How the Donner Party Worked

Did they or didn't they? There is plenty of written evidence that the ill-fated Donner Party resorted to cannibalism - except there are no bones. Learn the details of one of the worst disasters of the early West in this episode of Stuff You Should Know.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from House Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, I was always
as Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and that makes this stuff

(00:23):
you should know? M How you don't. I'm fine, good.
How are you doing? I'm great, dude. I watched PBS
today at work, which is always fun when you get
to watch TV via the computer at work paid for it. Yeah, man,
I remember I watched American grind House once at work

(00:44):
while we were doing the exploitation I did do. Actually,
it was awesome. I watched the PBS is American Experience,
which is an awesome show. I've been around for years,
and I watched there. Obviously. I watched the one in
the Donner Party. Oh is that the one you? I gotcha?
I just saw there was one on the Johnstown flood
that I wish already known. I would have watched it.

(01:06):
Oh yeah, I mean I'll still watch it. I still
want to learn. You're not gonna you only watch PBS
at work for money? Um. I was doing a little
research and I came across something called hufu or hoofu
I play on Hulu. No, a play on tofu that's
designed um to taste like human flesh. Oh, I was

(01:29):
going in an entirely different direction. There was a big
um yeah, no, this is this is about cannibalism. Now
there's a big media push on it. It made the
Daily Show. Um, all sorts of articles came up about whufu.
There's a spokesman. There was a website, um, and it

(01:50):
was the tofu that's that tastes like human. They were
saying the reason why they're doing it so anthropologists could
better um understand then their subjects when they were investigating cambalism.
And there's plenty of people out there who just wanted
to try it. Well, how did they know? How did
they flavor it like human? Well they didn't. It turns

(02:11):
out the whole thing was total farce. But if you
still look today, Um, it was on the snop spoort.
It's not definitively yes, but no one's ever had it.
And apparently while you could access the website, you you
couldn't buy. You got an error message whenever you tried
to check out or whatever. But um, it was pretty

(02:34):
funny that everybody got taken on that. I thought I'd mentioned. Yeah,
I did too, And if you look in Urban Dictionary, UM,
that's still there's no mention of it being fake or fictitious. Yeah,
I think I loathe to say it, but it was
Wikipedia that that initially said it's fictitious. To me, I

(02:55):
feel dirty. Um, but Chuck, we talk about hoofu or hufu,
depending on what region of the country you live in.
Um to talk about the Donner Party, which is one
of those very rare instances in the history of humanity
where we can say, pretty much without doubt, people late

(03:17):
other people, and they did so under some of the
most horrific circumstances that humans have ever endured. This group
of people went through. Holy hell, it's pretty rough there.
I can just keep going for the rest of the episodes.
Bad it was, um and uh. I learned a lot

(03:39):
from this article, a lot of new surprising stuff. It's
pretty cool, Like, did you know that it took two
years when it should have taken six months? What are
you talking about? Okay, well, did you know that the
Donner Party was originally the Donna Reed Party and the
the Reed Party split off and made their way without

(04:00):
event onto um Fort Cutter, California. No problem, that's not
true either. What are you talking about? Yeah, this is
not the best article on our site. And I must say,
and I read it, and then I did my own
research and was like, wow, how did you miss some
of this stuff. We'll get to the bottom of that
and we'll we'll make sure it gets changed. I've already

(04:21):
sent an email actually about that. Did you an angry one? Well,
just like, how could this be on our site? It's
so wrong and it's so easily figured out. It's not
like rocket science. It's like it took two years. No,
look at a calendar. It took one year. So a
caddy one. Okay, little catty. Um, well, let's talk about

(04:43):
the Donner Party. Let's talk about what's known what's not known.
So Donna Donna Read. Donner was a wealthy farmer in
his sixties. Read was Irish American businessman, had some dough
as well. He financed the trip. Oh did he? I believe? So? Okay,
But George Donner was the official guy in charge. Yeah,

(05:06):
James Reid thought that he was going to be in charge. Um,
and kind of was in a way, but they did
elect Donner the captain because Reid turned off people with
his his RV. Essentially he had a a macked out
wagon that everyone else is really piste off about because

