forensic Examiner, 15(3), 63-65.
•Schablitsky, J. (2012). Letter from california: A new look at the donner
party. Archaeology Maginze, 65(3), Retrieved from
http://www.archaeology.org/1205/letter/donner_party_alder_creek_washoe.html