One hundred and sixty-plus years ago this week, in late January, 1847, nearly 60 remaining members of the Donner Party were still trapped near Donner Lake and the Mexican-American War in northern California was winding down.

The war had started in March 1846 along the Rio Grande River (Texas) when the Mexican army attacked American troops in disputed territory. In May 1846 President Polk declared war on Mexico.

Link Between War and Pioneers
The Texas conflict spread to California during the summer of 1846, while the Donner Party and other wagon-train companies were traveling west on the Oregon/California Trail. Roughly 2,700 people had left Independence, Missouri in the spring of 1846; approximately 500 of the emigrants went to Northern California, which was part of Mexico at the time. As the pioneers arrived in California, tensions between them and the Mexican government became strained. The war stalled efforts to send rescue parties from Sutter's Fort to the Donner Party stranded by early snows at the top of the Sierra.

John Freemont: Pathfinder
As the pioneers rumbled west in mid-1846, American warships were anchored along the California coast in strategic locations such as Monterey Bay and San Francisco Bay. John Charles Frémont, an officer in the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, was the principal U.S. military commander on the ground in California. He was admired for his well-publicized explorations of the west; Frémont was nationally known as the "Pathfinder." Frémont and a small group of about 25 men had made a mid-winter crossing of the Sierra Nevada just south of Lake Tahoe in February 1844. Frémont is credited with being the first European-descent person to "discover" Lake Tahoe.

In 1844, James K. Polk was elected President of the United States on a platform that espoused "Manifest Destiny" and westward expansion to the Pacific Ocean. Due to a simmering dispute between the U.S. and Mexico over Texas Territory, Polk ordered warships to the California coast for possible naval action and to hold off British and Russian ambitions to take over the country. For years, foreign powers had considered California "a plum ripe for the picking." Mexico had become independent of Spain in 1821.

On June 14, 1846, after being threatened with "extermination" by Mexican General Jose Castro, a small group of armed, American settlers arrested General Mariano Vallejo in Sonoma. Vallejo was considered an ally of the American effort to "liberate" California from Mexican rule. General Vallejo once said: "The Yankees are a wonderful people. If they emigrated to hell itself, they would somehow manage to change the climate."

Despite Vallejo's vocal support for an American takeover of California, the suspicious rebels who arrested him sent him to Sutter's Fort for safeguarding. The pioneers in Sonoma then declared independence and proclaimed California a new Republic to be governed under laws heavily influenced by the U.S Declaration of Independence and Constitution. They hoisted a new flag that included a grizzly bear on it and the words "California Republic."

Bear Flag Revolt and San Francisco Bay Area
As soon as Frémont, who was marching toward Oregon at the time, learned of this "Bear Flag Revolt," he changed direction, organized the rebels and his 62 troops into the California Battalion, and led the battalion against the Mexican army.

In a series of small but violent engagements, Frémont's ragtag force secured much of the San Francisco Bay Area. James Reed, a Donner Party leader who had been banished from the group after a fight between two men that ended in the death of a group member, was a member of the battalion. At Sutter's Fort he had made heroic efforts to mount rescue efforts for the Donner Party, which included Reed's wife and four children, at Sutter's Fort, but he had had no luck due, in part, to the Mexican-American War. There were neither able-bodied men nor supplies to stage a relief operation. Reed was appointed a captain in the California war effort. (See #29 in this series.)

Sutter
John Augustus Sutter played a major role in pre-gold rush emigration to California. Born of Swiss parents in 1803, Sutter had arrived in California in 1839. The following year he was granted Mexican citizenship and acquired an enormous land grant of 75 square miles at the junction of the Sacramento and American rivers. At that time Sutter was appointed the official representative of the Mexican government in the Sacramento River region.

Using Hawaiian and American-Indian labor, he had built a primitive outpost of grass huts. By 1844, Captain Sutter commanded a substantial military-style fort, protected by a dozen cannon of various caliber plus adobe walls 18 feet high and nearly three feet thick. The fort itself was surrounded by a thousand acres planted with wheat and 20,000 head of cattle grazed over the range. Calling his enterprise New Helvetia (New Switzerland), Sutter employed hundreds of people; local Indians were paid a token amount for their work, usually beads or credit to buy merchandise in his store. Sutter's Fort later became the foundation for modern Sacramento.

During the Mexican-American War, the U.S. Army had taken control of Sutter's Fort. It was the beginning of the end of Sutter's success in California. Gold was discovered in the American River early in 1848 and the subsequent Gold Rush ruined him financially as people simply squatted on his land, killed his cattle, and destroyed his crops. The final insult came when the U.S. Congress refused to honor his title to the land grant given him by the Mexican government.

Editor's Note: With the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848, the Mexican government was forced to relinquish a vast territory (525,000 square miles) that would eventually become the modern-day states of California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah and parts of Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico. Photos above courtesy of Sutter's Fort Archive.

Editor's Note: This installment is #31 in an exclusive, weekly series tracing the actual experiences of the Donner Party as it worked its way into American history. Mark McLaughlin, a weather historian and photographer, who lives on the North Shore of Lake Tahoe, writes the series for Tahoetopia. Copies of all the installments can be found in the Tahoetopia archive on the Home Page under Donner Party.

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