page_title: Donner Party
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Donner Party / Background
caption_attribution_description: "Drawing shows several tents and covered wagons encamped on the banks of the Humboldt River in western Nevada. Both women and men prepare food over open fires, haul water, and prepare bedding. In the foreground, inside a covered wagon, a couple courts. Jenks and his party reached here on Friday, July 22, 1859.", "1 drawing on paper&#160;: graphite, ink, crayon and watercolor&#160;; 18.2 x 25.4 cm. (sheet)."
context_page_description: The Donner Party was a group of American pioneers who migrated to California in a wagon train from the Midwest. Delayed by a series of mishaps, they spent the winter of 1846–1847 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Some of the migrants resorted to cannibalism to survive, eating the bodies of those who had succumbed to starvation and sickness.
  The Donner Party departed Missouri on the Oregon Trail in the spring of 1846, behind many other pioneer families who were attempting to make the same overland trip. The journey west usually took between four and six months, but the Donner Party was slowed after electing to follow a new route called the Hastings Cutoff, which bypassed established trails and instead crossed the Rocky Mountains' Wasatch Range and the Great Salt Lake Desert in present-day Utah. The desolate and rugged terrain, and the difficulties they later encountered while traveling along the Humboldt River in present-day Nevada, resulted in the loss of many cattle and wagons, and divisions soon formed within the group.
context_section_description: During the 1840s, the United States saw a dramatic increase in settlers who left their homes in the east to resettle in the Oregon Territory or California, which at the time were only accessible by a very long sea voyage or a daunting overland journey across the American frontier. Some, such as Patrick Breen, saw California as a place where they would be free to live in a fully Catholic culture; others were attracted to the West's burgeoning economic opportunities or inspired by the idea of manifest destiny, the belief that the land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans belonged to European Americans and that they should settle it. Most wagon trains followed the Oregon Trail route from a starting point in Independence, Missouri, to the Continental Divide of the Americas, traveling about 15 miles (24 km) a day on a journey that usually took between four and six months. The trail generally followed rivers to South Pass, a mountain pass in present-day Wyoming which was relatively easy for wagons to negotiate. From there, pioneers had a choice of routes to their destinations.
  Lansford Hastings, an early migrant from Ohio to the West, went to California in 1842 and saw the promise of the undeveloped country. To encourage settlers, he published The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California. As an alternative to the Oregon Trail's standard route through Idaho's Snake River Plain, he proposed a more direct route (which actually increased the trip's mileage) to California across the Great Basin, which would take travelers through the Wasatch Range and across the Great Salt Lake Desert. Hastings had not traveled any part of his proposed shortcut until early 1846 on a trip from California to Fort Bridger. The fort was a scant supply station run by Jim Bridger and his partner Louis Vasquez in Blacks Fork, Wyoming. Hastings stayed at the fort to persuade travelers to turn south on his route. As of 1846, Hastings was the second of two men documented to have crossed the southern part of the Great Salt Lake Desert, but neither had been accompanied by wagons.
  Arguably the most difficult part of the journey to California was the last 100 miles (160 km) across the Sierra Nevada. This mountain range has 500 distinct peaks over 12,000 feet (3,700 m) high which, because of their height and proximity to the Pacific Ocean, receive more snow than most other ranges in North America. The eastern side of the range is also notoriously steep. After leaving Missouri to cross the vast wilderness to Oregon or California, timing was crucial to ensure that wagon trains would not be bogged down by mud created by spring rains, nor by massive snowdrifts in the mountains from September onward. Traveling during the right time of year was also critical to ensuring that horses and oxen had enough spring grass to eat.
caption: An encampment of tents and covered wagons on the Humboldt River in Nevada, 1859
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