Kelly Dixon, a thirty-five-year-old professor at the University of Montana in Missoula, describes herself as an archeologist of the West. A wooden plaque with six styles of nineteenth-century barbed wire nailed to it hangs on her office wall; her shelves are crammed with books like "Antique Western Bitters Bottles," "The Glass Glossary," and the 1897 Sears, Roebuck catalogue, and treatises on windmills, barns, and human bones. She works exclusively on sites in the historical period-in the United States, that means the past five hundred years-and has spent a lot of time in ghost towns. In Virginia City, Nevada, a gold-and-silver boomtown on the Comstock lode, she dug the buried remains of the Boston Saloon, the first African-American bar in the Old West to be excavated. Contrary to popular notions of Western saloons as raucous places for brawls and shootouts-and of black establishments as dives-the Boston Saloon, she discovered, served the finest cuts of meat, used crystal stemware, and offered live music and games. The fragments she uncovered, she wrote in a book on the subject, helped tell "a more complex and vivid Western story."
In Virginia City, Dixon, who is tall and patient, with a husky voice and hair that is the white-blond color of corn silk, encountered another young archeologist, Julie Schablitsky, whom she had met some years earlier. Schablitsky-excitable, dark-eyed, quick-was conducting her own dig, a few blocks away, and had managed to extract four distinct strands of DNA from the copper needles of a hundred-and-thirty-five-year-old syringe, which she thinks was used, perhaps in a brothel-like setting, for the recreational injection of morphine. Her finding, which, she says, was the first example of DNA being recovered from an inanimate object in an archeological context, inspired Dixon to try to do the same. Dixon retrieved DNA from a clench mark on a pipe stem found in the Boston Saloon; it turned out to belong to a woman. The two archeologists decided to team up on their next dig. Schablitsky had been considering the O.K. Corral. Then someone suggested a site that engaged even more directly with the high drama of Western settlement: the Donner Family Camp, in the Sierra Nevada, near Truckee, California.
A scandal in its day, the saga of the Donner Party-a group of emigrants snowbound in the mountains during the winter of 1846-47-remains notorious for its association with cannibalism. The group was in the first wave of what became a sweeping westward migration, and its disastrous fate is deeply embedded in the national psyche. Over the years, the story has taken many forms. First, it was a gripping news event, and then it was a tabloid sensation; with the gold rush, it became a spooky campfire legend told by forty-niners, whose own perilous journeys West were burnished by the tale. The next generation-comfortably established, historically self-conscious, and already experiencing nostalgia for the old days-made pioneer heroes of the vilified company. The major proponent of this view was an enterprising Truckee journalist and jack-of-all-trades named Charles Fayette McGlashan. In 1879, he set out to write the true history of the Donner Party. He later explained, "I had been seven years in Truckee, as teacher, lawyer and editor, and from the best information I had then been able to acquire, believed the Donner Party consisted of four people: Donner, his wife, a Dutchman, and somebody else, and that the Dutchman ate the others up."
As McGlashan soon discovered, the party actually consisted of eighty-one people, two-thirds of whom camped near what is today called Donner Lake. The rest, including all the members of the Donner family, stayed in a meadow some seven miles away. His careful investigation-he studied all the existing records, and corresponded with twenty-four of the twenty-six survivors then living-yielded a series of articles for the Truckee Republican and, a short time later, a book that for many years stood as the authoritative version. He befriended several of the survivors, and eventually used his influence to help build a massive bronze sculpture on the shores of Donner Lake, dedicated to the emigrants, called Pioneer Monument. (It is inscribed with the words "Virile to risk and find; kindly withal and a ready help. Facing the brunt of fate; indomitable,-unafraid," and when it was completed, in 1918, it weighed eighteen tons.) But McGlashan's emotional Victorian prose, and his essential delicacy, managed in some respects to obscure more than it revealed. Other accounts-both first-hand and after-the-fact-were equally compromised.
It has long been accepted that cannibalism occurred at the lake and among those trying to escape the mountains. Survivors admitted it, and, in the nineteen-eighties, an archeologist from the University of Nevada named Donald Hardesty found human bone fragments at the lake in a deposition with burned and butchered cow bones. But everything about the Donner Family Camp-even its location-has been disputed, and among the eleven survivors, most of them orphaned children, the subject of cannibalism was especially contentious. To this day, descendants of the family say that they don't believe any such thing occurred. Nonetheless, "Donner" is still a byword for cannibalism, and the descendants, like their forebears, want to disentangle their family's experience from that of the larger group that bore their name.
In a phenomenally unreliable historical record, cloudy with misperceptions, contradictions, self-deceit, and macabre exaggeration, Dixon and Schablitsky saw an opportunity. As historical archeologists, Schablitsky says, their job is to "confirm, contribute to, or contradict the written record," and always to keep in mind by whom and for what purpose history is written. (She also says that historical archeologists are the "red-haired stepchildren of archeology," looked down upon by archeologists of the prehistoric period, who don't realize how much their discipline can add to already documented sites.) In most tellings, the Donner Party story begins with the travellers being snowed in and ends with cannibalism. "We want to know more," Dixon says. "We want to know about the experiences not only of the men but of the women and the children out there. We want to say something about human behavior. They were trying to adjust very quickly to a terrible situation. What did they do in that camp when pushed to the limits?" Using a modern hybrid of anthropology and forensic science, and drawing on the expertise of a large research team, the archeologists hope to reframe one of the most enduring and confused myths of the American West, turning it from a horror story about ghoulish appetites or a melodrama of pioneer travail and triumph into a case study of starvation, adaptation, and survival. The goal, Dixon says, is to "affect the way history is told-to affect the way collective memory exists as we know it."