(05:27):
it was double decker and it had a stove in it,
and it had bunk beds and it was like apparently
like made a big commotion among the other people because
they're like, who's this guy with his big wagon? And
this is even before the chuck wagon was invented by
Charles Chuck Goodnight. Do you want to go ahead and
tell that story? Well, there's not much to tell. Charles

(05:47):
Chuck Goodnight was a cookie on the wagon trails. Uh,
and after the Civil War he had gotten very tired
of not having a decent meal, so he bought an
old government wagon and converted it into a kitchen, in
which became the first chuck wagon named after him. And uh,
from that, if you follow it further and further, you

(06:08):
get diners and food trucks. Chuck wagon. Yeah, very nice, gosh,
very slick. So the Donna Reed party, Uh, like a
lot of people back then said you know what, you
know where it's at this place called California that I've
heard so much about. And this is prior to the
gold Rush. Yeah, um this there was a movement towards

(06:29):
populating California, basically wrestling wrestling control of California away from
the Spanish just through sheer numbers, by having a bunch
of white folks show up and basically saying, Mexico, you can't,
you can't control this land anymore. It will be too
expensive and costly. We're taking over because we live here now,
That's right. And Lansford Hastings was one of the main

(06:51):
dudes behind this movement. He was an attorney from Ohio.
He went to California two and dream aimed of wrestling
this land from the Mexican uh from Mexico and saying
and governing California himself. Well, he did dreams. He did
so with a guy named John Sutter, who was a

(07:12):
German born Swiss immigrant who had taken Mexican citizen citizenship
to get a charter a land grant from the Mexican
government and he used it to form um New Helvetia
or New Switzerland a k a. Fort Sutter, which is
now Sacramento, Swiss German Swiss born with Mexican citizenship. I

(07:36):
love it. Who was a trader only in the eighteen
forties can do stuff like that? Exactly only in California,
you know. But Hastings will come back up in a
very big way because it's pretty much all his fault got. Uh.
So they basically set out for for California in May,
while they set out from Springfield in April, but Missouri

(07:58):
in May is when they had the whole gang together,
the big wagon train. So we're going west, We're following
the California trail. Everyone goes that way. Everyone actually that
year made it except for the Donner Party. Oh yeah, yeah,
all the immigrants going to California checked in, Okay, except
for these these sad folks. And um, it was really

(08:22):
all because of one fateful decision. To tell the truth. Um,
they were just like any other uh wagon train, just
like any other pioneers. They weren't trailblazers. They were following
trails that they learned of and um they were well equipped,
they weren't stupid, but they did make one faithful decision.

(08:43):
Like you said, Um, Hastings was his first name, Lanford.
Lanford Hastings comes up in a big way because a
lot of people laid the disaster, the calamity of the
Donner party at Hastings feet because he was also a
trail laser, and he came up with a fanciful thing
called the Hastings cut Off. That's right, a shortcut essentially. Yeah,

(09:07):
he wrote a book called The Immigrants Guide to Oregon
in California, which Donner had on the seat of his wagon,
and there was a very brief sentence about the shortcut,
the Hastings cut Off that was supposedly going to cut
off about three fifty four hundred miles a full three
weeks off of the trip, which is a big chunk

(09:29):
for a six month trip. That's definitely worth the the
trip that they cut off. The problem was Hastings had
never taken this route himself and had certainly never taken
a wagon over it. But that didn't stop him from
claiming that all of the roads were high and hard
and level, that there was plenty of water and grass
for the livestock um, and that there were no aggressive

(09:52):
Indian tribes in the area. Yeah, he basically painted it
out like a pleasure cruise because he was trying to
get as many people as possible to California. Yeah, he
actually would go and hang out like on the way
to Oregon, on the Oregon Trail and be like, you
don't want to go there, you want to come down
to California because you leave people. Yeah. So this is
why he came up with the Hastings cut off. And

(10:13):
it was a dangerous gamble. And the Donner Party said, well,
we want to shave three weeks off of our trip. Well, yeah,
part of the Donner Party uh went left, part of
him went right. The part that went right did just fine.
And you don't hear about them. They're not the Dinner
Party any longer. I don't know what they're what they
called themselves, but it wasn't the Reds. It was not

