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- [00:02]
Vanessa Richardson
Hi, listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, the First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case. The interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [00:41]
Carter Roy
This is crime house.
- [00:47]
Vanessa Richardson
In the summer of 1846, a man named James Reed sat at a campsite somewhere in present day Wyoming, reading a letter that had just been handed to him by a passing writer. It was from a guidebook author named Lansford Hastings, and it promised a faster way to California. A shortcut that would shave three to 400 miles off the trip. A new route across the desert and over the mountains that would put Reed and his family weeks ahead of schedule. There was just one problem. Nobody had ever taken wagons through it, not even Hastings. Reed read the letter. He talked it over with the other families in his wagon train. And the Donners and the Breens. They were already running late. Winter was coming, and the mountains ahead of them were unforgiving. They took the shortcut. Six months later, almost half of them would be dead. The survivors were trapped in cabins in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, eating the leather straps of their snowshoes. Then the hides off the cabin roofs. And finally, the bodies of the people they'd buried in the snow. This is the story of the Donner Party, a group of ordinary American families who made one bad decision in a trading post and spent the next winter paying for it in ways nobody could have imagined. From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes. A Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. These cases are wild, and I want to hear what you think at the end of each episode. Please leave a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review and follow so we can continue building this community together. And if you want even more, subscribe to Crime House plus and get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crime houseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Please note this episode contains descriptions of death, starvation and cannibalism, so please listen with care. Today I'm talking about the Donner Party. In the spring of 1846, nearly 90 men, women and children set out for California. They were farmers, businessmen, mothers and children, chasing the same thing as every other wagon that year free land, a milder climate, and a fresh start out west. They never made it on time. A bad decision cost them weeks, and an early blizzard trapped them in the mountains for the winter. By the time rescue parties reached them four months later, the survivors were so far gone that one of the master rescuer whether he'd come from California or from heaven, this is the story of how it happened, who made the calls and who paid for them, and how a wagon train ended up giving its name to the most infamous chapter of American westward expansion. All that and more coming up. If you're always on the hunt for a good deal like I am, you need to know about whatnot. It is the number one live shopping app in the US bringing real time conversations and incredible discounts right to your phone. What I love most is the community. It honestly feels like hanging out with a group of friends who just totally get your style. It's also an amazing way to discover new brands because the sellers never gatekeep their best sources. During a live stream yesterday, I connected with a seller who hooked me up with a gorgeous Sephora Collection eyeshadow palette and a Charlotte Tilbury lipstick Bundle for only $30 total. She was so sweet. It was such a fun experience getting to chat with everyone live while saving a fortune on something I love. Download whatnot today and get $20 off and free shipping on your first purchase. Search whatnot w h a T N o t in the App Store Sign up and start finding the best deals on the products you love with $20 off and free Shipp first purchase. We've all been there. You look up. Suddenly life has thrown so much at you that your to do list is completely out of control. For me, it was last month when I moved and I needed to install a cabinet in my bathroom and fix a broken light fixture. I knew just where to turn. Finding A tasker on TaskRabbit makes tackling your to do list even easier, and I honestly felt this wave of blissful relief watching a seasoned tasker handle it all in a couple of hours. I like to use the same tasker for home repairs, but I know if he's not available the app is filled with more than qualified taskers. TaskRabbit is an app that makes everyday life easier by helping people get more done around the home. It connects you with skilled taskers in your area for everything from mounting and yard work to home repairs. You can search for the best tasker for the job based on cost, skill set availability and past client reviews so you always feel confident. I use TaskRabbit and you should check it out too. When life happens, your to do list grows. Get ahead of it now and get $15 off your first task@taskrabbit.com or on the TaskRabbit code Crime House Taskers book up fast, especially for same day tasks. So book trusted home help today. That's $15 off your first task using promo code crime house with the TaskRabbit app or@taskrabbit.com In April of 1846, James Fraser Reed loaded up three wagons in Springfield, Illinois and got ready to leave every single thing he knew. Reed was a 45 year old furniture manufacturer and railroad contractor. He was Irish born and had served in the Blackhawk War alongside a young Abraham Lincoln. By most accounts, Reed was the kind of man who was sure he knew best. Confident, educated and used to giving the orders. He was also the reason his family was heading west. Reed had been hit hard by a financial crash a few years earlier he'd won a contract to make ties for Illinois's first railroad, but when the railroad failed, his business went down with it. Now he was looking for a fresh start on a bigger scale. And he wasn't alone. America in 1846 was restless. The same crash that had