In 1845, the United States Senate published the report of Captain J. C. Frémont, of the topographical bureau, on his expeditions to Oregon and California, and helped launch an era of exploration and Western colonization. Many of those who travelled with the Donner Party were respectable agrarian types, who had given up stable Midwestern existences for the extravagant promise of California: a place where, it was rumored, a man could live two hundred and fifty years and, when he died, be resurrected by the "health-breathing Californian zephyrs." George Donner, the party's captain and namesake, was a farmer from Springfield, Illinois, in late middle age. His wife, Tamsen, a teacher born in Massachusetts, held a regular literary salon; during the winter before they embarked, she used the gatherings to read from a popular book, "The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California," which exhorted flatlanders to "exchange the sterile hills, bleak mountains, chilling winds, and piercing cold of their native lands, for the deep, rich, and productive soil, and uniform, mild and delightful climate, of this unparalleled region." The author, Lansford Hastings, was a young adventurer who hoped to make his name in the emerging territory. California was a place, he claimed, "in all respects, to promote the unbounded happiness and prosperity, of civilized and enlightened man."
George and Tamsen left Illinois with three ox-drawn wagons in April of 1846, bringing with them his two daughters from a previous marriage-Elitha, who was thirteen, and Leanna, who was eleven-and their three young girls, Frances, Georgia, and Eliza, who were five, four, and three. Tamsen planned to start a ladies' seminary, and took books and school supplies. An amateur botanist, she packed watercolors and oil paints, along with silver spoons and what one of her daughters remembered as "pretty white lace day caps trimmed with dainty ribbon bows." She dressed her little girls in linsey dresses and petticoats; Frances got a blue-and-white patterned cloak with a matching wool hood, and her younger sisters had the same in red. They brought expensive silks, satins, and velvet to trade with the Mexicans, and cheaper cotton prints and beads for the Indians they might meet along the way; as Eliza later wrote, they also carried religious pamphlets "to distribute among the heathen in the benighted land to which we were going." They had extra oxen, some beef cattle, milk cows, horses, and a dog, Uno. George's brother Jacob also had three wagons, for his wife, Elizabeth, and their seven children. The Donners formed a caravan with their neighbor James Reed, a wealthy furniture manufacturer, and his family, who rode in an elaborate double-decker wagon, and took with them good brandy and a small library. The emigrants, though laden with all the accoutrements of civilization, were anxious about what would become of them in the coarse, unknown land beyond the States. Virginia Reed, who was twelve at the time, wrote in a memoir many years later, "Some of Mama's young friends gave her a mirror in order, as they said, that my mother might not forget to keep her good looks."
As the group made its way across the plains, it picked up more wagons. Lewis Keseberg (McGlashan's infamous "Dutchman"), a German-born Ohio man, travelling with his wife and two toddlers, joined, as did the Breens, a large Catholic family. In mid-July, the party encountered a lone horseman who carried a letter from Lansford Hastings outlining a new, shorter route to California. When the road forked, the company took the left branch, onto the Hastings cutoff. It was bad advice, and forced the men of the Donner Party to forge a road through the Wasatch Mountains, wasting a month and sapping their reserves of food and energy. Then the wagons had to cross the Great Salt Desert: eighty miles, not forty, as Hastings claimed. In the desert, the children sucked on flattened bullets to make themselves salivate; oxen, smelling distant water, stampeded and dispersed.
By the time the caravan reached the other side of the desert, it had become an attenuated thread across the landscape, and the group, which at the outset established common laws and rules, had begun to fall apart. In early October, James Reed killed another family's teamster in a scuffle, and was banished; then Hardkoop, an older Belgian man, was put out of Keseberg's wagon and left for dead; a week later, a Mr. Wolfinger, travelling with his wife and a quantity of gold, disappeared, probably murdered by two teamsters who had hung back to help him cache his wagon. As George Stewart, the author of an influential 1936 account, saw it, "The cruel individualism of the westerner had gained the upper hand."
Toward the end of the month, the advance wagons reached the Sierra Nevada and attempted a crossing, but a heavy snowfall forced them back to the lake. They took shelter in an existing cabin, and built two more cabins and a lean-to. The Donners, already at least a day behind, were delayed further when George had to fix a broken wagon axle, and cut his hand. They stopped in a meadow, and were just starting to build a cabin when the storm hit. Leanna wrote to McGlashan, "The snow came on so sudden that we had barely time to pitch our tent, and put up a small brush shed, as it were. One side open, thus"-she drew a sketch-"this brush shed was covered with pine boughs, and then covered with rubber coats, quilts etc. My Uncle Jacob & family also had a tent, he camped near us." Later, she told her youngest sister, Eliza, "We did not have any hut, our winter quarters were made of a scaffold, covered with boughs and what few blankets and quilts we could spare and we had a small tent to sleep in. Our scaffold was built right at the root of the tree and we cooked under the scaffold."