(10:34):
the Reds. The Reds stayed with the Donners. Uh, And
they went left, went on to Fort Bridger, Wyoming. They
were gonna meet up with Hastings there, and they got
there a little late and and Hastings was no longer there.
But he uh sent message. Oh, he left a note

(10:54):
somewhere along the trail along the Hastens cut off saying, uh,
this may not be as good as I thought. You
should probably turn back. Well yeah, and before that, this
other dude named Climbing was headed east from California by
way the Hastings cut off, and he said, don't go
this way. He said, you're you're never gonna make it alive.

(11:15):
Your wagons aren't gonna make it, and you probably wouldn't
even make it, So don't go that way. So they continued.
They continued, they found the note, and when they found
the note, read went, uh spent five days looking for
Hastings to kill him, to talk to him about what
the deal was. He just said he wanted to talk
to him. Yeah, he wanted to kill him. Uh. He

(11:35):
did find him, actually, and he didn't kill him. Uh.
And Hasting said, I'm not coming back with you to
lead Uh sorry, but hey, I'm up on this high
bluff and there's another route and that one looks a
lot better. And so they went that way instead, which
was still the southern route under the Great Salt Lake.
But um, it was not a good move. And that's

(11:59):
what Star did the beginning of the end for the
dinner party. Two miles a day. Yeah, at that point,
in thirty six days, they went sixteen miles, which is
horrible considering that, um, they averaged about twelve miles a
day normally. Um, they ended up going an extra hundred
and twenty five miles and it added three weeks to

(12:21):
the trip rather than subtracting three weeks to the trip.
They also lost four wagons, which is a big deal
in a wagon train. Yeah, they lost a lot of
oxen of their cattle as well. And uh, that's where
they lost some of their first members because essentially they
were in the desert eighty miles stretched the desert on

(12:41):
the trail. Yeah, the salt desert, so you got the
heat during the day and then it was very cold
at night. And this was in August. This was like hm.
They eventually met back up with the California Trail, but
they thought, oh man, that was rough, but now we're
all set because we're back on the original trail. So
that time that it took him, I mean that extra

(13:02):
three weeks, wasn't it. That wasn't went dinnim And they
were going slower than they predicted. Yeah, and it's important
to know right here, during that Hastings cut off route
where they started to encounter like a lot of hardships,
they sent this dude named Stanton. He was a bachelor
from New York, uh, and he was one of the
only like single dudes there. They sent him out for provisions.

(13:24):
So he took off for a period of time and
did come back with five mules loaded with food and
two Indian guides Lewis and Salvador to help him out,
so they weren't a part like the article says the
original training. He came back with the provisions with Stanton Uh.

(13:44):
During this time, read got in a fight. It was
basically the first incident of road rage. His wagon became entangled,
his big like RV wagon became entangled with a guy
named Snyder. They fought. Uh Reid killed Snyder with a knife.
They had a little kangaroo court and first said they
should hang him and then said, now you know what,
just pack your stuff and get out of here. Wow.

(14:07):
Did the financier of the whole thing. Yeah, And so
he did the next day without his family. He left.
So he's crazy. There's two stories going on. Now you've
got the dinner party and the Red family. Then you've
got Red who goes on his own makes it to California.
Actually just fine. Well, he was no worse for the wear,
at least so wow, the dramas high already. Yeah, the

(14:30):
drama is high. They they the amount of time, all
the setbacks, all of the problems that they encountered, conspired
to put them back on the California Trail after the
disastrous hastings cut off um and right at the eastern edge,
so that would be the but the Nevada side maybe

(14:53):
of the um Sierra Nevada Mountains in November at the
first snow storm, and it was a pretty bad snowstorm,
and they thought, we can't make it through these mountains
in the middle of winter. It's November. Let's just honker
down here. And it would turn out to be one
of the worst winders, one of the harshest winners on
record that they were unknowingly honkering down for. And they

(15:17):
made camp two very famous camps. There was the Donner
Camp at the edge of a little lake in the area,
Truckee Lake, and then there was the Alder Creek camp,
which apparently was uh founded because of a broken wagon wheel,
is six miles back for they're back along the trail
and that's where the two groups camped in the Donner Party.

