The Museum of Natural and Cultural History presented a lecture discussing the ill-fated journey of the Donner family and the possibility of cannibalism Friday night in Lillis Hall.
Museum Research Associate Julie Schablitsky and Museum Osteologist/Archaeologist Guy Tasa anchored the event titled “Reconstructing a Tragedy: The Archaeology of the Donner Family Camp.” The two were shown last fall in an episode of Discovery Channel’s “Unsolved History,” which documented a team of archaeologists and its attempt to find the Donner family campsite.
In 1846, a group of 81 people led by George Donner left Illinois for California to seek a better way of life. After taking a shortcut, the Donner Party was stranded in the Sierra Nevada Mountains when an early blizzard occurred. Possibly starving, it is speculated that the Donner Party resorted to cannibalism.
The Donner Party erected two campsites, the main campsite at Donner Lake. Artifacts found at Alder Creek in the Truckee Ranger District of Tahoe National Forest may be from the other campsite, where the Donner family stayed along with a group of teamsters. If the artifacts are indeed from the Donner family, Schablitsky said she hopes to learn more about the events of that winter.
“Our goal is to figure out what happened during those three to four months,” she said.
Some of the artifacts found at the site may confirm the Donner family’s presence.
“One piece of evidence that may show the Donners were at Alder Creek is the presence of women,” Schablitsky said. “We found pieces of beads and writing tablets.”
Writing tablets may have been used by Tamzene Donner, a teacher, to help normalize the situation with her and George’s children. She may have been teaching them to read and write.
The issue of the Donner Party and cannibalism spread across the country in the late 1840s as newspapers often described the Donner Party as a crazed group of people seen eating humans. Regardless of whether cannibalism happened at the Donner family camp, Schablitsky wants to present the Donner Party as more humane.
“They were not animals who just cannibalized each other, they were human beings,” Schablitsky said.
Tasa’s job is to find out whether bone fragments found at Alder Creek are indeed human. That is no easy task considering there are over 25,000 pieces of bone smaller than a paper clip. Some of the fragments have been sent away for DNA testing to find out if they are human.
“We have good evidence cannibalism occurred at the main campsite, but at the Alder Creek campsite it is unknown,” Tasa said. “All the material we have found so far has been mammalian bone.”
The lynchpin evidence for cannibalism is if the bones are burnt, botched, or broken. Tasa said that the pieces of bone fragments found so far are all burnt heavily. Tasa also said the majority of the fragments are Class V bones, which could include deer, bear and human.
It will be some time before the gaps are filled in on the four months of winter the Donner Party struggled through, but both Schablitsky and Tasa are confident it will be done. Schablitsky said they would not be working with the media, as they did on the Discovery Channel, even though they would receive funding. Schablitsky said the media would rush them through their work and that the team wants to take as much time as they need.
Charlie Hansen is a freelance
reporter for the Daily Emerald