The Donner Party: Who Died, and Why

The Donner Party is remembered for one thing. That one thing is documented, and this episode says so plainly, in three places and at three times. Then it moves on to what actually explains the deaths. In 1990 the anthropologist Donald Grayson published a demographic assessment of the party. Eighty-seven people. Forty dead. Men died at 56.6 percent, women at 29.4 — roughly twice the rate. Children under five: 62.5 percent. Adults over forty-nine: all of them. And the men between twenty and thirty-nine, the ones the story assumes were the toughest people on that mountain: 66.6 percent. Fourteen of twenty-one. The single best predictor of survival was not strength. It was how many relatives you had with you. Among the twenty-to-thirty-nine-year-olds in the mountain camps, those who lived had kin groups averaging 6.8 people; those who died averaged 2.3. Every bachelor trapped in the Sierra died. Four adult men came out of those camps alive, and all four were fathers. The episode also asks a question with no single answer: how many people were in the Donner Party? Eighty-seven, eighty-nine and eighty-one are all correct, and they are answers to three different questions. Whether the number is 87 or 89 comes down to whether Luis and Salvador — the two Miwok vaqueros John Sutter sent east with mules and provisions to rescue them, and who were shot and eaten by the people they came to save — are counted as members of the party at all.