The Forlorn Hope
The Donner Party, stranded on the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains, hunkered down for the winter of 1846-47, which would turn out to be one of the harshest on record.
As the food supply ran out, the group became more and more desperate. First, they killed and ate their pack animals. When that meat was gone, they hunted deer, rabbits and foxes. Then they ate their dogs, boiled blankets and rawhide into a gluelike soup, and consumed bark and twigs. Families hoarded what little they had, neglecting their starving companions. On Dec. 16, six weeks after they arrived in the foothills, the first person died of starvation.
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The Forlorn Hope expedition set off from Donner Lake in December 1846 to find help.
On that day, a party of the 15 strongest members -- 10 men and five women -- embarked with their Indian guides through the snow and storms, hoping to reach the pass and bring aid to their camps. The group, called the Forlorn Hope, wore homemade snowshoes (and so are sometimes referred to as the Snowshoe Group). They carried almost no food with them as they traveled the 100 miles to Sutter's Fort, Calif., which they reached on Jan. 18, 1847. Ten of them didn't make it.
Six days into the Forlorn Hope's trek, Charles Staton, overwhelmed by starvation and exhaustion, begged the others to leave him there to die. It wasn't until the ninth day of the expedition that the topic of cannibalism was brought up for the first time, and the group discussed the proper circumstances for it. They thought about drawing straws or dueling, but eventually they agreed that they'd just wait for someone to die -- and that no one would consume the flesh of a relative. That night, a traveler named Antoine (or Antonio) died of starvation. The remaining members of the party cut off his flesh and roasted it over a campfire. Others soon followed -- the Forlorn Hope ate three more men, and things started turning violent.
Jay Fosdick, a 23-year-old traveling with his family, died of starvation (see How long can you go without food or water?). A Mrs. Foster, following the (however horrific) rules for the situation, cut up the body and boiled it, and the two Indian guides ate it. Jay Fosdick's father then hunted down the guides and shot them dead. The original group had dwindled to seven people when they limped into the settlement at Sutter's Fort. The harrowing journey lasted for 33 days.
Now we know that the smaller expedition was forced to resort to cannibalism because they brought so little food with them, but were those who stayed at the original encampments forced into the same fate?
