One hundred and sixty-four years ago this week, the members of the Donner Party were fighting their way through the labyrinth of canyons and mountain ridges of the Wasatch Mountains (eastern Utah).

This rugged and formidable mountain range forms the east wall of the (Salt Lake) Great Basin. For the Donner Party, it was the most challenging stretch of their journey so far.

Reed's Gap
Lansford Hastings had led an earlier group of wagons down one canyon (Weber), but due to Weber's impracticality for wagons, the Donner group was forced to build its own road through another canyon (now called Emigration C.). James Reed led them along a primitive Indian trail that wound its way through the deep canyon that was choked with bushes and trees. Reed had discovered the trail on his return from the Great Salt Lake, after riding ahead to get instructions from Hastings.

Reed called the canyon, Reed's Gap. The men and older boys rolled large boulders out of the way and cut down trees to create a narrow passage for their wagons. The pace was slow and tortuous, often only a few miles a day.

The women and younger children could only wait and watch while the men struggled to build the new road. Tamsen Donner tended to 25-year-old Luke Halloran, a single man who was suffering from consumption (tuberculosis). Halloran, who was traveling alone to California in hopes that the mild climate would help cure his disease, had joined the Donner Party during their short stay at Fort Bridger.

Tamsen was also doctoring 13-year-old Edward Breen, who had recently broken his leg in a fall from a horse. A mountain man from Fort Bridger who tended to Breen's injury had wanted to amputate the teenager's limb, but the young boy insisted that they set the bone with splints instead. Fortunately, no infection had set in and a full recovery seemed likely.

Graves Family
On August 16, the Graves family from Illinois overtook the Donner Party. In her 1891 memoirs published in Century Magazine, Virginia Reed remembered: "Only those who have passed through this country on horseback can appreciate the situation. There was absolutely no road, not even a trail. The canyon wound around among the hills. Heavy underbrush had to be cut away and used for making a road bed. While cutting our way step by step through the Hastings Cut-off, we were overtaken and joined by the Graves family, consisting of W.F. Graves, his wife and eight children, his son-in-law, Jay Fosdick, and a young man by the name of John Snyder."

There were actually 13 members in the Graves group, and they were a welcome addition to the struggling wagon company. The Donner Party was now at full strength with 87 members and 22 wagons. (Note: Picture of William Graves is of him in 1879. He was age 17 in 1846, on the journey west.)

Who's at Fault?
Years later, Franklin Ward Graves, the 57-year-old patriarch of the family, would complain that James Reed was at fault for the delays and hardship they all faced in the Wasatch Mountains. The delays there, in his view, contributed to their becoming trapped by snow east of Donner Pass later in the year (1846).

Graves wrote. "Here is what caused our suffering, for Reed told us if we went the [Weber] canyon road we would be apt to break our wagons and kill our oxen, but if we went the new way (Emigration C.), we could get to Salt Lake in a week or ten days. There had been over a thousand wagons come ahead of us (on the California/Oregon Trail) except in the one place that we were fools enough to leave the old road (to take the Hasting Shortcut) and suffer the consequence. But that was Reed's fault. Oh I get mad every time I think it."

In her book Unfortunate Emigrants: Narratives of the Donner Party, historian Kristin Johnson points out that the Graves family had already left the old road (California/Oregon Trail) by the time they caught up with the Donners in the Wasatch Mountains.

Grave's Photo: Author's Collection

Editor's Note: This installment is #7 in a series tracing the experiences of the Donner Party as it worked its way into American history. The series was written f by Mark McLaughlin, weather historian, who lives on the North Shore of Lake Tahoe.