The Donners, either because they couldn't rejoin their companions at the lake or because they preferred not to, stayed in the meadow for the next four months. With them were the widow Wolfinger and five hired men: Noah James, Joseph Reinhardt, James Smith, Samuel Shoemaker, and a sixteen-year-old boy of Mexican and French origin named Jean Baptiste Trudeau-a total of twenty-two people. The snow was debilitating, and, as Trudeau said later, the difficulty of gathering wood meant that they "were often without fires for days." Tamsen is said to have kept a detailed journal, but no such document has ever been found. On November 30th, Patrick Breen, at the lake camp, wrote in his diary, "No living thing without wings can get about." The emigrants began to die, in what Donald Grayson, an archeologist at the University of Washington, has described as a "case study of mediated natural selection in action": the single men, who had done the heavy lifting in the Wasatch, went first, and then the very old and the very young. George Donner, Grayson believes, was spared in these first rounds because his injured hand made him an invalid. Occasionally, men from the lake camp trekked the seven miles to the meadow and brought back reports of the Donner clan. By the end of December, Breen noted, Jacob Donner, Shoemaker, Reinhardt, and Smith were dead, and "the rest of them in a low situation."
In the summer of 2003, Dixon and Schablitsky started an excavation in Alder Creek meadow, a picnic area in the Tahoe National Forest long identified as the Donner Family Camp, where the descendants of George and Jacob Donner, dozens of whom still live in California, hold big, jolly reunions. Lochie Paige, Elitha Donner's sixty-one-year-old great-granddaughter and the family spokesperson, told me that she supports the archeological work. "The stigma that goes with the cannibalism is something that is still around," she said. "I think that they will give us answers."
The archeologists found some seven hundred and fifty artifacts in Alder Creek meadow, and, over a long weekend late last spring, Schablitsky visited Dixon's lab in Missoula to study them. She sat at a wooden table, with the collection spread before her, each piece in a small bag: shards of bottle glass (aqua, olive, colorless), ceramics (shell-and-feather-edge ware, decorative sprig-painted china), fragments of mirror, lantern glass, buttons, wagon gear, lead shot, writing slate. Schablitsky was trying to visualize the layout of the camp. "We have pieces of slate and teacups-did Tamsen Donner sit here, huddled around the fire hearth with her children, practicing spelling and math?" she said. "Is this where they had their tea?"
Nearby, Dixon worked at a computer, organizing an extensive electronic database of the artifacts. She swivelled away from the screen and picked up a bag with an intact metal button in it. "We have to let these little, excruciating crumbles help us re-create the last scene," she said. "And perhaps use that as a stepping stone to re-create the ambience and the atmosphere of that camp. That's why the rest of the world-they laugh when they see the fragmentary nature of the Donner collection. This button, by the way, is huge." She showed me some of the slate fragments, which were still covered with orange dirt from the field. (Because of their interest in retrieving DNA, the archeologists didn't wash the artifacts.) "We wish we could read what someone was writing at the Donner Family Camp," she said. "We always said, 'If only we could find Tamsen's journal.' Then we realized-there's slate there! Oh, my gosh, people wrote on it! Tamsen was a teacher. Was she actually attempting to normalize and have her children do lessons? We don't know." Dixon explained that in the mid-nineteenth century people used slate pencils, rather than chalk, and the impressions should exist in the layers of the slate tablets. To her knowledge, no one has ever tried to examine slate in this way, but she assigned a graduate student to look into it, and borrowed some time at the scanning electron microscope in the university's biology lab. "We want to know if there is some way to read remnants of writing," she said.
"That's the thing," Schablitsky said. "Is there a message from the past scrawled on the slate?"
In the meadow, the archeologists also found sixteen thousand pieces of badly burned and "calcined"-nearly incinerated-bone. The soil at Alder Creek is acidic, and the burning may have acted as a preservative; very little unburned bone was found. There was one piece of special interest, which the research team nicknamed "the Bone": an inch-long segment with signs of butchering that were visible to the naked eye. Dixon turned on an overhead fluorescent light and picked up a black box with a window in the top. The fragment rested inside on a bed of cotton gauze; it was gray and veined with black, like a chunk of granite, with three thin scratches across the top. "You can see how blatant the chop marks are," she said, placing it under a microscope. Magnified, it looked lunar, with shaded canyons, cracks, and spindly little lines. "That bluish sheen and the really white chalky color that you see is what happens to bone when it's subjected to really high temperatures for very long periods of time," she said. "It appears to have been thrown into the fire hearth."
The signature for cannibalism in its simplest form was described by the physical anthropologist Christy Turner as "the three B's": breakage, burning, and butchery. The bones that Dixon and Schablitsky found were badly damaged; still, they hoped that some genetic material might have survived, and sent a large sample (along with a whetstone and some of the spent lead shot) to a company called Trace Genetics, near San Francisco, which specializes in ancient DNA. They wanted to determine the species of the bones and, if any were found to be human, attempt to connect them to Donner descendants. Dixon jokes that theirs is the "archeology of desperation"-the Donners were desperate, and so are they.
In summer, the meadow at Alder Creek is speckled with fat dandelions, clumps of sagebrush, delicate white wild onions, hardy yarrow, and Queen Anne's lace, and edged with fifty-foot-tall Ponderosa pines. There are little heaps of freshly overturned dirt-the work of burrowing rodents-and a couple of snowmelt creeks. A mile in the distance, Prosser Reservoir floats flat and blue; beyond it looms the imposing granite palisade of the Sierra Nevada, which one nineteenth-century traveller described as a "formidable and apparently impassable barrier." At the far end of the meadow is a tall hollow stump with a black burn scar; its upper half lies supine a few yards off, with the crown protruding like the tangled rack of an old elk. This is what remains of the "George Donner tree," anecdotally identified as the place where George and his family built their camp. The burn, it was said, was from the cooking fire.
