donner lake

i am staying up by donner lake for the holiday weekend. want to to know their story????  Seems like the donner party didn't just grill up some hamburgers and hotdogs for dinner!

This info is compliments of Wikipedia.

The Donner Party was a California Trail wagon train of 81 American pioneers who in 1846 found themselves trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada. Thirty-six members of the party perished as a result of starvation, exposure, disease, and trauma, and some of the survivors resorted to cannibalism.

The wagons left in May 1846. Encouraged to try a new, faster route across Utah and Nevada, they opted to take theHastings Cutoff proposed by Lansford Hastings, who had never taken the journey with wagons. The Cutoff required the wagons to traverse Utah's Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake Desert, and slowed the party considerably, leading to the loss of wagons, horses, and cattle. It also forced them to engage in heavy labor by clearing the path ahead of them, and created deep divisions between members of the party. They had planned to be in the Sacramento Valley by September, but found themselves trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains by early November.

Most of the party took shelter in three cabins by Truckee Lake (now Donner Lake), while a smaller group camped in hastily constructed brush sheds and tents several miles away. Food stores quickly ran out, and a group of 15 people attempted to reach California on snowshoes in December, but became disoriented in the mountains before succumbing to starvation and cold. Only seven members of the snowshoe party survived, by eating the flesh of their dead companions. Meanwhile, the Mexican–American War delayed rescue attempts from California, although family members and authorities in California tried to reach the stranded pioneers but were turned back by harsh weather.

The first rescue group reached the remaining members, who were starving and feeble, in February 1847. Weather conditions were so bad that three rescue groups were required to lead the rest to California, the last arriving in March. Most of these survivors also had resorted to cannibalism. Forty-five of the eighty-one trapped members of the Donner Party survived to live in California. Although a minor incident in the record of westward migration in North America, the Donner Party became notorious for the reported claims of cannibalism. Efforts to memorialize the Donner Party were underway within a few years; historians have described the episode as one of the most spectacular tragedies in California history and in the record of western migration.^[1]