hurt Reid, the panic of 1837, had dragged the whole economy down for years. Banks failed. Land values collapsed. A lot of ambitious people who'd expected to be comfortable by middle age were starting over from nothing. At the same time, the whole country was itching to head west. There was even a phrase for it, Manifest Destiny, the belief that the United States was meant to stretch all the way to the Pacific. Newspapers ran glowing stories about California. It was still Mexican territory back then and Mexico wanted to people to settle there. So it was handing out enormous land grants, some of them tens of thousands of acres, for next to nothing. The land, the mild climate, the clean slate. It was the sort of opportunity that just didn't exist back home For a man Reed's age with capital, ambition and a family to provide for it was a chance he'd never get in Illinois. On top of that, his wife Margaret suffered from terrible migraines and doctors thought California's climate might help. Margaret's mother, Sarah Keys, was 70 years old and dying of tuberculosis. She refused to be separated from her only daughter, so she came too. California was a new life for all of them. As for how they'd get there, Reed's wagon was famous. Before they even left town, he'd had it custom built. It had a stove inside, side spring cushioned seats, beds for the children and a raised sleeping platform. His neighbors called it the palace car and by all accounts it was completely impractical for crossing a continent. Reed didn't care. He brought it anyway. Traveling with him were two other families he'd recruited in Springfield. George Donner and his wife Tamson, plus George's brother Jacob and his wife Elizabeth. Between the three families there were more than a dozen children. A few hired teamsters to drive the wagons, a family friend and Sarah Keys riding in a wagon bed propped up on pillows. George donner was around 60 years old by the time the wagons rolled out. He was a farmer, successful, well liked, the grandfatherly type, but not the confident operator. James reed was his third wife. Tamson was first 44 and considerably sharper. She was a schoolteacher who spoke French and collected botanical specimens. Along the trail. She planned to write a book about the journey once they reached California. The group left Springfield on April 14, 1846. Friends rode alongside them for the first few days to say Goodbye. Reed's stepdaughter, 13 year old Virginia, later wrote that her father had tears in his eyes as one for friend after another grasped his hand for a final farewell. She also wrote that the first stretch of the journey was, in her words, an ideal pleasure trip. Wide green prairies, wild flowers, songs around the campfire at night. That feeling didn't last. Just over a month in near the Big Blue river in present day Kansas. The rains came and swelled the river and and the train had to stop and wait while they were camped there. On May 29, 1846, Sarah Keyes died. She was 70 and she never made it out of the second state on the trip. They buried her under a tree near the river. Sarah's death was a grim start. But there was a quieter problem already working against them. One nobody could bury and walk away from. They were behind schedule and on a trip like this that was dangerous. Nobody set out for California from their own front door. The real trailhead was Independence, Missouri on the Missouri river, where The Oregon and California trails began, so a family leaving Springfield had to travel a few hundred miles just to reach the starting line. And timing was everything. Leave too early and there's no grass. Grass on the prairie to feed your oxen. Leave too late and you hit the mountains after the snow starts. The window was narrow and the Donners missed it on both ends. Most trains left Missouri in mid April. The Donners didn't even leave Illinois until then and didn't reach Independence until well into May. One writer wrote in his diary that he was, quote, beginning to feel alarmed at the tardiness of our movements and fearful that that winter will find us in the snowy mountains of California. For most of the trip, the Donners and the Reeds had been traveling with a huge group of other families. But at a spot called the Little Sandy river, that big group came to a fork. The families taking the safe, established route went one way. A smaller breakaway group, the ones who wanted to try a new shortcut they'd been hearing about, wanted to take the other. In addition to the Donners and the Reeds, this breakaway group included the Breens and the Eddies. Later, the Graves family also joined. There was also a widow named Lavina Murphy, who was traveling with 12 of her children, grandchildren, and in laws, 13 Murphys in all. A businessman named Charles Stanton was traveling alone. A German immigrant named Louis Keseberg was with his wife and two small children. Children. Altogether there were around 87 people in roughly 20 wagons. And before they set off, they held a vote for a new captain. They elected George Donner, partly because he was the oldest, partly because he was the kindest, but mostly because nobody wanted to elect James Reed, who'd irritated half the group with his palace car and his obvious sense of superiority. That vote is the only reason this story isn't called the Reid Party. And now they had a decision to make. Picture two roads west. The established route, the one everyone trusted, swung north to a place called Fort hall in present day Idaho before curving back down toward California. The longer but safer way. The other was Hastings Shortcut, which cut south of the Great Salt Lake and ran straight across the desert. On a map, it looked shorter. That was the whole pitch. And the man selling it was Langsford Hastings, a lawyer, an opportunist, and a man with big ambitions. He'd spent time in California and become convinced that if enough Americans moved there, the territory could be pried away from Mexico and turned into its own republic, possibly with him in charge. So he'd written a book. The Emigrant's guide to Oregon and California, published in 1845.
