An ordeal like no other: the Donner Party's westward trek turned tragic in the snow.

• Author: Price, Sean
• Position: Times past

In 1847, Americans were flocking westward. Th6usands of covered wagons rumbled the 2,500 miles from Missouri to the West Coast. The emigrants wanted a fresh start, a better climate, cheap land, or a new adventure. "If hell lay to the west," went one popular saying, "Americans would cross heaven to get there."

One wagon train, known as the Donner Party, stumbled into its own kind of hell. Led by two Illinois farmers, George Donner and James Reed, the group of 87 men, women, and children became stranded by a brutal, early winter in a high mountain pass along the California-Nevada border. Nearly half the group, 41 people, starved or froze to death, and the rest were reduced to eating the dead to survive.

FATEFUL MISTAKES

"West" in the 1840s meant anything west of Independence, Missouri. From the time the Donner Party left there on May 12, 1847, it suffered from bad judgment, bad advice, and plain bad luck. Like a lot of pioneers, many of the party's eight families overpacked. As a result, the wagon train fell behind schedule. This was serious. Everyone knew they had to be through the Sierra Nevada mountains, where peaks exceed 14,000 feet, before the snows of winter.

To make up for lost time, Donner and Reed made a tragic mistake: They listened to Lansford Hastings, a lawyer who was trying to lure emigrants to California. Hastings had touted a shortcut to California in his 1845 bestseller The Emigrants Guide to Oregon and California. The book claimed the Hastings Cutoff would shorten westward trips by hundreds of miles. But when the book was published, Hastings himself had never used the shortcut. At Fort Laramie, in what is now Wyoming, Reed bumped into an old friend named James Clyman, a man who had ridden over the Hastings Cutoff. Clyman later recalled that he begged Reed to avoid it:

I told him about the great desert and the roughness of the Sierras and that a straight route [to California by the shortcut] might turn out to be impracticable. I told him to take the regular wagon track and never leave it.

But others suggested trying the shortcut, and that's what the pioneers did. Their first obstacle was Utah's Wasatch mountains, with elevations of over 11,000 feet. The men spent hours each day hacking a road through forests, taking 20 days to go 31 miles. Next came the Great Salt Lake Desert. Hastings had said crossing it would take two days. It took six. No one died, but several cattle went mad with thirst. Wagon after wagon had co be left...