(15:37):
If I may a reading from the diary of one
of the members of the Donner Party November Party, November
one eighty six. It was a raining then in the
valleys and snowing in the mountains. So we went on
that way three or four days till we came to
the Big Mountain, or the California Mountain. The snow was

(15:57):
then about three ft deep. There there was some wagons there.
They said they had attempted to cross and could not.
We set out the next morning to make a last struggle,
but did not advance more than two miles before the
road became so completely blocked that we were compelled to
retrace our steps in despair. When we reached the lake,
we lost our road, and owing to the depth of
the snow in the mountains, were compelled to abandon our

(16:19):
wagons and pack our goods upon Oxen. So this is
early November, and they are in bad shape and basically
the wagons can't even pass anymore. So they set up
these camps, are like we gotta hunker down for the winter,
And ultimately they ended up in an area where there
was through the winter thirty feet of snow. Not over

(16:42):
time like that was the snowpack was thirty ft deep. Yeah,
I mean it's still one of the worst winners on record,
like today, not just for the time. And these people,
this group of fairly green hornish people from back east
are settled down and one of the most dangerous spots
in the country at the time, at least climate wise. Yeah,

(17:03):
medor all illogically dangerous provisions started to run out. Another
diary entry, November six, We have now killed most of
our cattle, having to stay here until next spring and
live on poor beef, without bread or salt. It's snow
during the space of eight days with little intermission. After
our arrival, Mr Curtis remarked that in the oven was

(17:24):
a piece of the dog and we could have and
we could have it. Raising the lid of the oven,
we found the dog well baked and having a fine
savory smell. I cut out a rib, smelling and tasting,
found it to be good and handed the rib to
Mr McCutchen, who, after smelling it sometime tasted it and
pronounced it the very good dog. So apparently that was,

(17:46):
you know, the Dinners dog or the Reeds dog. It
was one of the main things dogs, you know, was
met that fate. Yeah, I hadn't. I didn't read that
he was delicious. Uh, well, imagine if you're dying of starvation,
anything going to be delicious. They ate their shoestrings, They
ate the kids would sit in front of the fire
and pick off pieces of the hide skin rug and

(18:08):
eat that, and then they eventually ate the hide from
the roofs of the cabins because there are actually cabins
at the lake. There were no cabins at the creek. No,
but they weren't you know, they weren't much help against
this kind of snow. In fact, apparently they were completely
packed in at one point and couldn't even get out
of the cabin. It was like the thing that happened, um,
Mr Burns and Homer Simpson. Yeah, when the the camping

(18:33):
tripper was at the ski trip. It was the corporate retreat, right, boy,
that was a good one. Um. They also they boiled
their blankets into like kind of a pasty glue. Apparently
you said there's shoelaces, right, They ate their shoelaces, Yeah,
because I think they were made of like animal hide
or something, bark, twigs, anything they could get their hands on,

(18:54):
anything that might have any kind of protein. They were eating. Yeah,
they boiled the bones so much for soup that they
became just brittle. So they ate the bones of the
animals because they could like bite into them. So it's um,
it's pretty rough. They also, it should go without saying,
they ate their pack animals. They managed to hunt for deer,
which is pretty good in thirty feet of snow to

(19:20):
hunt deer in the middle of winter and successfully. Hats
off to them for that. Yeah, they got other things.
They got birds here and there, like ducks and owls
and uh, I think they got a wolf one time.
So they were able to the forage here and there.
But but everybody, everyone's clearly starving by this time, and
it's the writings on the wall to the parties at

(19:41):
these camps. So they select a group of um, well,
the strongest people, including the two Indian guides and I
think it was the strongest fifteen people, equipped them with
homemade snowshoes, and set them out to walk across the
Sierra Nevada mountains in the middle of winter with almost
no food. They had six days starvation rations per person

(20:05):
um and they were called the Forlorn Hope. That was
the name of the group or the Snowshoe Group. And
I just want to point out that this is some
of the most beautiful land you'll ever see in your life.
So it's you know, it's not like they were in
a goo log in Siberia. I mean, this was like

