The Ultimate Urban Legend?
(picture found here)
From Wikipedia:
An urban legend, urban myth, urban tale, or, more accurately, a contemporary legend, is a form of modern folklore consisting of apocryphal stories believed by their tellers to be true. As with all folklore and mythology, the designation suggests nothing about the story’s factuality or falsehood, but merely that it is in non-institutional circulation, exhibits variation over time, and carries some significance that motivates the community in preserving and propagating it.
For a hundred and fifty years, hearing the words, “Donner Party” has meant one thing. Cannibalism. I’m not sure when people learn about the Donner Party in other parts of the country, but if you are raised in California, it’s part of your 4th or 5th grade study of your state’s history. The Donner Party was a group who were traveling west in the 1840s, and got caught in the high sierras at the wrong time of year. Unable to travel through the 30 inches of snow, they tried to make camp and survive the winter until they could make it to Sutter’s Fort in the spring. Of the 87 members of the party, only 48 people survived the winter. What happened to the rest? Conventional wisdom is that, when those people died of starvation or illness, the survivors ate them, to prevent starving themselves. A horrid and unthinkable situation, to say the least. Every surviving member of the Donner Party denied this allegation, and one man even brought a defamation of character lawsuit against a newspaper, and won. Nonetheless, the belief that the survivors broke one of the most basic codes of humanity in their desperation, survived.
New evidence suggests that the trapped emigrants ate their cows, their horses, deer that they trapped, and even dogs, in their struggle, but while the hearth evidence (bones and so on) show that they boiled bones a long time in order to extract the most nutrition, that they chewed on leather, there is nothing pointing to the possibility that they ate each other.
So…what could motivate people to take this harrowing tale, and make it into a grizzly one? Perhaps just foolish rumors, people speculating about how no bodies were found and no graves for those who died. Perhaps, like any good Urban Legend, there’s a cautionary tale, about traveling to dangerous places where perhaps you ought not to be. But what if the reason that this story started was racism, rearing its ugly head yet again in our checkered and hateful history? The mid-19th century was a period of immigration, when groups of people came to the United States from Ireland. The Irish were often not well regarded, and held in low esteem by the descendants of the British who were already here. They were often just a few rungs in society above Asians, Native Americans, and African Americans, who were for the most party still enslaved in this country at that time. So, you take a basic distrust of a large group of people, a belief that the worst aspects of society are easily found in their midst, and you add a mystery like missing members of the party and not enough food, and it doesn’t matter that every person in the group denies the allegations against them, those allegations become history.
In truth, it reminds me of those first horrid days after Hurricane Katrina, when the stories of rape and murder in New Orleans were reported as fact, and turned out to be nothing but fiction, paranoia, and fear, fed by a lack of credible information. Why is it that we are, even today, so ready to believe the worst about each other?
UPDATE: Now I’m kind of disgusted by these researchers, who claim that the members of the Donner Party denied ever having resorted to cannibalism. Nance, in my comments, tells that she has read journal entries talking about it. And if you look at the comments on the link that I provided, there are excerpts there as well. I wonder who isn’t doing their homework here (besides me)…is it the researcher, or is it the person writing for Discovery News? And as for the claims of racism…I’ll admit that grabbed me. Could be that it was a factor in stories being published, or it could be that we are just as guilty of believing the worst about others. That fingers so quickly get pointed toward racism, where it may or may not have been a factor.
7 Comments
Rain
I have also found this an interesting story and have read quite a few articles and some books on it through the years. There are family members today who put one out not long ago hoping to debunk the stories. There were (from my reading) two groups up there and only one was claimed to have eaten dead bodies. I would not personally find it horrifying but sensible if they had done that. Killing someone to eat them has been in human history but a body that is dead is just flesh and so to me it’d be sensible to eat what kept other people alive.
I have a book on cannibalism among the Anasazi which may have been practiced at the end of their time in the American Southwest. In that case they did find the bones with unique markings and given the practices of other peoples of that time, perhaps even killed their ‘food’ but it was likely more about power building than sustenance. A stranded plane party in our lifetime resorted to eating the dead to survive (and I don’t remember the dates or events).
It was unfortunate with the Donner Party that whatever did or did not happen became such a big news story and damaged the reputation of the survivors. It just goes to show tabloid media has been with us as long as there has been media, I guess. I don’t know what the people did and no remaining evidence might not be surprising as our culture knows what a taboo it would be and could have well hidden evidence of such bone markings; but if they did it, it wasn’t murder. It was just a very tragic misjudgment on when they went across the mountains and their only way to survive.
J
Well said, Rain. I’ve driven through the Donner Pass in weather where it was warm to hot, clear and sunshine down here, and sleet and snow in the pass. To be stuck there in the middle of winter with no airlift to safety would be horrid.
Nance
I read the article you referenced; it’s interesting, and it’s also generating a ton of comments over there, not all of them (as usual) very intelligent or germane to its topic. I’ve read about the Donner Party, and I read some of the diary and journal entries of its members who actually admitted to eating human flesh, so I don’t really know how this researcher can declaim this. The story of the Party is so heartbreakingly sad, no matter what. The cannibalism aspect is immaterial to me, really. The idea of people being so trapped and knowing it is indefinite…and then to watch, helplessly, while their family begin one by one to die from such a basic, human need–food–is what moves me. I cannot imagine their endurance and their struggle.
J
Wow Nance, no, I hadn’t read the comments or any of the journal articles. Now I wonder, why are these researchers claiming that the survivors denied cannibalism, if there are journals and diaries detailing it?
I agree that the cannibalism of someone who is already dead is not as heartbreaking as watching people starve to death. But I would suspect that if they were reduced to that, it haunted them for the rest of their lives.
OmbudsBen
Our culture has an ugly fascination with the lurid. It gave us yellow journalism a century ago, and it certainly fed into the rapid spread of the story of the Donner party, too.
Michelle at Scribbit
Not to go off the subject but every time I hear about the Donner Party I think of a friend of mine who confessed to me that for many years she’d been confused and thought it was the Donna Reed Party. Cracks me up.
Dad Who Writes
I just went and read the Wikipedia article which is rated as “one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community”. It’s a horrid, tragic story and I can’t imagine the feelings of the parents involved.