In the middle of July, Dixon went up to Alder Creek to collect soil samples. It was a hot day, and she was wearing cargo pants and a tank top. She took from her car a T-shaped soil probe and a Munsell chart, which showed a palette of soil colors, and set off to find the baseline markers she had installed the year before. Alder Creek is a problematic archeological site: the rodents churn the earth; the acidic soil eats away at what is buried there; it's cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and the creek system creates seasonal flooding. It has been looted from the time of its abandonment. In the year since Dixon had last been there, the meadow grasses had grown high. "Feel how uneven the ground is," she said. "There's a lot of activity here." She indicated a slight change in elevation that marked the beginning of the one-by-one-metre units that she and Schablitsky excavated, alongside a number of units dug by Donald Hardesty a decade earlier. Hardesty, too, had unearthed hundreds of Donner-era artifacts in the meadow, and wrote a fascinating book called "The Archeology of the Donner Party," but he didn't find a hearth, which meant that he could reach no conclusions about the structure of the site, or even prove that the Donners had stayed there. (A competing theory, advocated by a trail historian named Don Wiggins, held that the site was actually under Prosser Reservoir.) Dixon and Schablitsky's team did identify a hearth, in 2004. In Dixon's formal description, it was "a roughly circular, grayish-black stain with a series of layers, including a deposit of burned and calcined bone, which sat atop a concentration of charred wood, which lay on top of fine, powdery ash." Now submerged under a thick pelt of grass and wildflowers, the hearth is the epicenter of the site, the place from which most of the artifacts were pulled.
Dixon pointed out the legendary George Donner tree. Hardesty's excavation had demonstrated that the lore was apocryphal: no relevant artifacts were found by the tree, and the burn, he determined, was probably the result of a natural fire. "I like the story that it tells," Dixon said. "In a relatively short amount of time, the actual encampment location was lost, and it was re-created, and then that became reality, and the power of collective memory lingered until Donald Hardesty did his work over there and said, 'Actually, I don't think that is the George Donner tree.' " She walked a few metres to the southwest and gathered soil from a unit that, the summer before, had optimistically been named Unit George, after a team of human-remains detection dogs repeatedly "alerted" there. (The dogs, which are mostly border collies and are trained in graveyards, belong to an organization called the Institute for Canine Forensics, which sent a crew to the World Trade Center in the aftermath of 9/11 and to Texas to search for the bodies of the Columbia space-shuttle astronauts.) Excavating the pit, the archeologists had found neither George's bones nor anything else, but Dixon wanted to look at the soil composition in the lab.
The next day was hot, too, and Dixon and I drove up Donner Pass to walk a portion of the Old Emigrant Trail. The pass is at seven thousand feet, and snowfall there can be heavy: many of the modern houses we saw along the road had, in addition to steep chalet-style roofs, snow tunnels and entrances on the second and third stories. We parked near a late-nineteenth-century Chinese railroad campsite, and switchbacked up a rocky trail. The path crossed under a set of ski lifts and entered a forest of ancient red firs covered with fluorescent-green moss. In the clearings, there were patches of snow and thick green corn lilies. At the summit, the snow was packed and icy, like a Sno-Cone, and covered with pine needles. We walked over to a precipitous drop-off. Below us was Donner Lake, teal-blue and foamy with the wakes of motorboats, and, to the west, a huge, vertical volcanic rock outcropping. "We look around at this and are just floored with appreciation and splendor," Dixon said. "You've got to wonder how it would look wearing a different pair of goggles."
In December of 1846, the snow on the pass was twelve feet deep when a group of fifteen snowshoers from the lake started across in a desperate attempt to get help. It took the "Forlorn Hope," as the journalist McGlashan later named them, a month, and eight died along the way. The survivors ate the dead, then consumed their own moccasins, and finally killed their two Indian guides for food. When the snowshoers got through, and word reached Sutter's Fort, a garrison that still stands in modern Sacramento, on the western side of the mountains, the newspapers eagerly took up the story of the stranded emigrants. Some of the early accounts were sympathetic, and sought to raise money for rescue expeditions ("We hope that our citizens will do something for the relief of these unfortunate people"). Other journalists, perhaps mindful of the pall that the disaster might cast over future emigration, portrayed it as something that could have been avoided. In mid-February, with most of the party still trapped at the two camps, the California Star ran a story that declared, "The whole party might have reached the California valley before the first fall of snow, if the men had exerted themselves as they should have done." In a shadow of what was to come, the newspaper also reported that the snowshoers had "made meat of the dead bodies of their companions."
A rescue party-the "first relief"-soon set out from Sutter's Fort. It was slow going; the men estimated the snow on the pass at thirty feet. Meanwhile, some twelve hundred feet below in the meadow, the Donners' tents were buried, visible to each other only by coils of smoke rising up from the drifts. Jean Baptiste Trudeau, the teen-age servant, fished for the lost cattle. "I used a pole with a hook, or nail fastened to the end, then I pushed into the snow," he recalled later. "Hair would catch on the hook, and I would then be sure I had found the right place." The three younger Donner girls, who were the most outspoken about their experience (and, given that none were older than six, the least authoritative), remembered eating boiled hides and burned bones. "We tried to eat a decayed buffalo robe, but it was too tough, and there was no nourishment in it," Georgia said. "Some of the few mice that came into camp were caught and eaten." Eliza wrote that as supplies dwindled "marrowless bones which had already been boiled and scraped, were now burned and eaten, even the bark and twigs of pine were chewed in the vain effort to soothe the gnawings which made one cry for bread and meat." There were a few comforting scenes. Georgia told a story about Tamsen combing her hair every morning, while entertaining her with Biblical tales: "Joseph and his cruel brethren, Daniel in the lion's den, Elijah and the ravens . . . the cruet of oil and the meal which never grew less."
