by Bill Schutt
The response was predictable. Media types, from obscure bloggers to major newspaper reporters and popular science writers, latched onto the story and within days their readers were being informed that serious and scientifically based doubts had risen over the question of cannibalism by the members of the Donner Party. Formerly a textbook example of survival cannibalism, the claims of people-eating by the starving Donner Party were now being blamed on Victorian-era journalists and ethnic prejudice.
In reality, though, there was no controversy at all, at least among most Donner Party experts. The PR department at ASU had simply blown it by badly misrepresenting the study’s preliminary results. The key statement by the PR mavens, and one that should have prevented the entire mess, can be found in the previously cited quotation about the statistical probability of finding a human bone among those examined by researchers. Such a discovery, they wrote, would have been statistically probable “if humans were processed in the same way animals were processed.” As I’ve mentioned, this is a requirement for determining whether cannibalism has occurred or not, but therein lies the problem. As it turns out the Donner Party did not process human bones and animal bones in the same way, and there’s a good reason why.
Of the thousands of bone fragments from the Meadow Hearth examined by researchers, 362 of them showed evidence of human processing. About one quarter of those had abrasions and scratch marks, which indicate that the bones had been smashed into bits. Other pieces of bone exhibited a condition known as “pot polish,” a smoothing of the edges that results from the bones being stirred in a pot. To anthropologists this was another strong indicator that the bone fragments had been cooked.
As starvation set in, the stranded members of the Donner Party ate whatever they could find. According to historical accounts, they consumed rodents, leather belts and laces, tree bark, and a gooey pulp scraped from boiled animal hides. By the end of January 1847, they began consuming their pet dogs. The analysis by Gwen Robbins and her coworkers indicated that bones from several types of mammals had been smashed, boiled, and burned by someone at the Alder Creek Camp. This would have been done in an effort to render the bones edible, while extracting every bit of nutrient possible. In all likelihood, these would have been the types of last-resort measures undertaken before the survivors turned to cannibalism, which did not begin in the mountain camps until the last week of February 1847—sometime after the departure of First Relief on February 22 and before the arrival of Second Relief a week later. The practice of consuming dead bodies continued until the survivors either died or were rescued, and for everyone except the soon-to-be-christened Donner Party monster, Louis Keseberg, cannibalism would have lasted only a week or two at most, a vitally important point.
Given the large number of bodies present at the Truckee Lake and Alder Creek campsites, and the short amount of time during which cannibalism occurred, there would have been no need to process human bones in the same manner in which animal bones had been processed previously. Essentially, that’s because once cannibalism began at the camps there would have been ample human flesh for the ever-dwindling number of survivors to eat—more than enough to make cooking and re-cooking the human bones completely unnecessary. For similar reasons, once Louis Keseberg was the only person left alive at either camp, between the human bodies and the livestock carcasses uncovered by the melting snow, he would have had plenty of food (grisly though it was) on which to subsist until his rescue by Fourth Relief a month later.
Because uncooked bones would not have been preserved in the acidic soil of the conifer-dense Sierras, there would be no human bones for archaeologists to uncover. Therefore, the absence of calcined human bones from the Meadow Hearth only proves that human and animal bodies were not processed in the same way. The evidence does not place the practice of cannibalism by members of the Alder Creek Camp into doubt, nor does it have any bearing whatsoever on the cannibalism that took place at the Truckee Lake Camp, within The Forlorn Hope, or at the Second Relief’s Starved Camp.
The good news was that someone at Appalachian State yanked the press release and deactivated the global web link. A week later, ASU’s University News website featured a revised version of the original release, minus the grandiose claims of its predecessor. The newly titled report, “Professor’s Research Demonstrates Starvation Diet at the Donner Party’s Alder Creek Camp” was a far more straightforward story on the preliminary findings of the research team. Those who had written the revision also chose not to address the previous boo-boo.
The actual research paper (published three months later in the archaeological journal American Antiquity) turned out to be a fine piece of science. Yet it is likely that very few people outside the archaeology/anthropology communities will ever read it, and this presents its own problem.
According to Kristin Johnson, since 2010 the claims of “no cannibalism” have made it that much more difficult for Donner Party historians to present a factual representation of the events that took place. “Unfortunately, people’s memories seem remarkably retentive when it comes to misinformation,” Johnson told me. “And once a falsehood or garbled story gets out, it’s difficult to dislodge. ‘We found no evidence for cannibalism at Alder Creek’ becomes ‘There was no cannibalism in the Donner Party.’ ”
Even the media seemed less excited about the prospect of returning to the long-held Donners-as-cannibals stance, although the New York Post scored points with their headline, “ ‘Cannibal’ Doc Eats Her Words.”
Although the 2010 media flap had certainly sparked my interest in writing about the Donner Party, I had come to Alder Creek in 2014 for a completely different reason. In brief, historians like Kristin Johnson had begun to doubt the claims of some of the 2003–2004 archaeological team that the Meadow Hearth had once been the camp of Donner Party leader George Donner, whose body had been discovered, still wrapped in its sheet, by General Kearny and his men in the summer of 1847.
