Tamsen Donner and the Donner Party

The Donner-Reed Party’s catastrophe was the result of a chain of decisions and conditions, not one cause. Tamsen Donner’s surviving letters capture an educated woman’s voice before the disaster; Patrick Breen’s diary records part of the winter that followed, from the lake camp where he kept it.

In June 1846, Tamsen Donner wrote from the overland trail to California about camp life, travel, and the ordinary work of a family in motion. Published the following month in the Sangamo Journal under the signature “Mrs. George Donner,” the letter is one of the few surviving records in her own voice from the journey.¹

Of the 87 people who took the Hastings Cutoff with the Donner-Reed Party, 46 survived, and 41 died; figures vary slightly by source.² What remains is a surviving record that is unusually extensive for a single overland emigrant party: Tamsen’s letters from before the crisis, Patrick Breen’s diary from the lake camp, survivor accounts, relief-party reports, and documents preserved by descendants. No single source tells the whole story. The companion piece in this series examines Lansford Hastings, the route promoter whose advice was one link in the chain that follows. This article stays with the party itself: who Tamsen Donner was, what the group decided together, and what the surviving documents can and cannot tell us about the winter of 1846–47.

An Educated Woman in Antebellum America

Newburyport to Elizabeth City

Tamsen Eustis was born November 1, 1801, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and received an education that was unusually extensive for many women of her time.³ In 1826 she took a position teaching at a female academy in Elizabeth City, North Carolina — one of relatively few paths available to an educated single woman of her era.³

Loss, and a Second Beginning in Illinois

She married farmer Tully Dozier in December 1829. Within a few years, fever took both of her young children and then Tully himself.³ Tamsen returned north, then, at her brother’s urging, moved to Illinois in 1836 to teach.³ There she met George Donner, a widowed Illinois farmer nearly two decades her senior. They married in May 1839 and had three daughters together — Frances, Georgia, and Eliza.³ Later biographical accounts describe her as proficient in mathematics, geometry, and philosophy, fluent in French, interested in botany, and a painter and writer.³

“We Go to California”

A Family’s Decision

The family chose to join the 1846 migration, drawn by the prospect of land and opportunity in California, as were many 1846 emigrants. The surviving letters do not reveal whether Tamsen opposed the plan or embraced it outright — only that she documented it once underway.

Tamsen’s Own Words, Before Fort Bridger

From Independence, Missouri, at the outset of the journey, Tamsen wrote of the trip ahead in practical terms: “We go to California… It is a four months trip. We have three wagons furnished with food and clothing.”⁴ Later, from along the Platte River, she described camp life with an observer’s eye, noting that buffalo chips, gathered for fuel, “kindle quick and retain heat surprisingly.”⁴ Her June 1846 letter, written before the party ever reached Fort Bridger and the decision point that would define its fate, is the fullest surviving account in her own hand of what the journey looked like from the inside, before anyone involved knew how it would end.¹

The Party’s Choices, Not One Man’s

The Cutoff and the Fork at Little Sandy

At Little Sandy River in mid-July 1846, the emigrant train the Donners were traveling with split. Some emigrants continued north by the established Fort Hall route, while a smaller group — including the Donners and Reeds — turned toward Fort Bridger to attempt a new route promoted by Lansford Hastings, a decision examined in full in this series’ companion article on Hastings.⁵ The group elected George Donner captain, a position that put his family’s name permanently on what followed.²

A Month Lost in Utah

The cutoff proved far harder than advertised. The party spent about twelve days cutting a wagon road through the Wasatch Mountains and about six more crossing the Great Salt Lake Desert, losing wagons and livestock along the way.⁶ They reached the Humboldt River on September 26, weeks behind the schedule other 1846 parties were keeping.⁷ That delay mattered, but it was compounded by decisions made after the cutoff as well: on October 5, a dispute between James Reed and John Snyder, a teamster traveling with the party, ended in Snyder’s death and Reed’s banishment from the group; further losses of livestock along the Humboldt followed, along with the simple arithmetic of dwindling food against an unknown distance still to cover.² No single decision explains what followed. Each one narrowed the party’s margin for error a little further, at exactly the time of year when that margin mattered most.

