Donald Grayson - Sex and Death on the Western Emigrant Trail: The Biology of Three American Tragedies

Never take no cutofs and hury along as fast as you can, advised 13-year-old Virginia Reed after her ordeal as a member of the Donner Party had finally ended. She and the rest of her family survived, but 39 others were not so fortunate.

Virtually all Americans have heard of the Donner Party. They are famous not simply because so many of them lost their lives but because most who died were cannibalized. Those who participated in the cannibalismand that probably includes all who survivedwere at first horrified by what they were doing. Not surprisingly, people safe at home were scandalized by this behavior. The Donner Party has had immediate name recognition ever since.

This might be the most famous group of mid-19th-century overland emigrants to lose many of its members to severe cold and starvation on its way west, but it is not the only one. Exactly 10 years after the Donner Partys troubles, two large groups sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, the Mormon Church) ran into very similar difficulties, and many of their members died as well. These people were following a well-traveled path, but they were doing it in a novel waytransporting their goods, and often their children, in handcarts they pushed and pulled some 1,300 miles from Iowa City, Iowa, to Salt Lake City, Utah.

There are many reasons why these two handcart companies may not be nearly as well known as the Donner Party. A smaller proportion of them died, most of them were impoverished European emigrants who had chosen to join what was then a controversial religion, and the Mormon Church did not wish the full facts of the tragedy to be generally known. In addition, the handcarters did not resort to cannibalism.

The histories of these groups have been told by different peoples in different ways. Although I will summarize some necessary history here, my goals are not historical. Instead, I hope to show that the patterns of who lived and who died in these three groups of very unfortunate travelers can be explained by human biology. I argue that three prime factorsage, sex, and family tiescan explain not only the general patterns of mortality and survivorship in these groups but also such relatively minor matters as who attempted to escape on their own and who did not. Not all of what follows will be fun reading, but what happened to these people helps get at the core of who and what we all are.

SOME PERSONAL BACKGROUND

One of the most frequent questions I have been asked by those who are familiar with my studies of the relationship between human biology and mortality in nineteenth-century emigrant groups is how I became interested in this topic in the first place. Since I have been asked this question so often, I answer it here.

I am an archaeologist who studies the ways people interact with their environments, and how their impacts on those environments, in turn, change the lives of the people themselves. I have also done a good deal of fieldwork in remote places. The crews that help with this work almost always include men and women, often in similar numbers. Far more often than not things go well, but on occasion things go wrong. Over the years, these rare experiences of things gone wrong add up.

I began to realize that there are patterns to the responses that people make in these settings. Get a truck stuck or blow a tire or two in the middle of nowhere, and it is generally the men who rush to fix the problem while the women watch. But if the problem cant be fixed and you are stuck for substantial amounts of time, it is the men who take it the worst. They tend to become crabby, sullen, and annoyed. The women often react far moreproductively, primarily by taking everything in stride. This is not true of all the men or women with whom I have worked and gotten stuck, but it is true of the majority of them. It is as if the men excel at things that require strength, risk, and short-term aggressive behavior while the women excel at things that provide longer-term cohesiveness.

These are hardly novel insights. The popular literature on the differences between American men and women is full of such observations, and, as I will discuss in , important scientific literature exists in this area as well. My field experience did, however, make me wonder how men and women react when they are stuck enough to have their very existence threatened. Once I began to wonder about that, I decided to read accounts of groups of men and women in those kinds of situations. Because I work in the deserts of western North America, my reading focused on classic accounts of those who ran into serious trouble in the areas I know so well.