(20:26):
gorgeous Sierra Nevada mountain range in this lake. You know,
it's it's absolutely amazing. So it must have been a
bitter pill, you know, to be that close. So they're
only like a hundred and fifty miles away at that
point and just stuck, yeah, and dying. I think even
beyond the beauty, the fact that they were a hundred
and fifty miles from their destination, yea, dying like you said,
that's rough. It was them the Forlorn Hope Group where

(20:53):
cannibalism first came up because they all ran out of
food very quickly, and apparently six days in. A guy
UM named Charles Stanton who you mentioned. Stanton didn'to he
was a bachelor. He was saying, hey, you guys go
on without me, or um, you know, take me with

(21:13):
you as provisions maybe, and everybody said, no, we can't
do that. It's crazy. Stop that um, and they left
him to die right. A couple of days after that,
they thought, hey, maybe Stanton wasn't so crazy. Let's figure
out well, let's let's all let's explore the possibility of cannibalism.
And they did. They discussed it, and apparently at first

(21:36):
they decided that they were going to draw lots draw straws,
and then whoever is like the custom of the sea,
whoever drew the short oft straw was going to die,
and whoever drew the second short of straw was the
person who had to kill him. And this one guy,
I can't remember his name, drew the straw, the shortest straw,

(21:57):
but nobody had the heart to kill him, so they
they kind of just waited instead for the next person
to die, and they proposed dueling to at one point,
like let's do a shootout and whoever dies, we'll just
eat them. But it was very grim. Um. Another another
reading perhaps yes, this was in December actually right for Christmas, sadly,

(22:21):
and this melancholy, and this is from the Snowshoe group,
the Forlorn Hope. In this melancholy situation, they consulted together
and concluded they would go on trusting in Providence rather
than return to the Miserable Cabins. They were also at
this time out of provisions and partly agreed, with the
exception of Mr Foster, that in case of necessity they
would cast lots who should die to preserve the remainder.

(22:45):
So it's coming, they know it, so UM, I think
a couple of days after UM they started talking about cannibalism.
The first guy died. His name was Um Antoine and
Antoine Um was eaten by the Forlorn Hope group. Um.

(23:10):
He was the first one, but definitely not the last.
There was a guy named Jay Fastick. He was the
next in a lady named Mrs Foster cut the meat
from his bones, boiled it and served it to everybody,
and everybody ate. But the one thing that was um
agreed upon was that relatives wouldn't eat relatives. Uh. So

(23:34):
there was a guy named Jay Fastick who was who
died next, and he was um butchered and cooked and
served by a lady named Mrs Foster. His fan but
his uh. One of the things they agreed upon was
that relatives wouldn't eat relatives, right so uh. But apparently
his father was part of the um. The Forlorn Hope

(23:56):
group to yeah, he wasn't having it. Hu. And then
things apparently started to turn on the two Indian guides.
Who um, the group started discussing murdering and eating them. Yeah,
and one of the other Forlorn Hope groups said, hey,
we're talking about doing this, you guys might want to
take off. So the Indians apparently had trouble believing it

(24:16):
at first. Um. They finally said, oh wait, that's right,
you guys are white man. I forgot you totally would
do that, And they disappeared into the woods. Yes, but
they were later found. They tracked them by their blood,
so apparently they weren't in great shape and they found them.
This is where it gets a little hinky. Um. Some

(24:37):
accounts say they found them dead and ate them. Some
accounts say they found them alive and like passed out basically,
and they shot them both through the head and then
ate them. Either way, they ate them, as you know,
even though there's no anthropological proof. Yeah, we'll get to that. Um.

