Ryan Greene

English 1

February 28, 2023

The Donner Party.

The Donner Party was a group of pioneers that left late, resulting in them getting trapped

in the Nevada mountains during winter. They were starving so they decided to eat the last

source of protein, human flesh. There are many things that made the Donner Party fail and the

first one is preparation.

Preparation is one of the things that made the Donner Party fail, most importantly the

time they left. Usually if people wanted to travel to California, they would leave early or the

middle of april. The Donner Party left late may, which meant that they had an extremely tight

schedule. No one knew how long it would take to get through the Hastings Cutoff, which is also a

major reason why they got snowed in, if they left at least late april, they would have been able to

get to California.

If the Donner party had a better budget, maybe they would have been able to just get past

the snow, if they could have had better wheels, or stronger oxen, they would of passed to

California. Not to mention the amount of children in the Donner Party, if one fourth of the

children were to be adults, that most likely would have had the man power to push through

terrain faster and reach California just in time.

Too many non essentials were also a key part in the failure of the Donner Party, all the

non essentials were useless weight on their wagons, most likely making the oxen more tired

which meant they most likely had to take more breaks, making the timing even more difficult.

They did eventually remove the useless items, but it was in the Salt Lake desert.

Snow made progressing impossible later into the expedition. When they got snowed in

Trucker Lake, it took the entire winter for a couple of rescuers to get them. Even before anyone

knew they were trapped, they tried to send a rescue team out with makeshift snow shoes called
the Forlorn Hope in a final desperation to get help but they ran out of food in just 6 days leading

to them committing cannibalism. Before they resulted in cannibalism, they killed every living

animal in their vicinity “Having to remain here until next spring, and live on lean beef, without

bread or salt” (artifact #1).

The Salt Lake Desert was one of the worst places the Donner Party went through, the

weird texture of salt with moisture made it difficult to traverse, it was so hard that when it was

night, oxen tried to escape and a lot of them were successful. 2 wagons were abandoned, and

hundreds of unessentials were thrown out.

The terrain played a big role in the downfall of the Donner Party, the Salt Lake desert,

and the mountains were the hardest part. The mountains were the worst though because in the

Hastings Cutoff, it goes through multiple high mountains that were completely impossible to

traverse.

The Hastings cutoff, no one ever used it before, but that didn't stop the Donner party

from taking the bumpy route, they had to cut down trees to make passages, they even had to

walk back to a different route because there was a canyon, making them far behind schedule. If

they were lucky and there was no canyon, they would have made it to California just at the last

minute.

Hastings wasn't known as a mountain man. If Hastings didn't just scout out the first

section of the route, and searched all of it, then the Donner Party would not have been in such

trouble. But since Hastings was confident the route would work, he actually went ahead of the

Donner Party on a horse just to make sure he was correct, turns out he wasn’t but it wasn’t fully

his fault. If the Donner party actually listened to a real mountain man, James Clyman, then they

would have gone the normal California route and made it. Because unlike Hastings, James

scouted the entire route and made sure it wasn't a fake.

 The Donner Party failed its expedition to California because they had lack of preparation,

the conditions, and the Hastings cutoff, if they were to fix two of these errors they made,

they most likely would have made it to california with the least amount of casualties.

Citations

“Artifact 1: Patrick Breen’s Diary” Bespoke Classroom. 2019.

EVAN ANDREWS. “ 10 Things You Should Know About the Donner Party”, 30 January
2020,
history.com. Accessed 2 March, 2023.

“Artifact 5: Survivors and Casualties” Bespoke Classroom. 2019.

“Artifact 8: Surprising Facts About The Donner Party” Bespoke Classroom. 2019.

“Artifact 10: What The Donner Party Ate During Their Last Days” Bespoke Classroom. 2019.