The first relief reached the Donners in late February. One rescuer wrote that "the two families had but one beef head amongst them, there was two cows buried in the snow but it was doubtful if they would be able to find them." After the relief stopped at the lake on its way out, Patrick Breen described an even grimmer situation in his diary. Four days earlier, he wrote, "the Donners told the California folks that they commence to eat the dead people . . . if they did not succeed that day or next in finding their cattle then under ten or twelve feet of snow and did not know the spot near it. I suppose they have done so ere this time." The rescuers had brought a small ration of biscuits, beef, and flour-the rest they cached in the mountains for the return trip-and could take back with them only those who were capable of fending for themselves. George Donner's two older daughters, Elitha and Leanna, were tall and strong enough to walk through the snowbanks on the pass, and the relief took them safely to Sutter's Fort. The rescuers made Trudeau, who could have walked out, too, stay behind to provide for the helpless.
Ten days afterward, the second relief arrived. It was later reported (and widely repeated) that the rescuers saw some of the Donner children "sitting upon a log, with their faces stained with blood, devouring the half-roasted liver and heart of the father"-Jacob, presumably, since George was still alive-and Trudeau carrying a severed leg. Some of the family were in surprisingly good condition. The leader of this relief noted in his diary, "At George Donner tent there was 3 stout hearty children." He mentioned that Tamsen, too, was healthy enough to travel but insisted on staying behind with George. Little Frances, Georgia, and Eliza, dressed in their red and blue cloaks with matching hoods, were taken to the lake camp, and, after a short stay in Keseberg's cabin, evacuated with the third relief. Sometime in mid-March, George died, and Tamsen, the last one alive in the meadow, left for the lake.
When members of the final relief arrived, they found only a seriously dishevelled Keseberg and a heap of mutilated remains, and accused him of murdering Tamsen. Captain Fallon, who led the rescue party-more of a scavenge party, really-allegedly kept a journal (the original, if there was one, is lost), and its "thrilling" details were published in the California Star in June. The story made a scapegoat of Keseberg, who admitted that circumstance had forced him to cannibalize but vehemently denied the charge of murder. (He later won a one-dollar settlement against his detractors.) About the Donners' camp, Fallon wrote, "At the mouth of the tent stood a large iron kettle, filled with human flesh, cut up. It was from the body of George Donner. The head had been split open, and the brains extracted therefrom." Other sources say that George was found wrapped in a sheet and carefully laid out: Tamsen's last act of tenderness.
The story of the doomed wagon train entered popular culture mercilessly fast. Kristin Johnson, a librarian in Salt Lake City, who is a self-taught historian and the research team's expert on the Donner Party, cites as an early example a letter written by the sheriff at Sutter's Fort to a friend camping in the Sierra Nevada in March of 1847: "I advise you to look out for those Man eating Women, from what I can learn from Glover"-a member of the first relief-"they prefer that kind of meat in larger than Nine inch pieces too." The emigrants' fate became a folk morality tale: a warning against greed, laziness, and choosing the wrong fork in the road. It also became, primarily, a story for children, and for decades it has been taught to fourth graders in the California public schools. It was a child's letter-written by Virginia Reed to her cousins back home, from the safety of the Napa Valley in the spring of 1847-that captured the party's chilling lesson: "Never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can."
More than anything, stories about the Donner Party dwelled on how thoroughly the emigrants had been transformed by their ordeal. The California Star ran a report saying, "So changed had the emigrants become that when the party sent out, arrived with food, some of them cast it aside and seemed to prefer the putrid human flesh that still remained." Another journalist, attempting, he said, to combat such sensational accounts, wrote, "The change which their unspeakable sufferings had produced seemed to affect the very texture of their nature and being." Talk of transformation worked as a distancing technique, and even Eliza Donner told of how her cousins, formerly "chubby and playful," became in camp "so changed in looks that I scarcely knew them, and they stared at me as at a stranger." Cannibalism, actual or imagined, is a frontier phenomenon-"the mark of greatest imaginable cultural difference," the literary scholar Peter Hulme has written. The Donner Party had set out to civilize what they saw as a barbaric land. The reputed cannibalism refigured their colonial story with a cruel twist: the civilizers themselves became savages.
Guy Tasa's lab at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, is a low, freestanding house in a neighborhood of student apartments not far from the center of campus. The peeling wooden sign out front is deliberately vague and misleading; Tasa, an expert in skeletal remains, occasionally works with the medical examiner's office identifying bones from crime scenes, and doesn't want to invite attention. He is in his early forties, and fair, with a short beard and milky blue eyes. When I visited, he had in his office a recent copy of the tabloid Star, in which he had been quoted analyzing the facial structure of a Brad Pitt look-alike.
Tasa, who had been enlisted by Dixon and Schablitsky to examine the Donner bones, said that the specimens were so fragmented-the sixteen thousand pieces weighed less than five pounds-that it had been almost impossible to determine how many animals were represented. Most pieces were a quarter or an eighth of an inch long, and none were bigger than half an inch. "The vast, vast majority of the material is unidentifiable chunks," he said. "After that, it's shaft fragments, and fragments from the middle of the bone that are pretty difficult to I.D., because there are no features." He could pin down only fifteen bones to a taxonomic category: Artiodactyla, or even-toed ungulates (cow, deer, elk). He could name the species of one fragment: cow.
