October 10, 2025 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, in 1846, a group of pioneers set out for California with dreams of a better life. Known as the Donner Party, they fell behind on the trail, took a disastrous shortcut, and became trapped in the Sierra Nevada as winter storms closed in. With supplies gone and snow piling up, survival came at a great cost. Here’s their remarkable and tragic story.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Coming to you from the city where the West begins,
Fort Worth, Texas. You're about to hear the most notorious
tragedy in the history of America's westward expansion, the Dinner
Party Story. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
It is odd to watch with what feverish odder Americans
pursue prosperity, ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they
may not have chosen the shortest route to get it.
They cleave to the things of this world, as if
assured that they will never die, and yet rush to
(00:59):
snatch any that comes within their reach, as if they
expected to stop living before they had relished them. Death
steps in in the end and stops them before they
have grown tired of this futile pursuit, of that complete
felicity which always escapes them. Alexis to Toukville.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
I remember.
Speaker 4 (01:37):
May eighteen forty six, thousands of men, women and children, riding, walking, pushing.
They're heading for a new life, two thousand, five hundred
miles away. Germans, Belgians, French Catholics, Presbyterians, Mormons, one of
(02:00):
the world's great mass migrations begins. The pioneer spirit is
moving west. In this colossal migration to Oregon and California,
America will finally define its character. When the Pioneer movement began,
(02:21):
fewer than twenty thousand white Americans lived west of the
Mississippi River. Ten years later, a half a million pioneers
stepped off into the western wilderness. It's the American dream then,
as now. The people want an already good life to
(02:41):
get better. They can walk ten miles a day for
up to six months straight. Some go through ten pairs
of boots each. Half are children en route. One in
five of the women are pregnant. But these aren't Americas.
(03:04):
Poor families sell farms, save for five years to join
the exodus, risking it all. Here's best selling author Jeannette Walls.
Speaker 5 (03:15):
I think if there is one episode that encapsulates the
American spirit, I think it is probably the move west
with those mules and horses and cross those rivers and
cross over those mountains to the unknown and say I'm
leaving everything behind. I'm leaving everything that I know behind
to reinvent myself.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
A wagon and oxen costs a minimum of five thousand
dollars in today's money, but it buys a complete life
support machine. The wagons carry a precious cargo, one thousand
pounds of supplies and a grub steak for their journey
your entire new life in the West. The pioneering spirit
(03:58):
is ingenious, drinking water captured from rain on the wagon canvas.
Even the oxen's dung is fuel for fires. And like today,
there are tolls. The Indians charged ten dollars for road
and one hundred dollars for river crossings in modern money.
(04:18):
But the greatest toll of all human lives in all,
twenty thousand Americans will die reaching the West, ten graves
for every mile. But of all the stories to come
out of the West, none has cut more deeply into
the imagination of the American people than the tale of
(04:41):
the Donner Party. This one story of suffering and death
will show just how far the pioneers will go to
conquer the West. Here's historian Joseph King.
Speaker 6 (04:54):
I think we're curious to know about people who have
experienced a hardship, who've gone through terrible ordeals, and certainly
the Donner Party. You know, eighty seven people went through
with or crisis the like of which few human beings
have ever faced, and we're curious about that. It can
(05:15):
tell us something I think about ourselves, about the limits
of human experience.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
June eighteen, forty six, nine brand new covered wagons rattle
out of Springfield, Illinois and head west. One of their
leaders is sixty two year old George Donner. His wife,
Tamsen Donner, is a school teacher. But on the trail,
women must be ready to do anything.
Speaker 7 (05:47):
Another girl, Welcome to the world.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
But these women were made up of the strongest fiber possible.
The journey is but the going is good. Tamsen Donner
writes in her journal.
Speaker 8 (06:05):
I could never have believed we could have traveled so
far with so little difficulty. Indeed, if we do not
experience anything worse, I shall say the trouble is all
in getting started.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
But as leader of the wagon train, Tamson's husband George
Donner is aware. There's one final obstacle to their journey.
The Sierra Nevada peaks up to fourteen thousand feet. Failure
to clear the mountain passes before the first snowfalls. The
consequences are terrifying.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
And you've been listening to the story of the Donner
Party with some really great backdrop, particularly that reading from
the Toeuville, and my goodness, there's no finer writer ever
on the American character and the American people than Topville,
and that reading was just powerful and a great prelude
(06:57):
to the story about this sun settlement, settling nature of Americans.
