SYSK Selects: 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 classic episode of Stuff You Should Know.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, they're friends. It's me Josh, and this week I've
selected for s y s K selects our episode on
the Donner Party, which was pretty grim. I mean, we
all know about the Donner Party, but once you start
to learn the details of the whole thing, it's pretty grim. Anyway,
I guess I would say enjoy this normally, but yeah, okay,

(00:22):
go ahead, enjoy this episode in a grim way. Welcome
to Stuff you Should Know, a production of My Heart
Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark with me as always a Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, and that makes this stuff you should know.

(00:46):
M I 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 and work. Yeah, paid for it. Yeah, man,
I remember I watched American grind House once at work
while we were doing the exploitation I did do. Actually,

(01:09):
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 Dinner Party. Oh, is that the one you watched?
I gotcha. I just saw there was one on the
Johnstown flood that I which I would have known, I
would have watched it. Oh yeah, I mean I'll still

(01:29):
watch it. I still want to learn. You're not gonna
you only watch PBS at work for money? Yeah, you're right. Um.
I was doing a little research and I came across
something called hugh Fou or wofu play on Hulu. You know,
a play on tofu that's designed, um to taste like
human flesh. Oh, I was going in an entirely different direction.

(01:52):
There is a big um. Yeah, no, this is this
is about canniballism. Now there's a big media put on it.
It made the Daily Show. Um. All sorts of articles
came up about whufu. There was a spokesman, there was
a website, UM, and it was the tofu that's that

(02:14):
tastes like human They were saying the reason why they're
doing it so anthropologists could better, um understand 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 out the whole thing was the

(02:34):
total farce. But if you still look today, Um, it
was on the snop sport. 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 funny that everybody got taken

(02:56):
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 and loath to say it, but it was
Wikipedia that that initially said it's fictitious. To me, I

(03:17):
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 ate

(03:38):
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. Yeah, it's pretty rough there. Yeah,
I can just keep going for the rest of the episodes.
How bad it was? Um and uh. I learned a

(04:00):
lot from this article, a lot of new surprising stuff,
and it's pretty cool. Like, did you know that it
took two years when it should have taken six months?
Not true? What are you talking about? It took one year? Okay? Yeah?
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 event onto um Fort Sutter, California.

(04:24):
No problem, that's not true either. What are you talking about? Yeah,
this is not the best article on our site, 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 sent an email actually about that, did you

(04:44):
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 caddie one, yes, okay, it was
a little caddy. Um. Well, let's talk about the Donner party.

(05:04):
Let's talk about what's known what's not known. So Donna
Donna Reid. Donner was a wealthy farmer in his sixties.
Reid 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,

(05:27):
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

(05:47):
because 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, oh, who's this guy with his
big wagon? And this is even before for 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 Chuck Goodnight was a cookie on

(06:09):
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, which became the first chuck wagon named
after him. And uh, from that, if you follow it
further and further, you get diners and food trucks. Chuck wagon. Yeah,

(06:33):
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. Um this there was a movement towards
populating California, basically wrestling wrestling control of California away from

(06:56):
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 dudes behind this movement. He was an attorney
from Ohio. He went to California forty two and dreamed

(07:21):
of wrestling this land from the Mexican Uh, from Mexico
and saying, and governing California himself, well he dreams. He
did so with a guy named John Sutter who was
a German born Swiss immigrant who had taken Mexican citizen
citizenship to get a charter a land grant from the

(07:42):
Mexican government, and he used it to form New Helvetia
or New Switzerland a k a. Fort Sutter, which is
now Sacramento Swiss German Swiss born with Mexican citizenship. Yeah,
I love it. Who was a trader? Only the can
do stuff like that exactly only in California, you know.

(08:04):
But Hastings will come back up in a very big
way because it's pretty much all his fault. Uh. So
they basically set out for for California in May, while
they set out from Springfield in April, but Missouri in
May is when they had the whole gang together, the
big wagon train. So we're going west, we're following the

(08:27):
California trail. Everyone goes that way. Everyone actually that year
made it except for the dinner party. Oh yeah, yeah,
all the immigrants going to California checked in, okay, except
for these these sad folks, and um, it was really
all because of one fateful decision to tell the truth. Um,

(08:48):
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, no, no, but they did make one
faithful decision, like you said. Um. Hastings was his first name, Lanford.

