The history of Donner

The Donner Party froze and starved through one winter

Donner Memorial State Park is a California state park built around the site where the Donner Party froze and starved through the winter of 1846 and 1847. The park's visitor center and the bronze Pioneer Monument stand near where three crude log cabins once sheltered dozens of emigrants trapped by early snow.

The party, about 87 settlers led by George Donner, had left Illinois that spring hoping to reach California. A shortcut called the Hastings Cutoff cost them five weeks crossing Utah's mountains and salt flats, putting them dangerously behind schedule. Late October snow sealed the pass above this lake before they could cross it. They built cabins with no floors and leaking roofs, while the Donner family camped six miles back at Alder Creek in brush shelters.

Inside one cabin, Patrick Breen kept a diary recording the slow collapse of the group, day by day, through hunger and cold. By mid-December, people began to die, and Jacob Donner was one of the first. In December, fifteen members strapped together homemade snowshoes and tried to walk out for help. Twelve days later, only seven returned alive, having eaten the dead to survive.

Rescue parties reached the camp in stages that winter. The first, in February 1847, dug through fifteen feet of snow and found a dozen people already dead. The last rescuer to arrive, in April, found only Lewis Keseberg alive, alone with the remains of those who had not survived. George Donner died at Alder Creek that winter. George Donner and his wife Tamsen Donner are both counted among the Donner Party dead, and both are tied to this ground in burial records. Of the roughly 87 people who set out, as many as 48 never reached California.

A historian and a society raised a bronze monument

Word of the deaths spread fast once survivors reached California. Within a year the cabin site had become a stop for curious travelers, and by 1854 it was drawing visitors purely to see where people had died and eaten the dead. Historian Charles McGlashan later made it his project to mark the spot properly. He bought an acre of land where the Breen family's cabin had stood, and in 1898 the Native Sons of the Golden West began raising money for a monument, with Nevada City dentist Chester W. Chapman chairing the effort.

Progress was slow. A cornerstone went down in 1910, but it took until 1913 for the group to settle on sculptor John MacQuarrie to design the statue, and the pedestal wasn't finished until 1917. The monument that finally went up on June 6, 1918, cost $35,000, a large sum for the time.

Truckee's Chinatown was burned out by white mobs

A few miles from the monument, Truckee held two Chinatowns at their peak, home to roughly 1,400 Chinese residents who had helped build the transcontinental railroad. Between 1875 and 1879, white residents burned the settlement at least four times. Chinese residents rebuilt after each fire until armed resistance in 1879 forced them south across the river instead. In June 1876, a mob raided Chinese cabins at nearby Trout Creek, burning two of them and shooting a woodcutter named Ah Ling as he fled the flames. Seven men were arrested; a jury acquitted one in nine minutes and the rest of the charges were dropped. A coordinated boycott in 1886 finished the job, driving out Truckee's entire Chinese population within nine weeks.

A roadside concession gave way to state ownership

Within two years the monument had company. T. C. Wohlbruck leased land nearby from the Native Sons and opened a roadside concession called "Pioneer Donner Park" in 1920, selling fuel, food, and souvenirs to the automobile travelers now reaching the site, along with a small museum of relics. The state ended his lease in 1930 and turned the building into park headquarters.

By then the land itself had already changed hands. In 1927, state legislator Cora Woodbridge pushed through a bill letting California buy the Native Sons' eleven acres, monument included, along with more land around it. The transfer was completed with a ceremony on August 18, 1928, and Donner Memorial State Park came into being.

Museums rose and fell as the park expanded

The park kept growing. A 1948 purchase brought the southeast shore of Donner Lake under state control, and new trails and campgrounds followed. In 1961, the state broke ground on the Emigrant Trail Museum, moving Donner Party relics there from Sutter's Fort, and dedicated the finished building the next September. Its audio-visual room was named for Congressman Bizz Johnson, who had helped secure the funding.

The Emigrant Trail Museum gave way in 2015 to a new visitor center, built for $6.6 million. It has exhibits on the Donner Party, the Washoe people who lived in the area for thousands of years before any wagon train arrived, and the Chinese laborers who later built the railroad through the pass above the lake.

Restorers cleaned the monument that draws 200,000 visitors

In 2022, California State Parks and the Sierra State Parks Foundation finished restoring the Pioneer Monument, cleaning its stonework and stabilizing MacQuarrie's bronze family. About 200,000 people now visit the park each year, most drawn by the same grim curiosity that brought the first tourists here in 1854. They come for picnics, kayaking, and lake swimming on ground where, in one winter, half the people who camped here did not live to see spring.