We're always moving to the next place, and the next
thing is pioneering spirit, and my goodness, it was there
in spades. And the people who went west twenty thousand
in all would die heading west, a lot of pain
and a lot of sacrifice. When we come back, what
(07:21):
happens to the Donner Party is they head towards their
destination here on our American Stories, Lee hbib here and
I'm inviting you to help our American Stories celebrate this
country's two hundred and fiftieth birthday coming soon.
Speaker 4 (07:37):
If you want to.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Help inspire countless others to love America like we do,
and want to help us bring the inspiring and important
stories told here about a good and beautiful country, please
consider making a tax deductible donation to our American Stories.
Go to Ouramericanstories dot com and click the donate button.
Any amount helps go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and
(07:58):
give and we continue with our American stories and the
story of the Donner Party. Let's pick up where we
last left off.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
Nine brand new covered wagons rattle out of Springfield, Illinois
and head west. One of their leaders is sixty two
year old George Donner. His wife, Tamsen Donner, is a
school teacher. But on the trail, women must be ready
to do anything.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Another girl. Welcome to the world.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
These women were made up of the strongest fiber possible.
The journey is tough, but the going is good. Tamsen
Donner writes in her.
Speaker 8 (08:54):
Journal, I could never have believed we could have traveled
so far with so little difficulty. Indeed, if we do
not experience anything worse, I shall say the trouble is
all in getting started.
Speaker 4 (09:07):
But as leader of the wagon train, Tamsen's husband George
Donner is aware there's one final obstacle to their journey.
The Sierra Nevada peaks up to fourteen thousand feet. Failure
to clear the mountain passes before the first snowfalls. The
consequences are terrifying, but as the Donner Party approaches Utah.
(09:30):
George Donner makes a fateful decision, leading a splinter group
off of the main party. The group now consists of
eighty seven people, nine families, and sixteen single men. George
Donner's two brothers, Jacob and James Reed, follow with their families.
(09:57):
Donner has read one of the many popular newtrail guides
books by Lanceford Hastings. Hastings was trying to garner support
from the government for his so called shortcut to the West.
Hastings Cutoff claimed to shave two weeks off the journey time.
Speaker 9 (10:13):
Lanceford Hastings would not publish this immigrant's guide showing us
the first route to California, if he did not travel
every step of it himself.
Speaker 4 (10:22):
Problem was, he never traveled it himself, let alone with
a trail of wagons.
Speaker 9 (10:29):
Tomorrow, I turned my wagons to the Hastings cut off.
I who will follow?
Speaker 4 (10:35):
George Donner's brother James Reed wrote in his diary on
July thirty first, eighteen forty six.
Speaker 6 (10:42):
Hastings Cutoff is said to be a saving of four
hundred miles.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
We are informed it as a fine level road with
plenty of water and grass.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
But Donner's information is wrong. In fact, the shortcut adds
one hundred miles to the journey.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Should be clear. Let's hope to God the snow will
close the passes in the fall, whether we are through
or not.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
Hi in the Sierra Nevada, the Donner party enters the
Truckee Pass. They're only thirty miles from the California Plains.
Then this happened.
Speaker 6 (11:19):
It was sundown, the weather was clear, but a large
circle around the moon indicated an approaching storm.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
John Bryn.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
Supplies are dangerously low. Their water supply is gone. Eighty
crazed and dehydrated oxen have run away. Twenty one other
oxen are killed with poisoned arrows by Pyute Indians from
the bluffs above the river. They could hear the Pyutes
latting at their plight. Then a broken front axle party
(12:00):
stops to make repairs near Trucky Lake, cutting timber for
a new axle. George Donner gashes his hand. That night,
five feet of snow falls.
Speaker 6 (12:14):
Five feet doesn't need snow up there.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
We've lost the road.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
Soon the drifts are sixty feet deep.
Speaker 9 (12:23):
Can we get through?
Speaker 2 (12:25):
No?
Speaker 7 (12:26):
Not anymore.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
The pass is completely blocked. The Donner party will be
stranded for five months.
Speaker 10 (12:40):
We made a fire and got something to eat, mosspread
down a buffalo rope and set up by the fire.
The Indians knew we were doomed, and one of them
wrapped his blanket about him and stood all night under
a tree.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
In just three weeks, they've eaten all their food. The men,
women and children are all dying. Almost every day becomes
someone's last. They kill their pack animals. Then they eat
charred bones, boiled hides, twigs, bark, leaves, dirt, and worse.
(13:29):
Here's George Donner's daughter Eliza.