(25:01):
The uh so this whole all of these events take
place over thirty three days the Forlorn Hope. Yeah, um,
they and I imagine the cannibalism it came in starting
on day nine, Um, no day ten or eleven, and
then after that they had twenty two more days of

(25:23):
this and they finally made it to Fort Sutter and said, hey, um,
we got big problems. We need your help. Let's start
sending out some rescue parties. How many it was like
seven of them? Uh yeah, seven made of the original fifteen.
So all right, so that story is going on. You've
still got the Donner party back at the camp by

(25:45):
the lake and the river, and you've still got read
who made it to Sacramento to Sutter Sport. He tried
to get supplies and men to take back to to
rescue his family, and the Mexican American War prevented that
from happening. He was essentially forced to kind of join
up that effort, and he couldn't get any of the

(26:07):
men anyway because they were everybody was fighting in the war.
So uh. He would later go on to be part
of the second relief party that went to go find them.
So we'll pick that up when we get there, right,
Because meanwhile, while the forlorn Hopes engaged in this horror
in the woods, the same stuff's going on back at

(26:27):
the um camps on the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevadas. UM.
It took a little longer, I believe, but eventually UM
people started to eat the dead that had a die
of starvation. Right, that's true. So, like I mentioned, there
were some rescue efforts. There were four groups that went

(26:50):
from California because word got back and they even started
writing about it in the paper in San Francisco that
these people were stranded in the Sierra Nevadas. So uh
in February five, there was a quote we concluded we
could go or die trying for not to make any
attempt to save them would be a disgrace to us
into California for as long as time lasted. And that

(27:14):
was one of the members of the very first relief
group of seven men fifty pounds of provisions headed out.
But Reid was a part of the second group. Right.
The first group didn't leave for thirteen days after the
forlorn hope came to Fort cutter Um and then Yeah
Read led the second group. So one survivors were brought

(27:36):
back by the first group, seventeen by the second group.
The third group UM rescued four and then they had
to leave four people behind, including a guy named Lewis
Keysburg and um. When the fourth group came back, Louiskeithberg
was the only person alive. Suspiciously, well, yeah, he was
accused um almost immediately of murdering the other three people

(28:00):
in eating them. Uh. He was said to have been
discovered surrounded by the disfigured and cannibalized corpses of the
other three people. That in the frying pan there was
like lungs and livers, buckets of blood. Basically, he was
in this um crazy place that he had created himself

(28:21):
through cannibalism, completely off his rocker at that point. But
the big kicker was that there were three uneaten oxen legs,
and that when asked, he had said that he oxen
didn't have a very good flavor, so he had resorted
to eating the other people. But they had died of
natural causes. He hadn't murdered them. So when the rescue

(28:42):
party comes and gets them, Keysburg has kind of kept
the arms length, like no one's talking to him. They
don't want to have anything to do with them. When
they made camp one night, he apparently was looking at
the snow and saw like a little piece of cloth
and um tugged at it. It It was in the snow,
tugged at a little harder, little more, and all of
a sudden, Um, he jars loose his dead daughter, the corpse,

(29:06):
the frozen corpse of his dead daughter, who had last
seen sending off with his wife on the third rescue party.
So he had it pretty rough one way or another. Yeah.
He sued for defamation later on in the court right
when he got back. Yeah, the courts award him one
dollar and demanded that he paid the court cost on
top of that. So he lived the rest of his

(29:27):
life pretty much a hermit. Well, yeah, he was derided
as a murdering cannibal who enjoyed it. He denied that
the rest of his life. Um, and other people denied too.
Like first they would say like, yeah, we we resorted
to cannibalism here and here and here, and then later
on someone would say, no, we didn't actually, Um, that

(29:49):
was just sensationalized. Well, yeah, there's a big question so
like of whether the there actually was cannibalism in the
dinner party or if it was all sensationalized and fabricated
by the newspapers. The big question is if if the
Donner Party hadn't resorted cannibalism, why would they lie on

(30:10):
the answer to that is, they wouldn't lie about resorting
to cannibalism. And the reports are probably true, but in
the great tradition of William Errands, you need to see
it to believe it. As far as cannibalism goes, most
people don't genuinely dispute that the dinner party did engage
in cannibalism. But the problem is that there is a

(30:32):
lack of forensic evidence. Like you said, they ate the
bones and bones of animals like the dog, you know, horses, deer, foxes,
that wolf. All these bones have been found at the campsites,
but they haven't found any human bones. So there's a
lot of explanations for that. Um. We know for a

(30:53):
fact that some people who came upon these scenes after
the dinner party had left ordered like these these things
to be cleaned up and buried. Makes sense. Um. Other
people have suggested that the donners didn't um, didn't try
to process the human cadavers like they did the animal bones,
and kind of very gently, so they wouldn't have left

(31:14):
butcher marks on the bones. Um. And then others say
that if they didn't cook the bones like they did
the animal bones, and those bones would have disintegrated a
long time ago. Then, lastly, the argument against says that
these things of cannibalism, like you said, happened here and
here and here and here. We only know of one
legitimate Donner site that's been excavated. The brothers haven't been found.

