Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History(43)
Reed soon headed toward the Alder Creek Camp, where Thornton’s account continues:
They had consumed four bodies, and the children were sitting upon a log, with their faces stained with blood, devouring the half-roasted liver and heart of the father [Jacob Donner], unconscious of the approach of the men, of whom they took not the slightest notice even after they came up. Mrs. Jacob Donner was in a helpless condition, without anything whatever to eat except the body of her husband, and she declared that she would die before she would eat of this. Around the fire were hair, bones, skulls, and the fragments of half-consumed limbs.
Second Relief departed the camps on March 1, but their blizzard-interrupted trek out of the mountains would become yet another misadventure.
When the small party of men that made up Third Relief arrived at the mountain camps nearly two weeks later, they found further scenes of horror at the cabins and more dead bodies at Alder Creek. With the last of her surviving children finally accompanying the rescuers, Tamzene Donner turned down one last opportunity to save herself, deciding instead to return to the side of her frail husband. When George Donner died in late March, she wrapped his body in a sheet, said her last good-byes, and headed back to the Truckee Lake Camp. It would be Tamzene’s final journey.
Donner Party member Louis Keseberg (who had not come down from the mountain because of a debilitating wound to his foot) later testified that Mrs. Donner had stumbled, half frozen, into his cabin one night. She had apparently fallen into a creek. Keseberg said that he had wrapped her in blankets, but found her dead the next morning. Sometime after the Fourth Relief (in reality a salvage team) showed up on April 17, their leader, William Fallon, wrote in his diary, “No traces of her person could be found.” There was no real mystery, though, since by his own admission Keseberg, whom they had found alive, had eaten Mrs. Donner as well as many of those who had died in the mountain camps. In fact he had been eating nothing but human bodies for two months.
On April 21, 1847, Fourth Relief, accompanied by Louis Keseberg, left the Truckee Lake Camp, and four days later they reached Sutter’s Fort (in current-day Sacramento). The last living member of the Donner Party had come down from the mountains.
That summer, General Stephen Kearny and his men were returning east after a brief war with Mexico. They stopped at the abandoned camp, finding “human skeletons . . . in every variety of mutilation. A more revolting and appalling spectacle I never witnessed,” wrote one of Kearny’s men.
The general ordered the men in his entourage to bury the dead, but instead they reportedly deposited the mostly mummified body parts in the center of a cabin before torching it. At Alder Creek, Kearny and his men found the intact and sheet-wrapped body of George Donner. There is no consensus about whether they buried him or not.
Although the tale of the Donner Party has become one of the darkest chapters in the history of the American West, time has also transformed it into something else. The dead pioneers who stare at us blankly from cracked daguerreotypes are too often a source of amusement (“Donner Party, your table is ready.”) and the butt of macabre jokes. To a public that has, for the most part, become anesthetized to the concepts of gore and gruesome death, the Donner Party is no longer the stuff of nightmares. Instead, any thoughts we might have about these pioneers usually relate to vague notions about cannibalism or perhaps the perils of taking ill-advised shortcuts.
In the spring of 2010 all that changed. The long-dead travelers were back in the news, and this time the story behind the renewed media interest was neither funny nor lurid. It was actually quite remarkable. In the 1920s, schoolteacher Peter Weddell had studied the Alder Creek area and posted signs, pointing out the presumed locations of Donner Party campsites. Although he never formally presented evidence for just how he’d come to his conclusion, sites like the George Donner Tree and the Jacob Donner Camp became popular and well-marked stops at what is now the Donner Party Picnic Ground/Historical Site. Although it took more than 80 years, modern science was finally able to show that Weddell’s camp localities were simply wrong.
In 2003–2004, an archaeological team from the University of Montana and Appalachian State University unearthed the remains of a campsite at Alder Creek that would become known as the Meadow Hearth. It contained artifacts like cooking utensils, fragments of pottery, and percussion caps—small, explosive-filled cylinders of copper or brass that allowed muzzle-loaders to fire in any weather. Each of these items dated to the 1840s. There were also thousands of bone fragments, and given the Donner Party’s reputation, interest soon centered on whether or not any of these bones were human in origin.
Six years later in 2010, the researchers had completed their analysis of the artifacts and were preparing a scientific paper that would detail their findings. Now, though, and before their paper could be published, a spate of articles and news blurbs announced that the scientists had uncovered physical evidence that led them to seriously question the very act for which the Donners had attained their infamy.
“Analysis Finally Clears Donner Party of Rumored Cannibalism,” read one media report, while Discovery News informed its readers that the “Donners Ate Family Dog, Maybe Not People.” The original subtitle, “Did ethnic prejudice spur the now infamous legend of the Donner Party’s cannibalism?” hinted at an intriguing new explanation for the notorious and long-held accusations. The subtitle resulted from the author’s mistaken belief that Louis Keseberg, the most notorious Donner Party member, was Polish (he was German) and that a prejudice against Poles had led to claims that he became a subhuman cannibal when the going got tough.26 Even the New York Times got into the act. “No Cannibalism Among the Donner Party?” read the bet-hedging headline in a Times-associated blog. My personal favorite was a headline from a blog post at The Rat: “Scientists Crash Donner Party.”