(09:09):
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 trailblazer,
and he came up with a fanciful thing called the
Hastings cut off. That's right, a shortcut essentially. Yeah. He
wrote a book called The Immigrants Guide to Oregon in California,

(09:31):
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 of a full three
weeks off of the trip, which is a big chunk
for a six month trip that's definitely worth the the

(09:53):
trip that they cut off. The problem was, Hastings had
never taken this route himself and had certain 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

(10:13):
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. 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 he would lead people. Yeah, so this is why
he came up with the Hastings cut off. And it

(10:34):
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 Dinner 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 was not the Reds.

(10:56):
The Reds stayed with the Donners. Uh, and they went left,
went on to Fort Bridger, Wyoming. They were going to
meet up with Hastings there, and they got there a
little late, and and Hastings was no longer there, but
he uh sent a message. Oh, he left a note
somewhere along the trail along the Hastings cut off saying, Uh,

(11:19):
this may not be as good as I thought. You
should probably turn back. Well. Yeah, and before that, this
other dude um 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. Your wagons aren't gonna make it, and you
probably wouldn't even make it, so don't go that way.

(11:41):
So but 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 did find him, actually, and he
didn't kill him. Uh. In Hasting said, I'm not coming
back with you to lead Uh sorry, but hey, I'm

(12:05):
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 what started the beginning of the
end for the Dinner Party. Two miles a day. Yeah,

(12:26):
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 the trip rather than subtracting three weeks to
the trip. They also lost four wagons, which is a

(12:48):
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
since they were in the desert eighty miles stretch of
desert on 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 that

(13:09):
this was like m 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 that time that it
took him, I mean that extra three weeks, wasn't it.
That wasn't went Dinniman. They were going slower than they predicted. Yeah,

(13:29):
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 provision. So he took off for a
period of time and did come back with five mules

(13:51):
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 UH train either. He came
back with the provisions with Stanton. UH. During this time,
read got in a fight. It was basically the first
incident of road rage. His wagon became entangled. His big

(14:13):
like RV wagon became entangled with a guy named Snyder.
They fought, Red killed Snyder with a knife. They had
a little kangaroo court and first said they should hang
him and then said no, you know what, just pack
your stuff and get out of here. 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

(14:35):
the dinner party and the Red family. Then you've got
read 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, the

(15:10):
drama is high. They they the amount of time, all
the setbacks, all 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

(15:33):
of the um Sierra Nevada Mountains in November at the
first snow storm, and it was a pretty bad snow storm,
and they thought, we can't make it through these mountains
in the middle of winter. It's November. Let's just hunker
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

(15:57):
made camp two very famous camps there's the Donner Camp
at the edge of a little lake in the area,
truck Ee Lake. And then there was the Alder Creek camp,
which apparently was uh founded because of a broken wagon wheel,
is six miles back either back along the trail, and
that's where the two groups camped in the Donner Party.

(16:17):
If I may a reading from the diary of one
of the members of the Donner Party, November Party, like
you're surprised. November one. 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

(16:37):
was 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 into Spare. When we
reached the lake, we lost our road, and, owing to
the depth of the snow in the mountains, were compelled

(16:58):
to abandon our 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 ft

(17:20):
of snow. Not over 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 in
one of the most dangerous spots in the country at
the time, at least climate wise, yeah, meteor logically dangerous.

(17:46):
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 a piece of the
dog and we could have and we could have it.

(18:09):
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, you know, the Dinners
dog or the Reeds dog. It was one of the
main Fellas dogs. You know, was met that fate. Yeah,

(18:33):
I hadn't. I didn't read that he was delicious. Uh well,
I imagine if you're dying of starvation, anything that's going
to be delicious. They ate their shoes strings, they ate
the kids would sit in front of the fire and
pick off pieces of the hide skin rug and eat that,
and then they eventually ate the hide from the roofs
of the cabins because there are actually cabins at the lake.

(18:55):
There were no cabins at the creek, but they weren't,
you know, they weren't much help against this kind of know.
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 to um Mr Burns
and Homer Simpson. Yeah, when the the camping tripper was
at the ski trip, it was the corporate retreat right, boy,

(19:18):
that was a good one. Um. They also they boiled
their blankets into like kind of a pasty glue. Apparently
you said they're 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,
anything that might have any kind of protein they were eating. Yeah,
they boiled the bones so much for soup that they

(19:41):
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 ft of snow to
hunt deer in the middle of winter and successfully. Hats

(20:03):
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 everybody, everyone's clearly starving by this time, and it's
the writings on the wall to the parties at these camps.
So they select a group of um, well, the strongest people,

