Word: donners
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Fremont's campaigns in California; 5) the Mormon colonization of Utah; 6) the westward surge of U.S. farmers and mechanics. The Year of Decision (Book-of-the-Month Club selection for April) also includes one of history's greatest horror stories, the anthropophagous annals of the Donner expedition...
...Great Migration had started the year before. But there were enough emigrants in 1846 so that their trains stretched for hundreds of miles across the Great Plains. Among them was a group later to be known as the Donner party. Few of the Donners ever reached California, but they became more famous than most of the settlers...
...Doomed. The Donners tried it-against the advice of a mountain scout who had just barely gotten through. There were 87 people in the doomed party-about half of them children, and half of these less than six years of age. "They were going to California ... to live out their days in the languorous, winterless country. . . . The younger children would grow up in a softer, more abundant life-and their gentility would not be impaired." George Donner's wife, Tamsen, took along "apparatus for preserving botanical specimens, water colors and oil paints, books and school supplies...
...Second Relief. Outside one hut, the Second Relief found a dismembered body. There was an entry concerning it in the diary of one of the travelers, Patrick Breen: "Mrs. Murphy said here yesterday that [she] thought she would commence on Milt and eat him." She had. At the Donner family huts, Tamsen Donner had just sent a man to beg Elizabeth, Jacob Donner's wife, for a meal. The man was just returning with a leg of Elizabeth's husband. "At the sight of the rescuers, he tossed the now unneeded leg back on the butchered corpse." Jacob...
Next Monday, DeVoto, the noted writer and editor, formerly a lecturer on English here will tell the tale of the ill-fated Donner Party which frose to death in a high mountain pass in California...