- [14:18]
Jay Uso
In.
- [14:18]
Vanessa Richardson
In it, he described his new route and claimed it would save settlers 3 to 400 miles. There were a few problems with that. First, Hastings had never taken the route with wagons. He'd crossed parts on horseback, which was totally different. Second, the mountain men who knew the terrain were already warning people off it. A trapper named James Clyman had walked the route that very spring, and he told everyone what wagons couldn't make it, including James Reed to his face. Reed didn't listen. And third, when the party finally reached Fort Bridger that July, the men running the fort told them exactly what they wanted to hear. Hastings himself had already pushed on west days earlier, leading another wagon train down the cutoff. But the people in charge of the fort, Jim Bridger and Lewis Vasquez, vouched for the route, calling it a fort fine level road with plenty of water and grass. What the emigrants didn't know was that Bridger and Vasquez had a stake in sending them that way. The cutoff ran past their fort, and the established road was starting to bypass them. Reed also hadn't seen the warnings. Other immigrants who'd passed through earlier had left letters at Fort Bridger telling him in no uncertain terms, do not take the Hastings cut off. Take the established route through for Fort Hall. But the men running Fort Bridger never gave those letters to read. On July 31, 1846, the Donner Party left Fort Bridger and took the shortcut. It was a catastrophe. From the first week, the Wasatch Mountains, which Hastings basically said were no big deal, turned out to be a wall of aspen, cottonwood, and tangled brush. Brush. There was no road. The men had to build one, chopping their way through the forest foot by foot, lowering wagons down ravines by hand. A crossing they'd expected to take a few days stretched into nearly three weeks. Then came the Great Salt Lake Desert in what's now northwestern Utah. A note from Hastings had promised a dry drive of about 40 miles with water in a day or two. The desert was actually around 80 miles across, and it took them five days and nights. One traveler described the salt flats as walking through deep oatmeal mixed with glue. When the oxen, worn down from four months on the trail, smelled distant water and bolted, Reed saddled his mare and rode out alone into the dark after them. He never found most of them. From then on, they were borrowing animals just to keep moving. Even worse, Reed had to abandon his beloved palace car, burying most of his possessions in a hole in the ground and pushing on with a single wagon. By the time the party limped back onto the established trail in late September, they'd lost almost a month and a huge chunk of their livestock and supplies. Every other wagon train from 1846 was already in California. The Donners were alone, behind schedule, low on food, and still hundreds of miles from the mountains. They had to cross before winter. Things were not going well. And then they got violent. On October 5, 1846, the train was working its way up a steep, sandy hill along the Humboldt river in what's now northern Nevada. The oxen were exhausted. The men were having to double team the wagons just to drag them up the slope. Reed's lead teamster, a man named Milt Elliot, got into a fight with a teamster from the Graves family, a young man named John Snyder. The argument was about whose wagon should go up first. Snyder lost his temper, grabbed his bullwhip and started beating his oxen across the head with the heavy wooden handle. Reid rode up and tried to calm him down. He argued that they couldn't afford to lose any more oxen and offered Snyder what was left of his own team to help haul the wagon up the hill. But Snyder swore at him and said he'd take the wagon up himself. When Reid suggested they settle the matter once they'd reached the top, Snyder told him no, they'd settle it right now. According to Reed, Snyder then swung the butt of his bullwhip at his head, opening a gash across his forehead that sent blood running into his eyes. When Snyder swung again, Reed's wife, Margaret rushed in to stop the fight, and the whip caught her, too. When Snyder reared back for a third blow, Reed pulled a hunting knife and drove it into his chest. Snyder staggered a few steps up the hill before he collapsed into the arms of Patrick Breen. He was dead within fear 15 minutes. That night, the company held a meeting to decide what to do with Reed. Louis Keseberg, who'd been at odds with Reed for months, wanted to hang him. He started setting up a wagon tongue the long wooden pole the oxen were hitched to as a makeshift gallows. But another immigrant, William Eddy, had two six shooters, a rifle, and friends who were just as well armed. He made it clear that nobody was hanging James Reed that night. Instead, Eddie proposed that they banish Reed and send him ahead to California. The others could deal with his crime once they all got there. So that's what they did. The next morning, Reid left his wife, three children, and stepdaughter Virginia with the wagon train and rode off towards Sutter's fort with no weapons and almost no supplies. But Virginia followed him into the dark that night and slipped him a rifle, ammunition, and some food before he disappeared. To a lot of people in the party, banishing Reed alone into the wilderness was as good as a death sentence. It wasn't, but nobody watching him ride off that morning could have known that. And for the people he left behind, things were about to get much, much worse.
