Beware of Shortcuts

One hundred sixty six years ago the Donner Party was hunkered down in hip-deep snow on the east side of the Sierra Crest. In early December the 81 people still weakly fanned embers of hope that they could somehow crawl up and over the 1000-foot granite wall just ahead of them. It was the remaining obstacle between them and their destination, Sutter’s Fort in sunny, central California. They had traveled 2,000 miles from central Illinois to reach the promised land. Twenty six hundred other people had made the migration to Oregon and California that summer; only the Donners were missing out. They were the caboose on the wagon train of 1846.

How did this happen? There were a number of contributing factors. One of the main ones was a decision to try a shortcut between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada range. The decision turned out poorly.

The Donner Party, as it came to be known, had left Springfield, IL in April in nine wagons. A month later it joined up with 45 other wagons near Independence, MO. In total, some 500 wagons with over 2,500 people went west that year following the established Oregon Trail and its tributary, the California Trail.

From the start, the Donner group tended to lag a bit behind the pace of the main “train” as it rumbled disjointedly westward at 10 to 12 miles per day. The Donner group, on July 17, finally inched over 7,000-foot South Pass on the crest of the Rockies in (now) Wyoming. It was five to ten days after most of the other pioneers heading west that year. Everyone in every wagon up and down the train knew that they needed to get over the Oregon or California mountains ahead before winter. South Pass was a little more than half way to either. And most people in the wagon train had heard—one way or another along the way—about the Hastings Shortcut for those headed to California.

Lansford W. Hastings, age 27, had traveled to California a few years earlier and he wrote a promotional book about a better route. It was supposedly 300 miles (30 days) shorter, although he had not actually traveled the route in a wagon, if at all. The book had circulated in the east; in addition, Hastings had “follow me” flyers distributed by men on horseback to the wagons on the trail in 1846.

Two days after starting downhill from South Pass, the Donner Party reached a fork in the trail. To the right was Ft. Hall and the established route to Oregon and California. To the left was the shortcut. The Hastings route went south and rounded the bottom of the Great Salt Lake. The right-hand, northern route went northwest a ways and then bent to the southwest to pick up the Snake River heading west to Oregon or the lightly used trail down into Nevada towards California. The northern route rounded the Great Salt Lake on its north side.

The Donner Party assumed it would meet Hastings on the trail or at a trading post named Ft. Bridger. When it arrived at Bridger, it turned out Hastings had left there for the west a week earlier. The Donner group rested a week and then headed west on July 31, trying (unsuccessfully) to follow Hastings’ tracks. It had no way of knowing the rigors ahead.

In the weeks to come, the Donner Party of 22 wagons, traveling alone, encountered three huge obstacles: the dense, heavily-vegetated Wasatch Range of mountains that run south from Idaho well into Utah; the debilitating Great Salt Lake Desert where people and cattle boiled during the day and froze at night; and the Ruby Mountains in Nevada, which also run north to south presenting a series of hurdles to wagons trying to get west.

The Donner Party re-joined the California trail on September 27 (near today’s Elko, Nevada). It was three weeks behind the last wagons on the train to California, completely exhausted, fragmented internally, and short on provisions as well as leadership. The party’s problems were cumulative… and there was already snow on the tops of the mountains along the trail. It was no longer the wagon train’s caboose; only a struggling straggler.

The scattered party reached today’s Reno area (4,500’ in elevation) on October 20 and started its final push up the Truckee River canyon toward the Sierra Crest. Once again, it encountered tough going. The Donner group of 81 arrived near (today’s) Donner Lake (6,000’ in elevation) around November 1. The Sierra Crest (7,000’) was in sight just ahead, a thousand feet up; it beckoned from beneath ominous gray clouds rolling in from California. The next day it began snowing. The snow continued to fall regularly for eleven days—an untimely, early storm heralding the start of winter. The party was trapped. It could go neither east or west….nor south or north.

The rest is history.