Donner Party - Background

Background

During the 1840s, the United States saw a dramatic increase in pioneers: people who left their homes in the east to settle in Oregon and California. Some, like Patrick Breen, saw California as a place where they would be free to live in a fully Catholic culture, but many were inspired by the idea of Manifest Destiny, a philosophy that asserted the land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans belonged to Americans and they should settle it. Most wagon trains followed the Oregon Trail route from Independence, Missouri, to the Continental Divide, traveling at about 15 miles (24 km) a day on a journey that usually took between 4 and 6 months. The trail generally followed rivers to South Pass, a mountain pass in Wyoming relatively easy for wagons to negotiate. From there, wagon trains had a choice of routes to their destination.

An early emigrant named Lansford W. Hastings had gone to California in 1842 and saw the promise of the undeveloped country. To entice settlers he published a guide for pioneers titled The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California. He described a direct route across the Great Basin, which would bring emigrants through the Wasatch Mountains and across the Great Salt Lake Desert. Hastings had not traveled any part of his proposed shortcut until early 1846, on a trip from California to Fort Bridger. The fort—a scant supply station run by Jim Bridger and his partner Pierre Louis Vasquez—was located in Blacks Fork, Wyoming. Hastings stayed at the fort to persuade travelers to turn south on his route. As of 1846, Hastings was the second of two men documented to have crossed the southern part of the Great Salt Lake Desert and neither had been accompanied by wagons.

The most difficult part of the journey to California was the last 100 miles (160 km), across the Sierra Nevada. This mountain range contains 500 distinct peaks over 12,000 feet (3,700 m) high, and because of their height and proximity to the Pacific Ocean they receive more snow than most other ranges in North America; the eastern side of the range is also extremely steep. Timing was crucial to ensure that after leaving Missouri to cross the vast wilderness to Oregon or California, wagon trains would not be bogged down by mud created by spring rains, or by massive snowdrifts in the mountains from September onwards, and that their horses and oxen would have enough spring grass to eat.