How many people survived donner party

Lincoln , was very interested in going as well. Lincoln was interested in California for the entirety of his life. He was even offered civic office out in the Pacific Northwest.

He might have signed up for the Donner Party, but he had a driven, and often obstinate wife, Mary Todd Lincoln. She already had kinsmen in California, who had gone out in earlier wagon trains.

But at the time of the Donner Party, she had a young toddler son and was pregnant with another. Lincoln was also just beginning his political career, after being elected to his one term of Congress.

Eating human flesh was a total, last resort. People say, 'Oh, those cannibals, how could they do that? Some of them never ever spoke of it again. Some denied it, but not that many. A lot of them went on to live perfectly normal and successful lives, like James Reed, who became a prosperous citizen and business leader in San Jose, California.

Not many people have talked to the descendants. But they have a great deal to say! There was no guilt or embarrassment. It proved several things to me. This grand expansionist movement came at a critical time, when America was fixated on extending its borders. Yet I found many of the decisions were not good decisions. Recently, that deadly combination from the past has reared its head again. The two words that come to mind to describe the present are ignorance and arrogance.

So my hope is that this story has relevancy for today. All rights reserved. Did members of the Donner Party eat each other to survive? And what evidence do we have? The decision proved disastrous. The emigrants were forced to blaze much of the trail themselves by cutting down trees, and they nearly died of thirst during a five-day crossing of the salt desert.

Despite the Hastings Cutoff debacle, most of the Donner Party still managed to reach the slopes of the Sierra Nevada by early November Only a scant hundred miles remained in their trek, but before the pioneers had a chance to drive their wagons through the mountains, an early blizzard blanketed the Sierras in several feet of snow.

Mountain passes that were navigable just a day earlier soon transformed into icy roadblocks, forcing the Donner Party to retreat to nearby Truckee Lake and wait out the winter in ramshackle tents and cabins. Like most pioneer trains, the Donner Party was largely made up of family wagons packed with young children and adolescents. Of the 81 people who became stranded at Truckee Lake, more than half were younger than 18 years old, and six were infants.

One of them, one-year-old Isabella Breen, would go on to live until On December 16, , more than a month after they became snowbound, 15 of the strongest members of the Donner Party strapped on makeshift snowshoes and tried to walk out of the mountains to find help. After wandering the frozen landscape for several days, they were left starving and on the verge of collapse. The hikers resigned themselves to cannibalism and considered drawing lots for a human sacrifice or even having two of the men square off in a duel.

Several members of the party soon died naturally, however, so the survivors roasted and consumed their corpses. Archeologists have found butchered human bones far too frequently for it to have been a sporadic, starvation-only practice. And before Western culture washed over the globe, ritualistic cannibalism was not uncommon.

In other words, the revulsion to cannibalism is not innate. The Donner Party might be infamous for its cannibalism, but more than a dozen members of the party starved to death rather than eat the already dead. In what may be the first example of a writer depicting cannibalism as the act of a monster, the cyclops Polyphemus catches Odysseus and his men stealing from him and in turn begins eating them one by one until Odysseus blinds the giant.

For the Greeks, human flesh was the food of foreigners—and thus eating it the lowest one could stoop. From there, the stigma only grew. Combine that with the racism of early anthropologists, who used its practice as justification to commit cultural genocide, and the stigma compounded. Many in the Donner Party refused to cannibalize at the cost of their lives. No cannibalism took place among the Donner Party members trapped by the lake until at least late February, after at least 13 people starved and died.

There is frozen food buried by the lake. The calories will keep you alive, and for far longer than you might expect. Of those who eventually cannibalized, Keseberg appears to have done so with the most vigor, and he not only survived but, for reasons unknown, he skipped the first two rescue parties and yet was still alive and strong enough to hike out with the third on April When practicing cannibalism, there are a few safety precautions one must take.

First, cook your meat thoroughly to avoid diseases. No tartars or carpaccios. Also, avoid the brain. You run a small risk of catching a deadly prion disease called kuru from eating it. Instead, target the thighs, butt, calves, and back muscles for the highest caloric returns.

As for the choice cuts beyond that, refer to the table below, which relies on data compiled by James Cole in his study of the caloric returns of cannibalism. Adequately fed, you should survive until February 18, when seven rescuers arrive. The snow is still far too deep for horses, so the rescuers have only brought a small amount of extra rations, and everyone they take has to hike out under their own power.

The rescuers cached some food on their way in, but it has mostly gotten stolen by animals. For example, women survived better than the men. Family groups and children also faired better than singles and older people. What Happened to the Survivors?

Most of the Donner party who lived through the ordeal enjoyed long and productive lives. Teenager Mary Murphy had lost her mother and five other family members, but within one month of reaching Johnson's Ranch, she married William Johnson, co-owner of the ranch.

She later divorced Johnson and married Charles Covillaud, who named the city of Marysville, California, for her. The Breen family survived intact and settled in San Juan Bautista, where they operated an inn. Patrick Breen became a rancher, school trustee, postmaster, and Monterey County supervisor. William Eddy, who lost his wife, two children, and all of his material possessions, settled in Gilroy, CA where he married and had three children.

He has relatives living at Lake Tahoe today. Franklin and Elizabeth Graves died in the mountains, but six of their eight children survived. They married and had children of their own.

Because the killing of American Indians was not a crime at that time, William was never tried for the deaths of Luis and Salvador.

The two Donner families suffered greatly; all four of the parents perished. The surviving children reached Sutter's Fort as orphans, but they all found good homes. Like the Breens, all of the Reed family members escaped the disaster alive.

They moved to San Jose where James Reed became a miner, rancher, and land developer. He made a fortune in real estate speculation.