Descent Into Winter

Truckee Lake and Alder Creek

By late October the party had reached the base of the Sierra Nevada, exhausted and low on supplies, with the mountain passes still ahead. Heavy snow blocked the route before most of the group could cross. The bulk of the party camped near a lake that would later bear the Donner name; the Donner families, delayed at Alder Creek by a broken wagon axle, made a separate camp about six miles back.² George Donner suffered a hand injury during the delay that later became infected and contributed to his death. That physical separation — two camps, not one — is part of why the surviving record is uneven: most daily documentation comes from the lake camp, where Patrick Breen began a diary on November 20, while the Alder Creek camp where George and Tamsen Donner sheltered is documented far more thinly.⁸

Snowbound

Snow and cold persisted through a winter the Bancroft Library’s own catalog record describes as one of the harshest on record, burying the camps’ small cabins and tents and making travel in either direction extraordinarily difficult.⁸ The winter proved fatal for roughly half of those who had set out with the party.² The deaths resulted from starvation, exposure, illness, injury, and the cascading effects of prolonged deprivation.

What Patrick Breen’s Diary Records

A Detailed Surviving Voice

Patrick Breen, whose family survived the winter, kept a diary from November 20, 1846, to March 1, 1847 — the only known diary kept by a party member during the winter entrapment.⁸ That fact matters as much as its contents: it means the fullest surviving account of daily life is one man’s perspective from one of the two camps, and it says relatively little directly about conditions six miles away at Alder Creek, where the Donners were camped.

Weather, Hunger, and Death

Breen’s entries record dwindling food, hides boiled for sustenance, illness, deaths, and increasing desperation as the winter wore on.⁸ On February 26, 1847, Breen wrote that the Donners had told members of the first relief party that they would begin eating the dead within four days if they could not find their cattle beneath the snow, and that he supposed “they have done so ere this time” — a secondhand report and a surmise, not something he witnessed.⁹ Four relief parties reached the camps between February 18 and April 17, 1847, evacuating survivors in stages as conditions and manpower allowed.²

Neighbors in a Land Not Empty

Washoe Homeland

The Sierra Nevada slopes where the party became trapped were, and are, Washoe homeland. The Washoe Tribe identifies Lake Tahoe as a spiritual and cultural center and describes its traditional territory as extending across the Lake Tahoe Basin and the adjacent eastern and western Sierra Nevada slopes and valleys, occupied for an estimated nine thousand years. The Tribe notes that this homeland lay directly in the path of California-bound emigrants and, later, gold seekers.¹⁰ Most accounts of the Donner Party say little about the Washoe.

A Different Account, Preserved Orally

Washoe oral history, documented by archaeologist Julie Schablitsky, who led the excavation at the Donner family’s Alder Creek camp, tells a different story. According to that oral tradition, Washoe scouts tried to bring food to the families camped at Alder Creek — in one instance attempting to deliver a deer carcass — and were met with gunfire.¹¹ “The northern Washoe were there, and they had tried to help,” Schablitsky has written of the tradition.¹¹ Schablitsky also records Washoe accounts of leaving rabbit meat and wild potatoes near the camps, and of withdrawing after observing the emigrants eating human remains. These accounts, preserved within the Washoe community and published alongside the Alder Creek archaeology, are part of the record.¹¹

Rescue, Death, and the Limits of the Record

Cannibalism, Documented and Incompletely Understood

That members of the party ate the flesh of the dead, in the final weeks before rescue, is documented by Breen’s diary and by the accounts of survivors themselves, including several who later described having done so.⁸,⁹ A three-year archaeological excavation of the Alder Creek camp, led by Julie Schablitsky and Kelly Dixon, recovered thousands of burned bone fragments, cooking and shelter remains, and evidence the group ate livestock, wild game, and even the family dog; DNA testing of the bone fragments was inconclusive, and researchers did not visually identify human bone among the material they examined.¹² The archaeologists concluded that if cannibalism took place at Alder Creek, it happened only in the party’s final weeks, involved fewer than a dozen people, and did not extend to processing bodies down to the bone — a more limited and specific picture than the popular legend suggests, not a disproof of the documented practice.¹²

Tamsen’s Disputed Final Days

George Donner died at Alder Creek in the weeks after the third relief party left on March 14, 1847; Tamsen had sent her daughters out with that relief and stayed behind with him.²,¹³ The circumstances of Tamsen Donner’s death are uncertain. Lewis Keseberg, the last person known to have seen her alive, gave an account of her final hours that was never formally tested. On reaching Sutter’s Fort in 1847, Keseberg sued Ned Coffeemeyer, a member of the fourth relief, for slander over the accusations against him; the court found for Keseberg but awarded him one dollar. Decades later, journalist Charles McGlashan, who interviewed Keseberg while researching the party’s story, concluded that he bore comparatively little blame, a view few of Keseberg’s contemporaries shared.¹³ Tamsen Donner’s final days rest on a single, contested account.

