Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History(44)

So how did this information come about? And was there any truth to it?

Initially, the archaeological team working at Alder Creek uncovered a thin layer of ash that they eventually determined to be the remains of an 1840s-era campsite. What became known as the Meadow Hearth dig also revealed concentrations of charred wood and deposits of burned and calcined bone fragments. The latter occurs when bone is subjected to high temperatures, resulting in the loss of organic material, like the protein collagen. What’s left is a mineralized version of the original bone and, importantly, one that is more resistant to decomposition than it was in its original form. Calcined bone also provides anthropologists with strong evidence that the bones in question were cooked.

All told, the university researchers collected a total of 16,204 bone fragments from the Meadow Hearth excavation, a number that makes it far easier to understand why it took them six years to analyze their data. Unfortunately, not everyone was as patient as the scientists had been.

On April 15, 2010, the Office of Public Affairs at Appalachian State University (ASU) issued a press release titled “Appalachian Professor’s Research Finds No Evidence of Cannibalism at Donner Party Campsite.” Posted on ASU’s University News site, it began with the following statement:

Research conducted by Dr. Gwen Robbins, an assistant professor of biological anthropology at Appalachian State University, finds there is no evidence of cannibalism among the 84 members of the Donner Party who were trapped by a snowstorm in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the mid-1840s.

The piece mentioned Robbins’s preliminary results and how the osteologist “had been asked to determine whether or not the bone fragments were human.” Robbins, they said, analyzed 30 bone bits as a grad student and 55 more several years later while working at ASU. After using an array of histological techniques, she concluded that the bones had come from cattle, deer, horse [probably mule], and dog, but that none of the fragments could be identified as human in origin.

Next, the ASU blurb writers trotted out their big gun—statistics:

A power analysis indicated that, statistically, Robbins and [fellow researcher] Gray can be 70 percent confident that if cannibalism made up a small fraction of the diet (less than 1 percent) at the site in the last few weeks of occupation, and if humans were processed in the same way animals were processed, at least one of the 85 bone fragments examined would be human.

With statistics firmly on their side, the PR scribes at ASU loaded up, took careful aim at their own feet, and fired off this bold statement:

The legend of the Donner party was primarily created by print journalists, who embellished the tales based on their own Victorian macabre sensibilities and their desire to sell more newspapers.

They went on to add, “The survivors fiercely denied allegations of cannibalism,” a statement contradicted by Donner Party survivors, rescuers, and historians alike. Finally, and as if to further convince the world that Donner Party members were actually humans and not crazed cannibals, the ASU PR crew announced that pieces of writing slate and broken china found near the cooking hearth “suggest an attempt to maintain a sense of a ‘normal life,’ a family intent on maintaining a routine of lessons, to preserve the dignified manners from another time and place, a refusal to accept the harsh reality of the moment, and a hope that the future was coming.”

The response was predictable. Media types, from obscure bloggers to major newspaper reporters and popular science writers, latched onto the story and within days their readers were being informed that serious and scientifically based doubts had risen over the question of cannibalism by the members of the Donner Party. Formerly a textbook example of survival cannibalism, the claims of people-eating by the starving Donner Party were now being blamed on Victorian-era journalists and ethnic prejudice.

In reality, though, there was no controversy at all, at least among most Donner Party experts. The PR department at ASU had simply blown it by badly misrepresenting the study’s preliminary results. The key statement by the PR mavens, and one that should have prevented the entire mess, can be found in the previously cited quotation about the statistical probability of finding a human bone among those examined by researchers. Such a discovery, they wrote, would have been statistically probable “if humans were processed in the same way animals were processed.” As I’ve mentioned, this is a requirement for determining whether cannibalism has occurred or not, but therein lies the problem. As it turns out the Donner Party did not process human bones and animal bones in the same way, and there’s a good reason why.

Of the thousands of bone fragments from the Meadow Hearth examined by researchers, 362 of them showed evidence of human processing. About one quarter of those had abrasions and scratch marks, which indicate that the bones had been smashed into bits. Other pieces of bone exhibited a condition known as “pot polish,” a smoothing of the edges that results from the bones being stirred in a pot. To anthropologists this was another strong indicator that the bone fragments had been cooked.

As starvation set in, the stranded members of the Donner Party ate whatever they could find. According to historical accounts, they consumed rodents, leather belts and laces, tree bark, and a gooey pulp scraped from boiled animal hides. By the end of January 1847, they began consuming their pet dogs. The analysis by Gwen Robbins and her coworkers indicated that bones from several types of mammals had been smashed, boiled, and burned by someone at the Alder Creek Camp. This would have been done in an effort to render the bones edible, while extracting every bit of nutrient possible. In all likelihood, these would have been the types of last-resort measures undertaken before the survivors turned to cannibalism, which did not begin in the mountain camps until the last week of February 1847—sometime after the departure of First Relief on February 22 and before the arrival of Second Relief a week later. The practice of consuming dead bodies continued until the survivors either died or were rescued, and for everyone except the soon-to-be-christened Donner Party monster, Louis Keseberg, cannibalism would have lasted only a week or two at most, a vitally important point.