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Jay Uso
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- [20:52]
Vanessa Richardson
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- [20:56]
Carter Roy
Jumbo Casino the moment a body is found, the clock starts ticking. 48 hours. That's how long the detectives have before the trail begins to go cold. From A and E and Crime House, this is the official podcast from the famous true crime series the first 48. Step inside the critical window. The interrogations, the dead ends and the breakthroughs that crack a case wide open. I'm Carter Roy. Each week I revisit a landmark homicide investigation with the depth you know and immersive long form storytelling built for your ears. Real detectives, real cases, real stakes. This is the first 48 new episodes every Thursday. Listen to and follow the first 48 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [21:58]
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- [22:28]
Vanessa Richardson
After James Reed was banished on October 6, 1846, the Donner party started to come apart. A 60 year old Belgian emigrant named Hardkoop had been riding in Louis Kessberg's wagon when Hartkoop's feet swelled so badly he could barely walk. Keseberg kicked him out. Margaret Reed and others pleaded with anyone who had a horse to go back for him. Nobody would. Hardkoop died alone in the desert, and the party kept bleeding. People and animals. Both Paiute warriors began picking off the oxen, shooting some and driving off others. By the time the party reached the Truckee river at the end of October, they were just east of the Sierra Nevada. That was a little over a hundred miles from Sutter's Fort, the California settlement they'd been aiming at all along. But the hardest stretch was still ahead, the climb up and over the pass. Most of their wagons were gone. Their food was running out. Their pack animals were dead or dying, and the first snow had already started falling on the mountains in front of them. They reached the eastern foot of the Sierra Nevada at the very start of November, 1846. The lake at the base of the pass, named after that same Truckee river, would one day be renamed Donner Lake in their honor. They were so close. If they could just get over the pass, they were home free. They tried. They pushed their remaining wagons up toward the summit, and snow got deeper as they climbed. 3ft. 5ft. Within a few miles of the top, it was so deep the oxen couldn't move. They unhitched the animals and tried to go on foot, packing what they could on the oxen's backs and. But the animals panicked and bucked off their loads. The snow kept falling, so eventually they turned around. They went back down to the lake, where a few crude log cabins were already standing from an earlier traveler, and they built more. This became the lake camp, but not everyone was there. The Donner families had fallen six miles behind after one of their wagons broke an axle. And they never made it up to the lake at all. They stopped where they were, at a place called Alder Creek and threw together tents out of canvas and pine branches. From that point on, there were two camps six miles of deep snow apart. The lake camp in its cabins and the donners in their tents at Alder Creek. The two groups would spend the winter almost completely cut off from each other. Counting both camps, around 80 people were trapped. Roughly 60 at the lake and 21 more at Alder Creek. More than half of them were children. The youngest was Louis Keseberg's son, less than a year old. They settled in to wait for the snow to clear. It never did. The winter of 1846-47 was one of the worst in the recorded history of The Sierra Nevada. The snow at the lake camp eventually reached a rain record 22ft deep. You can still find photographs of the tree stumps the immigrants cut for firewood. That winter. They were sawed off at the snow line. So the stumps stand more than 20ft off the ground. And that snow is the whole reason they starved. It wasn't that these were helpless people. Several families had guns, and at least one of the men, William Eddy, was a genuinely good hunter. Under normal conditions, they could have lived off the land. But these weren't normal conditions. The snow came early and deep, and it buried everything. The grass was gone. The deer and elk that might have fed the camp had moved below the snow line to an area the emigrants were too weak and too snowbound to reach. Guns don't help if there's nothing in range to shoot. And slowly the camp realized the mountains weren't going to feed them. They'd have to live on one what they'd brought. The first thing to go was the oxen. The emigrants slaughtered the last of them and buried the meat in the snow to keep it. But the animals were so starved themselves, they offered almost nothing. Then they killed the dogs. Then they boiled the leather strips off their snowshoes. Then they pulled the rawhide from the cabin roofs and boiled it into a paste they called glue soup. People described eating it and immediately throwing it back up. Some hunted when they could. William Eddy killed a bear early on and shared it, but those moments were rare. Then people started dying. The first was a hired hand named Bayless Williams. In mid December, the others looked at his body and understood what