Of the bones that Tasa could classify, he placed by far the greatest number-some two thousand pieces, including "the Bone"-in Class V, a size group that includes humans, deer, and bears. "Most you can exclude as human," he said. "But there were a couple of times when I was making my notes that I wrote 'human?' You can't make that identification visually, but they don't look like deer." He went on, "The bones are burned, and they are fractured, and there are some cut marks. If we could just find the burned, cut-marked piece of bone that was identifiable as human. Otherwise, you've got nothing that definitively says that cannibalism occurred there, beyond the historical record." In addition, Tasa put three pieces in Class VI (cow- or elk-size), fifteen pieces in Class IV (dog- or coyote-size), three in Class III (rabbit- or fox-size), and one, which appeared to be the rib of a large rodent, in Class II. Dixon seemed excited about the Class IV bones. "A lot of people have been asking us whether the Donners would have eaten their dog," she said. "Of course, there's no way we can actually prove this was their dog"-Uno lasted at the camp, according to one of the Donner girls, long enough to eat her shoes-"but now we've got something interesting in terms of alternatives to cannibalism."
Tasa sent the assemblage to Shan-non Novak, a forensic anthropologist at Idaho State University, who has analyzed human skeletal remains from cannibal sites in the Great Basin. Novak sampled more than three hundred pieces, and saw what she described as "screaming trauma": cuts, chops, saw marks, and "percussion pits"-V-shaped divots where the tip of a knife had been inserted, probably to break the bone down for grease extraction. Some of the bones showed pot polish: shiny patches that are thought to form when bones in boiling water are abraded by the surface of the cooking vessel. (The feature was identified by Tim White, a physical anthropologist, when he examined bones from an Anasazi cannibal site in Colorado in the mid-eighties.) "I have never seen processing like this," Novak said about the Donner collection. "Honestly. I have analyzed cannibalized sites and forensic cases, where you get postmortem dismemberment, and if this is not a starvation site I don't know what is. They are processing this bone down to nubbins."
Novak looked at the level at which each artifact had been unearthed, and found that, despite the rodent disturbance at the site, there were almost twice as many scars on pieces from the shallowest level as from the deepest: a clear pattern of increasing desperation. She also noticed that there were no rodent gnaw marks or carnivore puncture wounds, which told her that by the time the wild animals got to the site everything nutritious was gone. The trauma dispelled any doubt that the bones belonged to the Donner Family Camp. "The time is right, the artifacts are right, the processing is spectacular, and the pot polish-I mean, you really do not see people go to those extremes unless they're hungry," she said.
When Novak looked at the Bone under a scanning electron microscope, she determined that the chop marks had been made with a thin blade, like a bowie knife; the shape of the impressions told her that they had been made on fresh, "green" bone. In places, the surface was discolored gray and brown, a condition that occurs when heat gets underneath tissue and smokes the bone. That observation, along with the presence of pot polish and the fact that the chop marks themselves were calcined, meant that this piece had been cooked twice: first with flesh on it, and then again when it was bare.
Several months after he was rescued, Jean Baptiste Trudeau told a naval lieutenant whom he met in San Francisco about his misadventure with the Donner Party: "Eat baby raw, stewed some of Jake, and roasted his head, not good meat, taste like sheep with the rot; but, sir, very hungry, eat anything." (The baby would have been Jacob and Elizabeth's three-year-old son, who died in early March.) A passerby in September, 1847, reported seeing "a skull covered with hair lying here, a mangled arm or leg yonder, with the bones broken as one would break a beef shank to obtain the marrow from it." In 1879, Georgia-four going on five during the ordeal-wrote to McGlashan, "When I spoke of human flesh being used at both tents, I said it was prepared for the little ones in both tents. I did not mean to include the larger (my half sisters) children or the grown people, because I am not positive that they tasted of it. Father was crying and did not look at us during this time, and we little ones felt that we could not help it. There was nothing else. Jacob Donner's wife came down the steps one day saying to mother 'What do you think I cooked this morning?' Then answered the question herself, 'Shoemaker's arm.' " For the most part, however, the survivors from the Donner Family Camp kept mum.
More than her sisters, Eliza, who had just turned four when she was rescued, was haunted by the rumors that she had grown up hearing: Keseberg had murdered her mother for food, and the Donners themselves were man-eaters. When McGlashan wrote to her about participating in his history, she wrote back, "I feel a deep interest in having the truth told," and warned him not to conflate the story of the Donner Party in general with that of her family. In the spring of 1879, McGlashan wrote to Eliza, "You will be glad to know that I put Harry N. Morse's Detective Agency of Oakland upon the track of Keseberg, and that if found, I mean to take steps to obtain his confession." When he met Keseberg, though, he found him sympathetic, polylingual, scholarly in bearing, and "the most forlorn, pitiable, accursed being I ever saw." Keseberg swore that Tamsen had died a natural death-though he hinted that he had eaten her afterward-and McGlashan believed him. Eliza went to question Keseberg for herself and reported, "Unflinchingly Lewis Keseberg passed the ordeal which would have made a guilty man quake."
