Donner Party
George Donner lived just outside Springfield, Illinois. On April 14, 1846, he, his brother Jacob, and James F. Reed, along with their families and hired hands, set out for California in covered wagons as part of the Boggs Company. Three months later, at the Little Sandy River in Wyoming, George was chosen to lead the group, now known as the Donner Party. The Donner Party took the Hastings Cutoff through the Wasatch Mountains in Utah and they crossed the Great Salt Lake Desert, rejoining the California Trail west of Elko, Nevada. They arrived at the Sierra Nevada mountains late in the season and were trapped by snow on the eastern side of Truckee Lake (now Donner Lake) west of Truckee, California.
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Famous quotes containing the word party:
“He said, truly, that the reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before him was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they lacked a cause,—a kind of armor which he and his party never lacked. When the time came, few men were found willing to lay down their lives in defense of what they knew to be wrong; they did not like that this should be their last act in this world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)