One hundred and sixty-plus years ago this week, members of the Donner Party had just fought their way through the rugged Wasatch Mountains (Utah) and finally reached the eastern edge of the Great Salt Lake Desert.

This installment is #9 in a series tracing the experiences of the Donner Party as it worked its way into American history. View the entire series.

The party was now out of the mountains and just south of the Great Salt Lake in the valley of "Twenty Wells" where there was fresh, cold spring water and plenty of grass for exhausted livestock. The party spent a couple of days resting and recuperating for the next phase of its journey, crossing the vast Utah Desert from east to west.



James Reed later recounted the situation: "We arrived at the springs where we were to provide water and as much grass as we could for the purpose of crossing the Hastings desert, which was represented as 40 or 45 miles in length (but we found it at least 70 miles)."

At the springs the Donner group of pioneers found the remains of another note from Lansford Hastings. He had posted it on a board in a meadow. Unfortunately, birds had pecked at the paper and torn it to pieces, rendering it unreadable. But Tamsen Donner (wife of George Donner) patiently picked up the scattered fragments of paper and put it back together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Her daughter, Eliza, later wrote: "Presently my mother knelt before it and began searching for fragments of paper, which she believed crows had wantonly pecked off and dropped to the ground. Spurred by her zeal, others also were soon on their knees, scratching among the grasses and sifting the loose soil through their fingers. What they found, they brought to her, and after the search ended she took the guide board, laid it across her lap, and thoughtfully began fitting the ragged edges of paper together and matching the scraps to marks on the board. The tedious process was watched with spellbound interest by the anxious group around her."

The efforts by all paid off and the message was revealed, but it wasn't what the party wanted to hear. Hastings' had written: "2 days - 2 nights - hard driving - cross desert - reach water."

On August 30, the Donner Party began the arduous desert crossing. The members had gathered as much grass as possible for their livestock and filled every vessel they had with fresh water, including buckets and boots. Virginia Reed would later write: "It was a dreary, desolate, alkali waste; not a living thing could be seen; it seemed as though the hand of death had been laid upon the country."

By now, Edwin Bryant and his companions who had also taken the shortcut after trading in wagons for mules at Fort Bridger, were safe at Johnson's Ranch, near Bear Valley, California. Johnson's Ranch is only a one-day ride from Sutter's Fort. Bryant described the Utah desert in his book, What I Saw in California: "We struck a vast white plain, uniformly level, and utterly destitute of vegetation or any sign that shrub or plant had ever existed above its snow-like surface. It was a scene so entirely new to us, so frightfully forbidding in its aspects, that all of us, I believe, though impressed with its sublimity, felt a slight shudder of apprehension."

Every other wagon company on the California Trail in 1846 was beginning to arrive at the Humboldt River for the last stage of their journey west across present-day Northern Nevada. The Donner Party was weeks behind the others and just about to enter one of the most hellish landscapes in the West.

Editor's Note: This installment is #9 in a series tracing the experiences of the Donner Party as it worked its way into American history. View the entire series.

Mark McLaughlin, weather historian, who lives on the North Shore of Lake Tahoe, wrote the series as well as many other books on Lake Tahoe history and weather. For more about McLaughlin, visit www.micmacmedia.com.