was coming for them. On December 16, 15 of the strongest people in the camp tied makeshift snowshoes onto their feet and and set out to walk over the pass and bring back help. They became known as the Forlorn Hope. The forlorn hope was 10 men and five women, though it started out bigger. Seventeen people left the lake that morning. Two of them, who had no snowshoes and kept sinking into the drifts, gave up and turned back almost immediately. The plan was to make it over the summit, down the western slope and reach a settlement to send back a rescue party. They carried six days of rations. They ended up being on the trail for 33 days. Charles Stanton was the first to die, and he was one of the quiet heroes of this whole story. Earlier in the journey, he'd ridden ahead to Sutter's Fort, then turned around and came back with supplies. He had no family of his own. Traveling with him, he Just wanted to help. Now on the snowshoe trek, his eyesight was failing and he couldn't keep up. On the morning of December 21, the others left him sitting by a campfire, smoking his pipe. He told him to go on without him, he'd catch up. He never did. By then, the Forlorn Hope was even worse off than the camps they'd left behind. The people at the lake still had shelter and a few scraps, hides, bones, the last of the cattle. This group had walked away from all of it. Fifteen people out in the open in mid winter days past the end of their food with nothing left. That same day, in the middle of a blizzard, they sat down on a blanket in the snow and held a meeting. They'd eaten everything they had, down to the rawhide strings off their own snowshoes. There was one option left that none of them had been willing to say out loud until now. Patrick Dolan said it first. He proposed they draw lots. Whoever drew the short straw would be killed to feed the others. William Eddy seconded the motion, but another man, William Foster, opposed it, and the idea was voted down. Eddy then suggested two men fight to the death, with the loser feeding the rest. That was voted down, too. In the end, they agreed to keep walking and wait for someone to die on their own. They didn't have to wait long. Franklin Graves died next. Then Patrick Dolan, the very man who'd proposed the lottery. This next part is hard to hear, so if you're squeamish, just go ahead and skip ahead a bit. On December 26, the survivors built a fire, cut the flesh from Dolan's arms and legs and roasted it, careful that no one ate their own. Kim Eddie held out two more days before he could bring himself to eat. And some people in the group refused entirely. Lewis and Salvador, two Miwok men who'd come back from Sutter's fort with Stanton. They weren't emigrants. They worked for John Sutter, who'd sent them from his fort to carry supplies to people they'd never met. And they would not eat the dead. On New Year's Eve, the party set out again, stronger because of the terrible thing they'd done. That same week, William Foster came to a decision. He decided that the next people to die would be Luis and Salvador. The two men realized what was coming and slipped out of camp in the dark. A few days later, the party caught up to them. Luis and Salvador were lying in the snow, too exhausted to keep walking. By then, they hadn't eaten in nine days and hadn't had a fire in four. William Foster shot them both. Back at the lake camp, the same situation was playing out, just more slowly. The people there still had what the Forlorn Hope hadn't walls, roofs and fire. So their collapse came gradually, stretched out over weeks instead of days. But by Christmas, the cattle hides were gone, the dogs were gone. People were boiling pine cones for nourishment that wasn't there. And bit by bit, the camps arrived at the same place the Forlorn Hope had. It didn't happen during one dramatic meeting on a blanket in the snow, but quietly, cabin by cabin, as the dead piled up and the living ran out of anything else. There was a system, if you can call it that. Since families refused to eat their own dead bodies were shared between cabins. The dead from one family fed the children of another. Patrick Breen, who kept a diary all winter, recorded these things in the same dry voice he used to note the weather. One of the women at the lake was Lavina Murphy. She'd started the journey with 13 family members. By February, she was the only adult left in her cabin, caring for her own surviving children and grandchildren. She'd also taken in the Eddy and Fish, foster boys whose parents were either on the Forlorn Hope or already dead. Lavina watched her teenage son die in front of her in January. The bodies in her cabin, including her son's, fed the children she was trying to keep alive. Laina herself passed away in March, before the final rescue arrived. By all accounts, she gave the last of her food to the children until there was nothing left left of her at Alder Creek, six miles back, the situation was different. The Donner families were running out of food like everyone else. But when archaeologists excavated the Alder Creek site In the early 2000s, they found no human remains. Some people thought that meant the Donners never actually crossed the line to cannibalism. But researchers were quick to point out that just because they didn't find human bones at one point Fire pit doesn't