(20:26):
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 um. And they

(20:47):
were called the forelearn 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 goolag
in Siberia. I mean, this was like gorgeous Sierra Nevada

(21:08):
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 dying, like you said, that's rough. It was them

(21:30):
the Forlorn Hope Group, where cannibalism first came up because
they all ran out of food very quickly. And apparently, uh,
six days in a guy um named Charles Stanton. Who
you mentioned Stanton, didn't you. Yeah, he was a bachelor,
one of the early heroes. He was saying, hey, you
guys go on without me or um, you know, take

(21:53):
me with 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. Yeah. 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

(22:15):
apparently at first 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 of 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

(22:35):
the straw the shortest straw, but nobody had the heart
to kill him, so 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 whoever dies,
we'll just eat them. But it was very grim. Um.
Another another reading perhaps, Yes, this was in December actually

(22:59):
right for Christmas, sadly, 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,

(23:21):
they would cast lots who should die to preserve the remainder.
So it's coming, yea, 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. Yeah,

(23:42):
and Antoine Um was eaten by the Forlorn Hope group. Um.
He was the first one, but definitely not the last.
There was a guy named Jay Fast, Yes, he was
the next in A lady named Mrs Foster cut the
meat from his bones, boiled it and served it to everybody,

(24:03):
and everybody ate. But the one thing that was um
agreed upon was that relatives wouldn't eat relatives. Uh. So
there was a guy named Jay fos Dick who was
who died next and he was um butchered and cooked
and served by a lady named Mrs Foster his fan

(24:24):
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 group to yeah, he wasn't having it huh. And
then things apparently started to turn on the two Indian
guides who um the group started discussing murdering and eating them,

(24:48):
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
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

(25:08):
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
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

(25:29):
ate them either way. They ate them, as you know,
even though there's no anthropological proof. Yeah, we'll get to that. Yeah.

(26:02):
So this whole all of these events take place over
thirty three days the forlorn hope. Yeah 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 two more days of this and

(26:24):
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 fift.
So all right, so that story is going on. You've
still got the Donner party back at the camp by

(26:45):
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

(27:07):
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

(27:27):
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. Yeah, that had died
of starvation, right, that's true. So, like I mentioned, there
were some rescue efforts. There were four groups that went

(27:50):
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

(28:14):
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 sutter Um and then Yeah,
read led the second group. So one survivors were brought

(28:36):
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, Louis
Cuthberg was the only person alive. Suspiciously, well yeah, he
was accused um almost immediately of murdering the other three

(29:00):
people and 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

(29:21):
himself 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

(29:41):
the rescue party comes and gets them, Keysburg has kind
of kept the arm's 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,

(30:06):
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 and the right when
he got back. Yeah, the courts awarded him one dollar
and demanded that he paid the court cost on top
of that. So he lived the rest of his life

(30:27):
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. Then later on
someone would say, no, we didn't actually Um, that was

(30:49):
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 is if if the
Donner Party hadn't resorted cannibalism, why would they lie. Well,

(31:10):
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 Donner Party did engage
in cannibalism. But the problem is there is a lack

(31:33):
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

(31:53):
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

(32:14):
left 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 it
is 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 others

(32:36):
haven't been found. 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

(32:58):
his family 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 alive eight year old daughter. They
were one of two families that didn't have any deaths. Yeah,
the Reeds suffered no deaths, and I believe the Breens

(33:23):
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, fifty was

(33:45):
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 gold came around, and
then they said that was it. Screw it. I'll take
my chances. It was like a year before the first

(34:07):
gold Rush, 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 afterward that
was like, don't be afraid to come out here, you know,
just don't take any shortcuts and hurry. It was basically

(34:27):
don't 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

(34:49):
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 the life. That's Langford hastinks.
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

(35:11):
S in the search bar at how stuff works dot
com and it will coincidentally enough bring up as 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,

(35:33):
which means it's time for listener mayl 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 I think

(35:53):
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 and bring you back.

(36:17):
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 Prince Godspeed from Max Prince

(36:39):
assistant to Dr Emmett Lathrop, Doc Brown. Nice a little
bit of fun there. I've been enjoying the heck out
of a sog preneer that I've been eating morning, noon
and night. 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. Um. You can tweet to

(37:01):
us at s y s K podcast. You can hit
us up on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash Stuff
you Should Know, and you can send us an email
to stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen

(37:24):
to your favorite shows. H