McGlashan and Eliza corresponded often, and their growing intimacy was compromising in the end. He was too mindful of embarrassing her-he even invited her to edit his manuscript-and so, despite what Georgia had told him about "the little ones" and "Shoemaker's arm," his book came out later that year with no mention of cannibalism among the Donner family. Instead, McGlashan focussed his discussion of the Donners on the steadfast loyalty of Tamsen, who sacrificed her life rather than leave her husband to die alone.
Eventually, Eliza started researching a book of her own. According to the historian Kristin Johnson, Eliza's decision to tell her family's story was prompted by an encounter with her past that was even more radical than the one with Keseberg. In 1884, she was visited by Jean Baptiste Trudeau, who, contrary to his earlier statement, told her, "At no time did the people in the Donner Camps eat human flesh." He said that the hair and bones seen scattered around the campsite belonged to cattle. When Eliza's book came out, in 1911, it contained a strong denial that any cannibalism occurred in the meadow-she said her parents wouldn't allow it-and dismissed the California Star article that described the emigrants' preference for human flesh as "too utterly false, too cruelly misleading, to merit credence." She wrote, "Evidently, it was written without malice, but in ignorance, and by some warmly clad, well nourished person, who did not know the humanizing effect of suffering and sorrow." The so-called journal of the fourth relief, she said, was "wanton falsity." She must not have known about her sister Georgia's testimony, because she dedicated the book to her.
After several attempts, Trace Genetics gave up trying to extract DNA from the fragments it had been sent, concluding that the conditions at Alder Creek had degraded the signature beyond recognition. The Bone became the last best hope for finding archeological evidence of cannibalism. It had, in the meantime, broken of its own accord, and Dixon and Schablitsky decided to turn over a portion of it to Gwen Robbins, a graduate student in Tasa's department, to examine its microscopic architecture. For several months, Tasa had been supplying Robbins with mostly Class V bones from the Donner assemblage, and she had found cow, deer, and horse. The Class IV he gave her she identified as dog. But she hadn't found any human bone.
One morning in early December, Robbins, a tiny, serious thirty-three-year-old with an ankle tattoo, and Melissa Hanks, a twenty-four-year-old research assistant, met in Robbins's lab. The previous night, Robbins had stabilized the smaller piece of the Bone with superglue so that it wouldn't disintegrate. Then she ground down one face, using successively finer grades of sandpaper, until it was roughly a hundred micrometres thick, and mounted it on a slide. Wearing rubber gloves, Hanks placed the slide, bone side up, in a specimen dish, and kept it wet with distilled water as she sanded in a gentle, circular motion. Grayish bone water sloshed around in the tray, and after fifteen minutes a third of the specimen was gone. The room was quiet, except for the grainy windshield-wiper sound of bone being rubbed away.
When the slide was ready, Robbins looked at it under the microscope. The incandescent light of the bulb gave the specimen a warm, caramel color, but there were dark storm clouds where mineralization had occurred. She could already see that the bone was composed of structures potentially characteristic of human: the cells were organized in concentric patterns around a vascular canal-an arrangement known as an osteon-and the osteons had thick "cement lines" around them, which told her that they were part of secondary growth, a process that for humans starts in infancy. She didn't see any plexiform bone, which forms brick-like units for strength in young, fast-growing animals, and is very rare in people. "There's no one diagnostic factor-it's a combination of things," she said. She peered at the osteons, and said quietly, as if to herself, "It seems like maybe these are not going to be big enough to be human . . . I just don't think."
Robbins captured an image of the slide on a computer, and used the cursor to drag a thin yellow rule across each osteon and its central canal. "There are some larger osteons in here," she said, but after a moment she decided that the image was too blurry to yield accurate measurements, and asked Hanks to make the slide slightly thinner at the center. Hanks used a Q-tip with a bit of sandpaper affixed to it, and carefully took off more layers, until the specimen was almost completely translucent, and in danger of disappearing altogether. "I hope this works," Robbins said. "These bones are so bad." Hanks handed her the slide, and she began measuring again, entering each figure in a spreadsheet. She recorded the diameters of twenty-one canals, then moved on to the osteons with cement lines.
"They're falling out below the human range," she said, even considering the shrinkage expected when bone is exposed to high temperatures. She also noticed a large number of osteons without cement lines-primary osteons-which are uncommon in humans. She finished looking at the slide, and, with a slight, nervous laugh, said, "This is not human." She smiled. "Sadly." The Bone, she said, belonged to a horse.
Out of the silence surrounding the Donner Family Camp, the archeologists have been able to tell a story that focusses on small acts of adaptation and survival, and which, they hope, will add nuance to the Donners' image. Perhaps it will even help make obsolete the lurid shorthand of their name. The discovery of the hearth and the condition of the artifacts makes it clear that they've found the camp: now they can begin to say something about site structure and day-to-day life. During the excavation, Schablitsky noticed that the units toward the west had an invisible line running through them from north to south-to the right of the line, artifacts were scattered randomly, but to the left there were no artifacts at all. This, she believes, is the ghost outline of the back wall of an open, east-facing shelter, perhaps the cooking scaffold that Leanna sketched for McGlashan. Under the scaffold, there were a number of nails and a charred fleck of non-native oak; Schablitsky thinks that the Donners might have torched their wagons when they had trouble getting wood. The lead shot found around the hearth, according to a munitions expert, is "puddled," or poorly formed, suggesting that someone was trying to make bullets, probably in an attempt to hunt. (The various bullets show that there were at least eight different firearms present.) Another artifact from this area, a bit of pale-blue glass, may have come from the bottom of a pharmaceutical bottle, and made Dixon think of George's wounded hand. "It's a tangible material reminder of a story-his four months of misery were also doubled with him slowly dying from an infection," she said. "You've not only got people starving to death out there, but now we've got an added dimension of somebody being very ill." So far, the slate has not surrendered its secrets, if it has any. To Dixon, the most tantalizing artifact remains the button she showed me in Missoula. From its markings, the archeologists determined that it belonged to a heavy overcoat. If that coat was used, as Leanna described, to weatherproof a tent, it would be evidence of adaptation: a garment being appropriated for a secondary, architectural use.
