Michael Wallis - The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny

ALSO BY M ICHAEL W ALLIS

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Copyright 2017 by Michael Wallis

All rights reserved
First Edition

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Book design by Marysarah Quinn
Production manager: Anna Oler
Jacket Design by Cardon Webb
Jacket Painting: Among the Sierra Nevada, California 1868 by Albert Bierstadt / Bequest of Helen Huntington Hull, granddaughter of William Brown Dinsmore, who acquired the painting in 1873 for The Locusts, the family estate in Dutchess County, New York / Smithsonian American Art Museum / Google Art Project

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Wallis, Michael, 1945 author.
Title: The best land under heaven : the Donner Party in the age of Manifest Destiny / Michael Wallis.
Other titles: Donner Party in the age of Manifest Destiny
Description: New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of
W. W. Norton & Company, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017012937 | ISBN 9780871407696 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Donner Party. | PioneersCaliforniaHistory19th century. | PioneersWest (U.S.)History19th century. | Overland journeys to the Pacific. | Frontier and pioneer lifeWest (U.S.) | Sierra Nevada (Calif. and Nev.)History19th century.
Classification: LCC F868.N5 W36 2017 | DDC 978/.02dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012937

ISBN 978-0-87140-770-2 (e-book)

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FOR S UZANNE ,
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AND COMPANION
ON EVERY TRAIL

CONTENTS

T HIS IS THE story of a large cast of disparate characters whose lives intertwine in pursuit of a single actionthe opening of the American West. Much of their quest is revealed through quotations and paraphrase of their own letters and journals.

In telling the story of the Donner Party, many families and individuals emerge throughout the chapters. Not all those characters started with the Donner and Reed families and their hired hands and servants who comprised the original wagon caravan that departed from Springfield, Illinois. To help the reader, I have included a complete list of all members of the Donner Party and a route map.

I have also selected several major figures that had a significant role in the Donner Party drama. The voices and actions of those central characters, along with many secondary characters, are interwoven throughout the book. Although most accounts of the Donner Party portray the members actions as either heroic or villainous, it can be argued that there were no shades of black and white, but only gray.

The canvas for this story stretches westward from the dark topsoil of Illinois across prairies, deserts, and mountains to the foothills of the high Sierras flanking the midsection of California.

This is the story of individuals and families... who they were and how they lived. It is the important and neglected backstory of these pilgrims of Manifest Destiny.

1846

By the 1840sdespite the bounty harvested from the fertile Illinois soilrestlessness crept across the land. Mindful of the severe cholera epidemics and the lingering consequences of the financial panic of 1837, some farmers, like so many more to come, were inspired also by the promise of a richer life. They had heard the call that swept across the nation as fast as prairie fire, clearly expressing the widely held belief that the United States had a mission to expand, to spread its form of government and way of life across the continent.

The catch phrase Manifest Destiny gave the movement a name. John L. OSullivan, a New York publisher, coined this rallying cry in an editorial in the July-August 1845 issue of the Democratic Review when he proclaimed that it was by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty....

On April 15, 1846, some of the early foot soldiers of Manifest Destinya band of emigrants that came to be known in American history as the Donner Partydeparted Springfield, Illinois, headed for the Mexican province of Alta California. The America they were leaving behind was a nation of some 20 million people, including Indians and others held in bondage as slaves. Plantations and farms still predominated, but the surge of cities, the stirring of industry, and the rush of transportation and commerce marked the times. There was no holding back America in 1846.

Historian Bernard DeVoto later called 1846 the year of decision. Not all the decisions proved wise. America was evolving from a struggling new nation into an international force. Only the year before, the sovereign nation of Texas had been annexed and become a slave state. But America wanted morepresent-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah. So the nation, led by the bellicose and land-hungry President James K. Polkknown to be single-minded and fanatical about acquiring the Westwent to war with Mexico. Before the war ended, the United States had lost two thousand men in action and twelve thousand more to diseasebut in return, it got all that land.

Some political leaders, such as Abraham Lincoln, the new Whig congressman from Illinois, believed the content of the countrys national character had changedfor the worse. But some of Lincolns acquaintances in Springfield did not share those feelings. As more than a million starving refugees from Irelands potato famine came to America, thousands of Americans were eager to become part of what they thought would be a grand adventure.

The Donner Partys collective dream, however, tragically morphed into a collective nightmare. Poor timing, terrible advice, and even worse weather meant that only about half of those who started the journey reached their final destination. After becoming snowbound in the Sierra Nevada Mountains near the border of present Nevada and California, the party ran out of food and resorted to feeding off the flesh of their dead companions and family members. It is this aspect of the Donner Party story that makes it grotesquely fascinating and one of the most haunting to come out of the settlement of the West.