Speaker 7 (13:34):
Even the wind held its breath as a suggestion was
made that were one to die, the rest might live.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
Cannibalism Christmas eighteen forty six. They eat their first human,
averting their faces from each other and weeping. Only the
two Indians, Luis and Salvador, refuse to eat. The bodies
(14:09):
are cut up, flesh labeled so people don't eat their
own kin. The fourth rescue party brings out almost all survivors,
but not all. The winter, recorded as the worst ever
in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, is making it almost impossible
for the rescue teams to operate the very last rescue
(14:32):
finds a delirious Lewis Keysberg alone, surrounded by the half
eaten dead. No one else was alive. George Donner's body
is found, skulls split open, brain removed. Thamsen. Donner's body
(14:56):
is never found, though a survivor confessed tw eating her.
Two thirds of the women and children made it through,
two thirds of the men perished. Here's historian David McCullough.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Of the eighty seven men, women, and children in the
Donner Party, forty six survived, forty one died, five women,
fourteen children, and twenty two men, counting John Sutter's Indians,
Lewis and Salvador. Of all the families, the Donners suffered
(15:41):
the most. All four adults and four of the children died.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
The pass is renamed the Donner Pass, a testament to
the hardship of the pioneers going west. News of the
Donner Party tragedy made headlines around the world. Immigration to
California fell off sharply. Then, in January of eighteen forty eight,
gold was discovered in john Sutters Creek. By late eighteen
(16:17):
forty nine, more than one hundred thousand people rushed to
California to dig and sift near the streams and canyons
where the Donner Party had suffered so much.
Speaker 7 (16:31):
Oh Mary, I have not wrote you half of the
trouble we have had, but I have wrote you enough
to let you know what trouble is. But thank God,
we are.
Speaker 11 (16:46):
The only family that did not eat human flesh.
Speaker 7 (16:50):
We have left everything, but I don't care for that.
We have got through with our lives.
Speaker 11 (16:58):
Don't let this letter just and anybody remember never take
no cut offs and hurry along as fast as you can.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
For you read had a terrific job on the production,
editing and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And what
a story we just heard, with the Donner family itself
paying the highest price for George Donner's mistake, the Hastings
cut off, which was going to save hundreds of miles
four hundred miles in route and in the end only
(17:34):
added miles to the route. And then came that dreadful storm,
trapped up in those mountains for months, running out of
food and resorting to Well, you just heard the story
of the Donner Party and the story of so many
lives lost in the questa head west here on our
American stories,
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Coming to you from the city where the West begins,
Fort Worth, Texas. You're about to hear the most notorious
tragedy in the history of America's westward expansion, the Dinner
Party Story. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
It is odd to watch with what feverish odder Americans
pursue prosperity, ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they
may not have chosen the shortest route to get it.
They cleave to the things of this world, as if
assured that they will never die, and yet rush to
(00:59):
snatch any that comes within their reach, as if they
expected to stop living before they had relished them. Death
steps in in the end and stops them before they
have grown tired of this futile pursuit, of that complete
felicity which always escapes them. Alexis to Toukville.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
I remember.
Speaker 4 (01:37):
May eighteen forty six, thousands of men, women and children, riding, walking, pushing.
They're heading for a new life, two thousand, five hundred
miles away. Germans, Belgians, French Catholics, Presbyterians, Mormons, one of
(02:00):
the world's great mass migrations begins. The pioneer spirit is
moving west. In this colossal migration to Oregon and California,
America will finally define its character. When the Pioneer movement began,
(02:21):
fewer than twenty thousand white Americans lived west of the
Mississippi River. Ten years later, a half a million pioneers
stepped off into the western wilderness. It's the American dream then,
as now. The people want an already good life to
(02:41):
get better. They can walk ten miles a day for
up to six months straight. Some go through ten pairs
of boots each. Half are children en route. One in
five of the women are pregnant. But these aren't Americas.
(03:04):
Poor families sell farms, save for five years to join
the exodus, risking it all. Here's best selling author Jeannette Walls.
Speaker 5 (03:15):
I think if there is one episode that encapsulates the
American spirit, I think it is probably the move west
with those mules and horses and cross those rivers and
cross over those mountains to the unknown and say I'm
leaving everything behind. I'm leaving everything that I know behind
to reinvent myself.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
A wagon and oxen costs a minimum of five thousand
dollars in today's money, but it buys a complete life
support machine. The wagons carry a precious cargo, one thousand
pounds of supplies and a grub steak for their journey
your entire new life in the West. The pioneering spirit
(03:58):
is ingenious, drinking water captured from rain on the wagon canvas.
