Cannibalism of US pioneers thrown into doubt

[emad]

Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
Published: 14 January 2006



The story of the Donner Party is one of the most haunting to come out of the settlement of the American West: a group of pioneers driven to such desperation in the snow-driven Sierra Nevada mountains of California that they resorted to feeding off the flesh of their dead companions.

The horrors of the winter of 1846-7 quickly became the sensation of the popular press. The fate of the Donner Party gnawed at the gold prospectors who descended on the same part of California two years later.

More than a century and a half later, the Donner Party's various mountain hide outs - now a convenient pitstop off Highway 80 near Lake Tahoe - have become popular tourist destinations. An anthropologist, Terry Del Bene, even published Donner Party Cookbook a couple of years ago, laced with ghoulish humour.

And yet, according to forensic research unveiled this week, the Donner Party may not have been quite as voracious in its appetites as was previously believed. A group of anthropologists from the universities of Oregon and Montana spent three years examining remains at Alder Creek, one of the Donner Party's two encampments, and found no physical evidence of cannibalism whatsoever.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article338446.ece

[Poppyseedman]

1. I read the article and the title is very misleading

"Alder Creek was the smaller of the party's two camps. The other, on the shores of Lake Truckee, has already yielded definitive evidence of cannibalism, although historians have argued over its extent."

A pet peeve of mime.

[UTUSN]

2. & yet there was Jamestown (cf., Professor ZINN) n/t

[enlightenment]

3. What is most interesting to me

is not whether or not a member of the Donner family ate human flesh to survive, but how the entire episode impacted -- or, in actuality, failed to impact the surge of western migration.

Granted, the discovery of gold in California in 1848, combined with the "opening" of the area after the Mexican-American war, undoubtedly proved powerful mitigating factors as potential travelers weighed the risks of the journey -- but as far as I can tell, very few people were dissuaded because of what happened to the Donner/Reed party.

I suppose it just points to how strong the convictions were that the west was the "great promise" for America -- and how desperate many people were to seek out that promise.