(31:37):
They can't find them. Yeah, so it's possible there is
evidence out there and just hasn't been discovered. But the
point is, why would these people, if they did actually
say this, and these are their journal entries, why would
they say that they engaged in cannibalism if they hadn't
exactly so read. In the meantime, made his way back
with a second relief group. Was convinced that his family

(31:59):
was dead, but was very surprised and relieved to find
that they were alive. So can you imagine this reunion
that happens when his like eight two year old son
was still a lot year old daughter. They were one
of two families that didn't have any deaths. Yeah, the
Reeds suffered no deaths, and uh, I believe the Breens

(32:23):
did not suffer deaths. All of the Donners died every
single one of them, which is pretty sad and um.
Out of the group, I think two thirds of the
women and children survived, two thirds of the men died,
and everyone over fifty died. That was Yeah, the fifty

(32:45):
was pretty old back then, especially for those kind of conditions.
So there you have it, the Donner Party. Basically, what
that did was halted a lot of immigration to California
for a while until word of old came around and
then they said it was it, screw it. I'll take
my chances. It was like a year before the first

(33:07):
gold rushed and then there was the Movement of eighteen
forty nine, the big gold Rush of eighteen forty nine,
and that was that. I think read what the one
of the read wife sent a letter out afterwards that
was like, don't be afraid to come out here, you know,
just don't take any shortcuts and hurry was basically don't

(33:28):
listen to Hastings, and Hastings was like the whole time, dude,
he was being cursed, like on a daily basis. He
was vilified and cursed and that pretty much scrapped his
reputation as a trailblazer and uh, anyone to be trusted
and that was the end of him. I couldn't find
anything up about the rest of his life, but I

(33:49):
know that he was pretty well disgraced by that. He
went on to be like a merchant and like he
lived in a life after that, but he apparently was
remorseful for the rest of his life. That's Langford Hastings.
I guess if you want to know more about him,
you can type his name l A N G F
O R D H A S T I n G

(34:11):
S in the search bar at how stuff works dot
com and it will coincidentally enough bring up this article
on the Donner Party. And I said, search bar at
how stuff works dot com. Right, this soon to be
changed article on the dinner party. And uh yeah, since
it's gonna be changed soon, maybe give us a minute. Um,
But I said howster works dot com and search bar,

(34:33):
which means it's time for listener mail. Yes, this is
back to the future. Josh Okay, Josh Chuck exclamation points.
I just listened to the zero podcast and heard your
cries for help from across the ages. We all heard
you guys go get into the way back machine. But

(34:53):
I think only a few of us realize that you
never came out. I could tell that something had gone
wrong by the tone of your voice as you near
the end of the show, I know that you are
trying to send us a message. You are stuck in
fifth century India. I hope you have found somewhere safe
to bunker down. Do not try to fix the way
Back Machine on your end. Jerry and I are working
on a way to fix the broken flux capacitor remotely

(35:15):
and bring you back. We hope to hear you return
to us on a podcast soon. And one final warning,
do not, under any circumstances use the way Back Machine
while you are still strapped inside the way Back Machine.
The last thing we need is an inception style time
travel within time travel scenario. And that says uh Max

(35:36):
Prince god Speed from Max Prints, assistant to Dr Emmett Lathrop,
Doc Brown. Nice A little bit of fun there. I've
been enjoying the heck out of a sag paneer that
I've been eating morning, noon andnight. Oh yeah, man, I
get enough of this lavash. Well yeah, if you have
a bit of amusement for us, I found that highly amusing.

(36:00):
Um you can tweet to us at s Y s
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(36:23):
staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities
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