The Journey

The Donner-Reed Party planned on following a well-traveled route to the California Trail. They would travel west to St. Louis, northwest to Wyoming and Idaho, and then southwest through Utah and Nevada, over the Sierra Nevadas and into California. The trip was supposed to take six months -- but it ended up taking two years.

donner party illustration

The Donners and Reeds decided to split up when the group reached Little Sandy River, Wyo., in July 1846. The Reeds stayed on the familiar trail, but the Donners -- 23 wagons strong -- had heard about a new shortcut, the Hastings Cutoff. They decided to travel on to Fort Bridger, Wyo., and meet up with Lanford Hastings, who had discovered the new route. But they arrived in Fort Bridger a few days late and discovered that Hastings had gone without them.

So the Donner Party (87 people plus two American Indian guides) followed the shallow trail blazed a few days earlier by Hastings' group, covering about 12 miles a day. When the trail reached the Red Fork of the Weber River in Utah, they discovered a note from Hastings warning that the route was very bad. The land was so rugged that the group crossed only 16 miles in 36 days -- and then they hit a stretch of desert 80 miles long. Taking the shortcut ended up costing the group four wagons, three weeks and 125 unnecessary miles. They finally reached the California Trail on Sept. 31, 1846.

Lansford Hastings
Lansford Hastings made a name for himself as a trailblazer and was particularly fond of one shortcut he envisioned called the Hastings Cutoff. He wrote a book called "The Emigrants Guide to Oregon and California," which describes this shortcut in one brief sentence. His route was supposed to go west from Fort Bridger, Wyo., through the Wasatch mountains, south of the Great Salt Lake and across the Salt Lake Desert, where it would rejoin the familiar California Trail at the base of the Sierra Nevada range.

Hastings wrote a widely circulated open letter to all westward travelers urging them to use this route, even though he hadn't tried it himself. He promised that it would reduce travel by at least 350 miles, cutting three weeks off the journey. He also claimed that the roads were smooth, hard and level, that here was no threat of attack from aggressive local tribes, and that there was plenty of water and grass for animals. This misguidance led directly to the Donner Party's monstrous fate.

On the first of November the party reached the eastern border of the Sierra Nevadas as a heavy snow was falling. Bad weather and dwindling supplies conspired to keep them at camp through one of the longest and coldest winters on record -- and they had only 150 more miles to go. The group set up two different camps: Almost two-thirds settled on the banks of a lake; the rest, including the families of Jacob and George Donner, went six miles away to Adler Creek. Little did they know that the worst was yet to come.