What the Documents Do and Don’t Support

The surviving record does not support attributing the deaths at Donner Lake to the Hastings Cutoff alone, or to any single decision. The delay in Utah cost the party real time. So did the internal conflict that led to Reed’s banishment, the condition of the party’s livestock by the time they reached the Humboldt, the timing of the heavy October snowstorms that blocked the Sierra route, and the geography of two divided camps with uneven stores and uneven documentation.²,⁷,⁸ Tamsen Donner’s death, and her husband’s, cannot be assigned to a single cause any more than the deaths of the others who did not survive. What the surviving record supports is a chain: a route promoted before it had been tested by loaded wagons; a series of decisions and misfortunes that followed; a severe winter; and, within that, individual people — Tamsen and George Donner among them — making choices whose motives and circumstances are only partially recoverable from surviving sources.

Tamsen Donner’s Legacy

Tamsen’s three daughters — Frances, Georgia, and Eliza — survived and reached California.³ Tamsen herself is remembered today less for her death than for what came before it: a teacher who wrote home from the trail in her own words, months before the story that would eclipse the rest of her biography. Reading her letters alongside Patrick Breen’s diary — two of the most valuable surviving firsthand records of the journey and winter, while remaining partial accounts shaped by who wrote, what survived, and where each person was — is one of the closest ways historians can approach the Donner-Reed Party as the people who lived it experienced it, rather than as the legend it became.

Continue exploring this series with our companion article on Lansford Hastings and the Cutoff That Cost Weeks.

Footnotes

1. Tamsen Dozier (Eustis) Donner, letter published as “Mrs. George Donner,” Sangamo Journal (Springfield, Ill.), July 23, 1846; typescript in Tamsen Dozier (Eustis) Donner Papers, RG0960.AM, History Nebraska: https://history.nebraska.gov/collection_section/tamsen-dozier-eustis-donner-1801-1847-rg0960-am/
2. California State Parks, Researcher’s Guide to Sutter’s Fort’s Collections of Donner Party Material (April 2008): https://www.parks.ca.gov/pages/485/files/Donner_Party_Material_Master_Guide_April_2008.pdf
3. Martha Nell Hardy, “Donner, Tamsen Eustis,” NCpedia, adapted from the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986): https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/donner-tamsen-eustis
4. Journal of Sierra Nevada History & Biography (Sierra College) — “Tamsen Donner: Dream to Legacy”: https://ejournals.sierracollege.edu/jsnhb/v6n2/tamsendonner.html
5. National Park Service — “Hastings Cutoff”: https://www.nps.gov/places/hastings-cutoff.htm
6. Utah Division of State History — “The Donner Party”: https://historytogo.utah.gov/donner-party
7. National Park Service, California National Historic Trail — “Donner and Reed Wagon Train Incident”: https://www.nps.gov/cali/learn/historyculture/donner-reed-party.htm
8. Patrick Breen Diary, November 20, 1846–March 1, 1847, BANC MSS C-E 176, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf10000759/
9. Patrick Breen Diary, entry for February 26, 1847, BANC MSS C-E 176, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf10000759/
10. Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California — “About the Washoe Tribe”: https://www.washeshu.org/site/about/about-the-washoe-tribe
11. Julie M. Schablitsky, “Letter from California: A New Look at the Donner Party,” Archaeology, May/June 2012: https://www.archaeology.org/issues/may-june-2012/letters-from/letter-from-california-a-new-look-at-the-donner-party; the fuller scholarly account appears in Kelly J. Dixon, Julie M. Schablitsky, and Shannon A. Novak, eds., An Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party’s Alder Creek Camp (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011).
12. “Donner Party Cannibalism Legends Remain Unproven,” news release, University of Oregon, distributed via EurekAlert!, January 12, 2006: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/472027
13. “Lewis Keseberg of the Donner Party,” Journal of Sierra Nevada History & Biography (Sierra College): https://ejournals.sierracollege.edu/jsnhb/v1n1/LKeseberg.html

Image Source

Source: “Donner Summit Morning,” Adobe Stock, image #468261318. Licensed via the O’Connor Institute’s Adobe Stock account.