The Donner Party

The Donner Party has taken its place in American history as the stuff of legend. A tale of hope, desperation, colonial expansion, starvation, and the shocking lengths human beings can be pushed to for survival. The struggles of the group provide an opportunity to conduct demographic analysis of who lived and who died, offering insights specifically into the survival rate of different groups in a cold weather, starvation scenario. Additionally, the story of the Donner Party was adopted as both inspirational and cautionary tale by proponents of American expansion and Manifest Destiny. A review of the origins of Manifest Destiny and how the movement used the Donner Party to influence American identity in the second half of the 19th century provides some interesting insights into what inspired thousands of would-be pioneers to venture into the unknown despite the skills and experience necessary to live in the wilderness. And beneath the analysis, discourse, political maneuvering, and nation-building that stems from this story, there is the real human experiences of those who were present. This extreme scenario saw incidents of violence, cruelty, selfishness, and death, including the impossible choices forced on family members to decide who would live and who must be abandoned to die. At the same time there were incidents of heroism, kindness, selflessness, sacrifice, loyalty, and love. Beneath everything else, what the Donner Party teaches us is that in extreme situations there are no good people nor evil people, simply frightened people doing their best to survive.