Even the oxen's dung is fuel for fires. And like today,
there are tolls. The Indians charged ten dollars for road
and one hundred dollars for river crossings in modern money.
(04:18):
But the greatest toll of all human lives in all,
twenty thousand Americans will die reaching the West, ten graves
for every mile. But of all the stories to come
out of the West, none has cut more deeply into
the imagination of the American people than the tale of
(04:41):
the Donner Party. This one story of suffering and death
will show just how far the pioneers will go to
conquer the West. Here's historian Joseph King.
Speaker 6 (04:54):
I think we're curious to know about people who have
experienced a hardship, who've gone through terrible ordeals, and certainly
the Donner Party. You know, eighty seven people went through
with or crisis the like of which few human beings
have ever faced, and we're curious about that. It can
(05:15):
tell us something I think about ourselves, about the limits
of human experience.
Speaker 4 (05:24):
June eighteen, forty six, nine brand new covered wagons rattle
out of Springfield, Illinois and head west. One of their
leaders is sixty two year old George Donner. His wife,
Tamsen Donner, is a school teacher. But on the trail,
women must be ready to do anything.
Speaker 7 (05:47):
Another girl, Welcome to the world.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
But these women were made up of the strongest fiber possible.
The journey is but the going is good. Tamsen Donner
writes in her journal.
Speaker 8 (06:05):
I could never have believed we could have traveled so
far with so little difficulty. Indeed, if we do not
experience anything worse, I shall say the trouble is all
in getting started.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
But as leader of the wagon train, Tamson's husband George
Donner is aware. There's one final obstacle to their journey.
The Sierra Nevada peaks up to fourteen thousand feet. Failure
to clear the mountain passes before the first snowfalls. The
consequences are terrifying.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
And you've been listening to the story of the Donner
Party with some really great backdrop, particularly that reading from
the Toeuville, and my goodness, there's no finer writer ever
on the American character and the American people than Topville,
and that reading was just powerful and a great prelude
(06:57):
to the story about this sun settlement, settling nature of Americans.
We're always moving to the next place, and the next
thing is pioneering spirit, and my goodness, it was there
in spades. And the people who went west twenty thousand
in all would die heading west, a lot of pain
and a lot of sacrifice. When we come back, what
(07:21):
happens to the Donner Party is they head towards their
destination here on our American Stories, Lee hbib here and
I'm inviting you to help our American Stories celebrate this
country's two hundred and fiftieth birthday coming soon.
Speaker 4 (07:37):
If you want to.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Help inspire countless others to love America like we do,
and want to help us bring the inspiring and important
stories told here about a good and beautiful country, please
consider making a tax deductible donation to our American Stories.
Go to Ouramericanstories dot com and click the donate button.
Any amount helps go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and
(07:58):
give and we continue with our American stories and the
story of the Donner Party. Let's pick up where we
last left off.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
Nine brand new covered wagons rattle out of Springfield, Illinois
and head west. One of their leaders is sixty two
year old George Donner. His wife, Tamsen Donner, is a
school teacher. But on the trail, women must be ready
to do anything.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Another girl. Welcome to the world.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
These women were made up of the strongest fiber possible.
The journey is tough, but the going is good. Tamsen
Donner writes in her.
Speaker 8 (08:54):
Journal, I could never have believed we could have traveled
so far with so little difficulty. Indeed, if we do
not experience anything worse, I shall say the trouble is
all in getting started.
Speaker 4 (09:07):
But as leader of the wagon train, Tamsen's husband George
Donner is aware there's one final obstacle to their journey.
The Sierra Nevada peaks up to fourteen thousand feet. Failure
to clear the mountain passes before the first snowfalls. The
consequences are terrifying, but as the Donner Party approaches Utah.
(09:30):
George Donner makes a fateful decision, leading a splinter group
off of the main party. The group now consists of
eighty seven people, nine families, and sixteen single men. George
Donner's two brothers, Jacob and James Reed, follow with their families.
(09:57):
Donner has read one of the many popular newtrail guides
books by Lanceford Hastings. Hastings was trying to garner support
from the government for his so called shortcut to the West.
Hastings Cutoff claimed to shave two weeks off the journey time.
Speaker 9 (10:13):
Lanceford Hastings would not publish this immigrant's guide showing us
the first route to California, if he did not travel
every step of it himself.
Speaker 4 (10:22):
Problem was, he never traveled it himself, let alone with
a trail of wagons.
Speaker 9 (10:29):
Tomorrow, I turned my wagons to the Hastings cut off.
I who will follow?
