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Posted by Bill S on March 4, 2008 at 11:06:44 am EST
In reply to Tricks for fire on top of deep snow posted by WISam on March 3, 2008 at 4:15:22 pm EST

Quote:

I read somewhere that the area where the Donner Party's fire ring/pit was built was over 8 feet below the surface of the snow!

Sounds apocryphal, though believable. The Donner party was actually scattered over quite a large area around Donner Lake (it had another name at the time) and back down toward where Truckee is now. There are markers in Donner Lake State Park at some of the cabin sites. All of the groups built cabins and, according to the information at the park and in various books I have read, their fires and cooking were in the cabins. One of their problems was that, although they actually had plenty of meat from slaughtering all the oxen, they lost track of where the carcasses were placed, due to the depth of the snow. The hides in most cases were stored in the rafters of the cabins, so some of them chewed on the hides to get some nourishment. There is still a lot of controversy over how many of the party actually resorted to cannibalism, but the best evidence suggests it was only a small fraction of the survivors, maybe as few as 3 or 4. The famous Virginia Reed letter only refers to one specific person (an elderly lady who ate part of her deceased husband) and implies that no one in her family did so. The Reed father was the one who was expelled back near the Utah-Nevada border for beating his man-servant to death, but ended up organizing the first successful rescue party, and later became a prominent citizen and politician in California. His expulsion was the event that put Donner in charge.

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