mean it never happened. And the survivors themselves described cannibalism at Alder Creek in their own accounts. So the truth is, we just don't know. The dig made the story murkier. It didn't settle it. Out on the snow, the Forlorn Hope was still fighting its way down the western slope. Of the 15 who'd set out in December, only seven came down alive. Two men and five women. Every single one of the women survived. Eight of the 10 men did not. They wouldn't have made it at all without help. In the western foothills, native families found the survivors starving, frostbitten, barely moving, and took them in. The Nisenon and Miwok people shared what little they had acorn meal and pine nuts. One of the two surviving men was William Eddy. On January 17, 1847, he was helped to the door of a cabin at a place called Johnson's Ranch in the Sacramento Valley. The first thing Eddy told the people inside was that his group wasn't the only one. There were still more people up there in the mountains, dozens of them, more than 50 of them children. And they were dying by the day. Once that news reached Sutter's Fort, California finally understood what was happening in the mountains. But that meant somebody had to go back up and save them.
- [34:25]
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- [35:26]
Vanessa Richardson
When the seven survivors of the Forlorn Hope staggered out of the mountains in mid January 1847, they were finally able to tell those in California the news. The rest of the party was still trapped in two snowbound camps. The man who would do the most to get them out was the one they'd banished three months earlier, James Reed. Reed had reached Sutter's Fort weeks before, after making the rest of the trip alone. He'd tried to organize a rescue the moment he arrived, but the snow had already sealed the passes. So he'd spent weeks pacing, waiting for the weather to break, knowing his wife and children were trapped somewhere on the far side of all that snow, possibly already dead. Once William Eddy confirmed they were alive, Reid went to work. He held a public meeting, raised about $1,300. Hired men bought mules and Supplies and put together a relief party that he led himself. But the very first rescue to reach the camps wasn't Reed's. It was a separate group that had set out from Sutter's fort, and it reached the lake on February 18, 1847, after about two weeks on the trail. One of the rescuers later described reaching the lake at sunset. They crossed the ice to the spot where the emigrants were supposed to be. At first, they didn't see any signs of life and figured everyone was dead. Then they shouted, and a woman climbed up out of a hole in the snow. As they got closer, more people emerged the same way, rising up out of the buried camp one by one. One of the women who came up out of the snow looked at the rescuers and asked a question that's haunted this story ever since. She said, are you men from California or are you from heaven? They were the first people from heaven. The outside world these emigrants had seen in four months. But that initial relief party could only take a limited number of people back over the mountains. They took out around two dozen, most of them children. Margaret Reed went with two of her four kids. Patty and Tommy were too weak to make the trip and had to be left behind for the next party. Patty was 8 years old. As her mother left, she said, goodbye, mama. If I don't see you again, just do the best you can. Margaret didn't know if she would ever see them again. James Reed's party arrived a few days later. He found Patty and Tommy still alive at the lake, then pushed on the last six miles to the Donner camp at alder Creek. There he found George Donner dying. Back in November, George had cut his hand on a wagon axle, and the wound, wound never healed. By now, the infection had spread through his body. He had days left. His wife, Tamson, was 45 and healthy enough to walk out. Reed begged her to come. He promised to send another party back for George. He told her that her daughters needed her. Tamson kissed her three youngest children goodbye, handed them to the rescue party, and stayed with her dying husband. Her body was never recovered. Her journals, her botanical specimens, the manuscript of the book she'd been writing about the journey, all of it disappeared with her. Tamson Donner stayed behind. But for those who chose to leave, the ordeal was just beginning, because getting down that mountain alive was its own kind of nightmare. Reid gathered his children, Patty and Tommy among them and as many others as could travel, and started the long climb back over the pass. A blizzard caught them in the open Their food ran down to a spoonful of flour per person. Reid went snow blind. The place they waited it out became known grimly as Starved Camp. They were saved when the next relief party reached them. One of the rescuers, a man named John Stark, carried the weakest survivors out on his own back. Four relief parties came in and out of the mountains over more than two months. The last one to reach the lake in mid April 1847, found only one survivor, a German emigrant, the same man who six months earlier had wanted to hang James Reed for killing John Snyder. His name was Louis Keseberg. And what the rescuers found when they reached him