| Over the Thanksgiving weekend, heavy storms buried multiple U.S. states in snow, paralyzing traffic and making it an especially good time, one imagines, not to be travelling by ox-drawn wagon. Members of the Donner Party, who encountered similar conditions in the winter spanning 1846 and 1847, were not so lucky. As they migrated west to California, the group—mostly Midwestern farmers and their families—received fatefully bad advice, turning left at a fork in the trail. The decision, intended to get the group to its destination faster, instead made the journey longer and more arduous. By the time the season’s first snow fell, relations in the caravan were unravelling: one man had killed another, and a third had mysteriously disappeared. A hundred and sixty years later, The New Yorker’s Dana Goodyear examined what happened next. Trapped by snow at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains, members of the party—which included a widow, five hired men, and a sixteen-year-old boy—ran out of food. As late autumn turned into winter, the Donners and their companions began to die. The fate of their bodies remains contested to this day. Reports of cannibalism emerged from the mountains with the group’s survivors, and over time their hardships, Goodyear writes, have morphed from “gripping news event” to “spooky campfire legend.” Her investigation leads to a nineteenth-century journalist’s account, which features interviews with twenty-four participants in the ordeal. Goodyear also makes lab visits with archeologists who are studying bones collected at or near the Donner Party’s camping site, and speaks with Lochie Paige, a Donner descendant who teaches fourth graders about her ancestors. “For the children,” Goodyear observes, “she dresses up as her great-grandmother, circa 1846, and talks about cannibalism only if she’s asked.” | 
No comments:
Post a Comment