“That just didn’t work for me,” Johnson told me, and I asked her why.
“The site didn’t really fit the sources. There were no tree remains nearby. There weren’t all that many artifacts [excluding bone fragments] and few indicating a female presence. Initially, I thought the dig site was more likely Jacob Donner’s camp, since there were seven males and two females in his family.”
But that conclusion didn’t sit well with her, either.
Johnson began working with Kayle’s owner John Grebenkemper. The two Donner Party detectives examined old photos of the tree stump locations and shared relevant documents including maps, articles, memoirs, and letters written by Donner Party members. Grebenkemper, a retired computer whiz with a Ph.D. from Stanford, wrote a program to coordinate historic photos with the current topography of Alder Creek. Once their analysis of the data was complete, they arranged for the area to be examined by a pack of grave-sniffing pooches, including Kayle.
In addition to George Donner, 34 members of the Donner Party died in the winter camps or trying to escape them—mostly from starvation and/or exposure. In 1990, anthropologist Donald Grayson conducted a demographic assessment of the Donner Party deaths and came up with some interesting information.
On the not-so-surprising front was the fact that children between 1 and 5 years of age and older people (above the age of 49), experienced high mortality rates (62.5 percent and 100 percent, respectively), primarily because both groups are more susceptible to hypothermia.
What I found fascinating was that 53.1 percent of males (a total of 25) perished while only 29.4 percent of females died (10). Additionally, not only did more of the Donner men die, they died sooner. Fourteen men died in between December 1846 and the end of January 1847, while females didn’t begin dying until February.
Another intriguing detail is that all 11 Donner Party bachelors (over 18 years of age) who became trapped in the Sierras died, while only 4 of the 8 married men, traveling with their families, perished during the ordeal.
The explanation for
why more Donner Party males died than females is probably a combination of biology and behavior.
The biological component relates to the physiological differences between males and females, and nutritional researchers believe that three significant differences come into play during starvation conditions: 1) Females metabolize protein more slowly than males (i.e., they don’t burn up their nutrients as quickly as males); 2) Female daily caloric requirements are less (i.e., they don’t need as much food as men); and 3) Females have greater fat reserves than males, thus they have more stored energy that can be metabolized during starvation conditions. Also, much of this fat is located just below the skin (i.e., subcutaneous), where it functions as a layer of insulation, helping maintain the body’s core temperature during conditions of extreme cold.
The behavioral component of the female/male survival differential relates to the fact that the Donner Party men did most of the hard physical labor associated with a journey by wagon train, and that ultimately translated to serious health problems once their diets became compromised. Donald Grayson suggested a scenario that triggered the decline in the previously healthy males.
When the Donner Party hacked a trail through the Wasatch Range . . . it was the men, not the women who bore the brunt of the labor. . . . There is no way to know exactly how much this grueling labor affected the strength of the Donner Party men, but they surely emerged from the Wasatch Range with their internal energy stores drained, stores they were unable to renew during the long and arduous trip across the Great Basin Desert that followed.
So what about the fact that married men out-survived bachelors by such a wide margin? The reason for this may have to do with differences in the mammalian physiological response to stress, related to blood levels of the hormone cortisol (hydrocortisone), a steroid hormone released by the adrenal gland. Cortisol is considered a stress hormone and part of the body’s “fight or flight” response to real or imagined threats. While it can have positive short-term effects, increased plasma levels of cortisol can also lead to decreased cognitive ability, depression of the immune system, and impairment of the body’s ability to heal.27 In a 2010 study, researchers at the University of Chicago looked at hormone levels in test groups composed of married and unmarried college students who were placed in anxiety-filled situations. The bachelors had higher levels of cortisol than did married men subjected to the same levels of stress. Thus the experimenters concluded that
single and unpaired individuals are more responsive to psychological stress than married individuals, a finding consistent with a growing body of evidence showing that marriage and social support can buffer against stress.
If one adds these findings to the data from Robert Dirks’s study (in which one phase of starvation was for groups to partition along family lines), the results strongly indicate why all of the mountain-stranded bachelors perished while fully half of their married counterparts survived.
Back at Alder Creek, while my new friend Kayle and I rested in the shade of a large pine tree, Johnson and Grebenkemper outlined their new hypothesis. As I thought, it concerned the location of what they now believed to be multiple campsites at Alder Creek, one each for the two Donner brothers, George and Jacob, and another for the teamsters who worked for them. Grebenkemper told me that in 2011 and 2012, Kayle and several other HHRD dogs had alerted at the Meadow Hearth as well as another spot (Canine Two Locality) some 500 meters from where Kayle had just alerted. I was only mildly disappointed to learn that the site near where I now sat had already been designated Canine Three Locality. These localities were well outside the area traditionally associated with Donner camps, and this particular site had been reported to have the strongest scent signature—a determination made at the end of 2013 after six different HHRD dogs alerted here a total of 27 times.