is the part of the Donner party story that almost nobody even now knows how to talk about. This next bit may also be upsetting, so Skip ahead about 45 seconds if you don't want to hear it. The rescuers walked into Keseberg's cabin and found him lying in his bunk. Around him was a pan of human flesh, two kettles of human blood, and the remains of the people who'd shared that cabin with him. According to the rescuers, Keseberg told them everyone else had died of starvation. He said Tamson Donner had walked over from Alder Creek after her husband finally died. Soaked, exhausted, disoriented. He claimed he'd wrapped a blanket around her, put her to bed, and she'd died during the night. He also allegedly told them, and this is the part the rescuers found hardest to forgive, that of everyone in the camp, her flesh had tasted the best. The rescuers searched the cabin. They found two of George Donner's pistols, silk and jewelry that had belonged to the Donners, and hidden in Keseberg's clothing, more than $200 in gold coins that had belonged to the family. The rescuers threatened to hang him, but he swore he hadn't killed anyone, that Tamson had died on her own, and that he'd only kept her money to deliver it to her surviving children. He wouldn't break, and in the end, they brought him out alive. Louis Keseberg lived another 48 years when one of the original rescuers publicly accused him of murder. Keseberg sued for slander and won. The court awarded him a token of $1 until his death. He insisted he never killed Tamson Donner, and most historians today believe him. The starvation, the cold, the months of isolation would have killed her on their own. It's also important to note that historians now believe the original report about how Keseberg was found and what he said was largely Sensationalized. But the rescuer's account still made waves. And what he allegedly did to Tamson's body and the matter of fact, way he described it, made him a monster in the public imagination. But there's a part of Keseberg's story that gets left out because he didn't come out of those mountains unscathed either. But both of the children he'd started the journey with died in the Sierra. His infant son passed away at the lake camp early in the ordeal. His daughter, who was about 3 years old, survived the winter only to die in the snow during the rescue. His wife lived. She'd gone out with an earlier relief party and the two of them were reunited in California. But Keseberg never really left those mountains. He carried the trauma of one what he'd experienced for the rest of his life. And yet, when he died in a hospital for the poor in 1895 decades after the disaster, the world remembered him as a villain and nothing else. Keseberg became the face of the Donner Party, the cannibal, the monster. But he was one man in a catastrophe that swallowed dozens of. So step back from the legend for a second and look at the whole thing. How bad was it really? The numbers are hard to pin down because people joined and left the party along the way. But the most cited figures go like this. Of the roughly 87 who took the Hastings cutoff, only about half came out alive. About 40 died. And those deaths were not random. They fell hardest on children, the elderly and the single men with no family to fight for. In fact, about two thirds of the men in the party died and about 2/3 of the women lived. Almost everyone who died died of starvation, cold or sickness, not violence. The clear exceptions were John Snyder, killed in the fight with Reed, and Lewis and Salvador, the two Miwok men shot on the snowshoe trek. Two families lost. No one, The Reeds and the Breens. The Reeds, because Reed's banishment turned out to be the family's salvation. It put him in California ahead of the snow and made him the man who organized the rescues. The Breens, because Patrick and his wife were disciplined about rationing their food. Patrick's diary is bone dry. Most entries are about the weather. But threaded through it are the names of people dying one after another and his quiet despair as he ran out of hide to feed his own children. All nine Breens lived. The youngest, a baby named Isabella, remembered none of it and lived until 1935. The very last survivor of the Donner Party. On the other side of the ledger, the Donners lost almost everyone. George, Jacob, both their wives and several of their children died in the mountains. The Eddies were nearly wiped out, too. William Eddy only survived because he was on the Forlorn Hope, while his wife and both of his children died at the lake waiting for him to come back. You might be wondering why it's called the Donner Party when we've spent most of this episode on the Reeds. History names disasters after their most dramatic losses. George Donner was the elected captain, and his family was among the hardest hit. A family that loses no one, like the Reeds, doesn't get a disaster named after it. There's also this. James Reed spent the rest of his life shaping the public version of what happened. He gave interviews, he corrected the record, he made sure his role in the rescue was the part that got told the Donners couldn't do any of that. They were gone. So the disaster carries the name of the family that didn't survive to defend it. Which leaves the real who's actually to blame for what happened