Of course, the archeologists know what aspect of the Donner Party has always fascinated the public most: diet. After studying the bones, they can say that if humans were used for food at Alder Creek their bones were not cooked-and thus preserved-because they are not represented in the archeological record as it now exists. According to Schablitsky, "We dug some serious units there, we moved some dirt, we have tons of bone samples, and if it's not coming out all I can think is that, like the Uruguayan rugby team"-who crashed in the Andes in 1972 and survived for ten weeks by eating the dead-"they may have been turning them over face down and skimming off parts of the back, the flank, backs of the thighs, and buttocks. So we're not going to see any bone because bone wasn't being consumed."
The excavation has revealed that the Donners were eating from a much more diverse menu than was previously thought, and appear to have done everything possible to avoid eating the dead. "The plot was a lot thicker than we were led to believe," Dixon said when she learned about Robbins's identification of the Bone. "It's not all about cannibalism. This is different. Those decisions about when to eat rodent, horse, cow, dog, are a lot more complex. That's important, and it paints a more complex picture. It's painting a human picture. In the end, you don't know exactly what happened, but you now have a lot of different perspectives." Novak finds the dog specimen particularly meaningful. According to Patrick Breen's diary, the group at the lake held off killing their dogs as long as possible-they ate the hide roofs off their cabins first-but as soon as the dogs were gone they began to speak of eating the human dead. Novak reasons that there may have been a similar pattern at Alder Creek.
In a sense, the Donners' reluctance to eat human flesh is their real tragedy. Had they more readily overcome their prejudice against the one remaining source of food, surely more of them would have survived. But in the bone assemblage Schablitsky sees evidence of their ingenuity. "The biggest paradigm shift on the Donner Party is that the experience that occurred at Alder Creek, and the Donner Party story itself, wasn't as bad as everyone thought it was. It was brutal, it was hard, people died. But I think that they were a lot more successful at hunting and acquiring food than was previously thought. They had a lot of options before they cannibalized." The archeologists came to the conclusion that, if cannibalism did occur, it was most likely in the few weeks between the departure of the first relief, with Elitha and Leanna, in late February, and Tamsen's abandonment of the site, in mid-March.
Elitha, the eldest of the Donner survivors, died in 1923, at the age of ninety. She spent her last fifty years on a ranch outside Sacramento. She never discussed what happened at her family's camp, but, according to a local rumor, every year when the school did its unit on the Donner Party, she would sit in, listening silently from the back row. Lochie Paige, her great-granddaughter, grew up on the ranch, and now lives five blocks from Sutter's Fort-these days, a place where children go to see cannon demonstrations and to watch women in bonnets and calico skirts make biscuits-in a wooden house built in 1910, painted gray with blue trim. Lochie is a registered nurse, with deep-set brown eyes that she fancies she inherited from Elitha. She often lectures to historical societies-the Native Daughters of the Golden West, the Ladies Auxiliary to the California Pioneers-and to fourth graders. For the children, she dresses up as her great-grandmother, circa 1846, and talks about cannibalism only if she's asked.
On a wall of Lochie's living room is a Currier and Ives image, called "A Halt by the Wayside," that shows an emigrant party camping. Lochie's husband, Michael, who is of Oregon pioneer stock, gave it to her to symbolize the happy days of the Donners' journey. Above that is a needlepoint of Pioneer Monument, and nearby is a framed paperback edition of McGlashan's history from 1931. To Lochie, Alder Creek is a sacred place, and when she talks about it her voice quavers and her eyes well up. She and Michael visit there frequently, but only in the summer, because she hates the snow.
Earlier this year, Dixon and Schablitsky announced their findings at an academic conference in Sacramento. In a presentation called "Humanizing the Past Through Archeology," they discussed the challenge posed by the Donner collection: "We have tiny, tiny fragments-how do we spin a story from them?" They reminded their colleagues that their work is in its preliminary stages-not yet peerreviewed-and that though they haven't so far found evidence of cannibalism, they are not saying that cannibalism didn't take place.
Lochie, who spoke at the conference about growing up a Donner in California, has seized upon the tiny fragments to tell a story of her own, a kind of counternarrative that uses the new science to legitimatize the family version. In other words, she heard what she had always wanted to believe: her great-grandmother had escaped the mountains before eating the dead. "This is such good news for us," she said after the conference. "I know it's not a hundred per cent, but it's pretty close." To celebrate, she invited the archeologists over to her house for champagne. Michael polished the silver and made cioppino. He passed around homemade jerky. Lochie was in good spirits, feeling freed from the vicious associations that had clung to her family name for a hundred and sixty years. In her contentment, she echoed her great-great-aunt Eliza, sharing her relief with McGlashan after Trudeau recanted his account of cannibalism.
"I am my old self again," Eliza wrote. "The numbed feeling and dreamy mood which followed Jean Baptiste's visit has worn off. . . . The missing link which he has given me completes the chain of events which I have prayed for and sought for many, many years."
Copyright 2006 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
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