According to Grebenkemper, eight members of the Donner Party died at Alder Creek, their bodies placed in the snow, not only because of the weather conditions but because the survivors were too weak to bury them. In the spring of 1847, the thawed-out bodies began to decompose and the scent from the bones and body fluids would remain in the ground for nearly 170 years. Having gone through specialized training programs that began when they were puppies, HHRD dogs like Kayle were able to detect that scent.
Grebenkemper and Johnson believed that the Canine Localities Two and Three matched up extremely well with a combination of old maps and survivor accounts and were the best possible fit for the sites of the two Donner family campsites.
“I’ve had a change of mind about the teamsters’ shelter,” Kristin Johnson told me. “Previously, I’d cast doubts on its existence, arguing that there was no good source for it. But with this new site agreeing so well with the sources, I think that for now the best explanation for the Meadow Hearth is that it was the site of the teamsters’ hut.”
I gestured to the patch of dry ground in front of me where Kayle had just alerted. “So that would make that spot, over there . . . ?”
“The spot where Tamzene Donner placed George Donner’s body,” Grebenkemper said, nonchalantly.
I sat up straight.
He continued, quiet and calm. “And it would make that tree you’re sitting under the real George Donner Tree.”
The Donner detectives smiled wry smiles, sensing my momentary confusion as I scrambled to my feet. “Wait. And what happened under this tree?”
“A lot of suffering,” John replied.
Kristin Johnson finished up. “So when and if this new site is excavated, we may have to modify our thinking about all sorts of things related to the Alder Creek camps”—most importantly, where they were actually located.
Minutes later we were hiking out of the 19th century and back to the parking area. Letting my gaze fall on the clusters of tiny white flowers that covered the meadow, I couldn’t help thinking about another blanket of white that had vexed the Donner Party, perhaps at this very spot, during the long and horrible winter of 1846–1847. Though the air temperature had risen even higher since our arrival that morning, I shivered at the thought. Then I turned my face toward the warm, late-June sun and headed for my car.
We’ve already learned that cannibalism occurs across the entire animal kingdom, albeit more frequently in some groups than others. When the behavior does happen, it happens for reasons that make perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint: reducing competition, as a component of sexual behavior, or an aspect of parental care.
Cannibalism in nature is also widely seen as a natural response to stresses like overcrowding and food shortages. The unfortunates involved in shipwrecks, strandings, and sieges have also resorted to cannibalism, and by doing so they exhibited biologically and behaviorally predictable responses to specific forms of extreme stress. Although the conditions may have been unnatural, the actions that resulted were not.
Additionally, like male spiders that give up their lives and bodies to their mates, ultimately increasing the survival potential of their offspring, so too did the bodies of Donner Party members like Jacob Donner serve a similar function for their families.
Finally, in cannibalism-related tragedies like the Donner Party, survivors have been given something like a free pass for committing acts that would otherwise be considered unforgivable by their cultures.
But where did this taboo come from? Why is the very idea of human cannibalism so abhorrent that except in a very few cases it justified the torture, murder, and enslavement of those accused of being cannibals?
* * *
16 The tale of the Donner Party wasn’t the only cannibalism-related story to emerge from the American West. In February 1874, gold prospector Alfred (or Alferd) Packer led a party of five men into Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. When weather conditions deteriorated, he murdered and ate them. When the bodies were discovered the following spring, four of the five had been completely stripped of flesh. Although the skeletons showed signs of butchering, each was relatively complete and the bones showed no signs of smashing or
cooking. Packer had no need to process the skeletons further, presumably because he had enough meat to survive until the spring. During Packer’s sentencing, the judge was rumored to have made the following statement: “There were only seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, and you ate five of them, you depraved Republican son of a bitch!”
17 Alternately known in the literature as the “snowshoe group,” I used “The Forlorn Hope” to avoid confusion.
18 The Nisenan (sometimes referred to as the Maidu) were the indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada foothills.
19 I.e., debilitated, lacking strength or vigor.
20 Fasting or starving people often exhibit increased sensitivity to cold.
21 Catabolic reactions (from the Greek kata = downward + ballein = to throw) are those in which larger molecules are broken down into smaller molecules, releasing energy. Anabolic reactions work in the opposite direction.
22 In a system designed to maximize industrial output, Leningrad’s blue-collar workers received the greatest food allowance, followed by white-collar workers, and finally dependents (who received as little as the equivalent of one and a half slices of additive-adulterated bread per day). Rations were reduced a total of five times between September and November 1941.
23 Most estimates put the eventual civilian death toll at somewhere between 800,000 and 1.5 million.
24 During the Stalin era, the NKVD was a law enforcement agency, closely associated with the Soviet secret police.
25 Starved Camp is thought to been in Summit Valley, California, just west of Donner Pass.
26 The subtitle was subsequently eliminated from the online version of the article after complaints by readers.