to the Donner Party. The easy answer is Langsford Hastings, the man who wrote a guidebook for a route he'd never taken with wagons, who lied about the distances and the water. While the trading post helped bury the letters meant to warn people off, Hastings never paid a price. He served as a Confederate major. Then after the war, he sailed to Brazil to found a colony of ex Confederates selling the move with a guidebook almost identical to the one that doomed the Donners. He died of a fever in 1870 while leading a second shipload of settlers south. He never publicly spoke about what his shortcut had done. The harder answer is James Reed. Not because he killed John Snyder, that was by most accounts self defense, but because he was the man in the group with the most influence, the most education and the most access to information. The letters warning not to take the cutoff were addressed to him. The mountain man. James Clyman had warned him to his face. Reed had every reason to know better, and he chose the shortcut anyway. The most difficult answer is that they were all just trying to get to California. They'd sold their homes, they'd spent their savings on wagons and oxen and supplies. They'd brought their elderly parents and their small children. Turning back wasn't really an option. So when somebody offered them a shortcut, they believed him. Because they needed it to be true. So here's my question for you. At the end of all of this, was this disaster avoidable? Or were they doomed the moment they set out as late as they did? Was James Reed a hero? A villain? Or maybe both? And Louis Keseberg? Was he a monster? Or just a man who did what he had to do to survive and got branded for the rest of his life because he lived? There's a harder question buried in all of this too. If you'd been up at that lake camp, snowed in, watching your children starve, what would you have done? Tell me in the comments, wherever you're listening. I would love to hear. Virginia reed, James Reed's 13 year old stepdaughter, was one of the survivors. She came out of the mountain with the first relief party. She'd watched her mother leave her younger siblings behind, not knowing if any of them were come back. She made it. She got to California. She married, raised children of her own and lived to be 87. A few months after she reached California, when she was still just 13, she wrote a letter to a cousin back in Illinois. The cousin was thinking about bringing her own family west. The letter is mostly the story of what they went through, told in the matter of fact way a young girl tells a terrible story. But she ends it with one piece of advice. 13 words that might sum up the entire Donner party better than any historian ever has. Quote Never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can. End quote. Never take no cutoffs. It's the lesson hiding inside almost every disaster like this one. The shortcut is the thing that kills the you. The detour, the deal that sounds too good. The stranger with a map, a promise and a financial stake in seeing you take his road. The Donner party wasn't really killed by the snow. Not by the cold, not by hunger, not even by the bad luck of an early blizzard. They were killed by a decision they made in late July in a trading post in Wyoming when they had every piece of of information they needed to make a different one. There's one last detail about the Donner party. Something small it's easy to miss. Patty Reed was eight years old when her family left Springfield. Before they boarded the wagons, her grandmother gave her a tiny wooden doll. It was 4 inches tall with black painted hair and a red dress. When the family had to abandon their wagons out in the salt desert, the children were told to leave their things behind. But Patty hid that doll in her dress and she carried it across the desert and up to the lake, holding onto it through that whole four month winter. She kept it through the rescue and the blizzard at Starved camp out across the snow and all the way to California. The doll still exists. It's in a museum in Sacramento today. You can go and see. Might be the realest thing the Donner Party left behind. A wooden doll 4 inches tall, carried by a little girl through one of the worst things an American family has ever lived through. Because that's the part that's so easy to lose in a legend. They were people, ordinary families chasing a better life. They were children hiding dolls in their dresses. And almost half of them never made it home. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies and criminal acts. Conspiracy Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, Rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crime's listening experience, subscribe to Crime House plus. You'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crime houseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertovsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Keerthi Harishankar, Kaylee Pine, and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening.
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Vanessa Richardson
Hi, listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, the First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case. The interrogations, the dead end, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.