Speaker 4 (10:35):
George Donner's brother James Reed wrote in his diary on
July thirty first, eighteen forty six.
Speaker 6 (10:42):
Hastings Cutoff is said to be a saving of four
hundred miles.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
We are informed it as a fine level road with
plenty of water and grass.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
But Donner's information is wrong. In fact, the shortcut adds
one hundred miles to the journey.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Should be clear. Let's hope to God the snow will
close the passes in the fall, whether we are through
or not.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
Hi in the Sierra Nevada, the Donner party enters the
Truckee Pass. They're only thirty miles from the California Plains.
Then this happened.
Speaker 6 (11:19):
It was sundown, the weather was clear, but a large
circle around the moon indicated an approaching storm.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
John Bryn.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
Supplies are dangerously low. Their water supply is gone. Eighty
crazed and dehydrated oxen have run away. Twenty one other
oxen are killed with poisoned arrows by Pyute Indians from
the bluffs above the river. They could hear the Pyutes
latting at their plight. Then a broken front axle party
(12:00):
stops to make repairs near Trucky Lake, cutting timber for
a new axle. George Donner gashes his hand. That night,
five feet of snow falls.
Speaker 6 (12:14):
Five feet doesn't need snow up there.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
We've lost the road.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
Soon the drifts are sixty feet deep.
Speaker 9 (12:23):
Can we get through?
Speaker 2 (12:25):
No?
Speaker 7 (12:26):
Not anymore.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
The pass is completely blocked. The Donner party will be
stranded for five months.
Speaker 10 (12:40):
We made a fire and got something to eat, mosspread
down a buffalo rope and set up by the fire.
The Indians knew we were doomed, and one of them
wrapped his blanket about him and stood all night under
a tree.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
In just three weeks, they've eaten all their food. The men,
women and children are all dying. Almost every day becomes
someone's last. They kill their pack animals. Then they eat
charred bones, boiled hides, twigs, bark, leaves, dirt, and worse.
(13:29):
Here's George Donner's daughter Eliza.
Speaker 7 (13:34):
Even the wind held its breath as a suggestion was
made that were one to die, the rest might live.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
Cannibalism Christmas eighteen forty six. They eat their first human,
averting their faces from each other and weeping. Only the
two Indians, Luis and Salvador, refuse to eat. The bodies
(14:09):
are cut up, flesh labeled so people don't eat their
own kin. The fourth rescue party brings out almost all survivors,
but not all. The winter, recorded as the worst ever
in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, is making it almost impossible
for the rescue teams to operate the very last rescue
(14:32):
finds a delirious Lewis Keysberg alone, surrounded by the half
eaten dead. No one else was alive. George Donner's body
is found, skulls split open, brain removed. Thamsen. Donner's body
(14:56):
is never found, though a survivor confessed tw eating her.
Two thirds of the women and children made it through,
two thirds of the men perished. Here's historian David McCullough.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Of the eighty seven men, women, and children in the
Donner Party, forty six survived, forty one died, five women,
fourteen children, and twenty two men, counting John Sutter's Indians,
Lewis and Salvador. Of all the families, the Donners suffered
(15:41):
the most. All four adults and four of the children died.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
The pass is renamed the Donner Pass, a testament to
the hardship of the pioneers going west. News of the
Donner Party tragedy made headlines around the world. Immigration to
California fell off sharply. Then, in January of eighteen forty eight,
gold was discovered in john Sutters Creek. By late eighteen
(16:17):
forty nine, more than one hundred thousand people rushed to
California to dig and sift near the streams and canyons
where the Donner Party had suffered so much.
Speaker 7 (16:31):
Oh Mary, I have not wrote you half of the
trouble we have had, but I have wrote you enough
to let you know what trouble is. But thank God,
we are.
Speaker 11 (16:46):
The only family that did not eat human flesh.
Speaker 7 (16:50):
We have left everything, but I don't care for that.
We have got through with our lives.
Speaker 11 (16:58):
Don't let this letter just and anybody remember never take
no cut offs and hurry along as fast as you can.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
For you read had a terrific job on the production,
editing and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And what
a story we just heard, with the Donner family itself
paying the highest price for George Donner's mistake, the Hastings
cut off, which was going to save hundreds of miles
four hundred miles in route and in the end only
(17:34):
added miles to the route. And then came that dreadful storm,
trapped up in those mountains for months, running out of
food and resorting to Well, you just heard the story
of the Donner Party and the story of so many
lives lost in the questa head west here on our
American stories,
Host
Lee Habeeb
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