The romance of science

I’ve stumbled across enough blogs commenting on this Donner Party story that I’m moved to comment on it myself.

RENO, Nev. (AP) – There’s no physical evidence that the family who gave the Donner Party its name had anything to do with the cannibalism the ill-fated pioneers have been associated with for a century and a half, two scientists said Thursday.

Cannibalism has been documented at the Sierra Nevada site where most of the Donner Party’s 81 members were trapped during the brutal winter of 1846-47, but 21 people, including all the members of the George and Jacob Donner families, were stuck six miles away because a broken axle had delayed them.

No cooked human bones were found among the thousands of fragments of animal bones at that Alder Creek site, suggesting Donner family members did not resort to cannibalism, the archaeologists said at a conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Sacramento, Calif.

“The Donner family ended up getting the stigma basically because of the name,” said Julie Schablitsky, one of the lead authors. “But of all the people, they were probably the least deserving of it.”

The sawed and chopped animal bone fragments, recovered during an archaeological dig over the past three years, do suggest “extreme desperation and starvation,” the study said. One of the animals eaten was a pet dog – presumably “Uno,” mentioned in some of the children’s later writings.

“The Donner Party’s experience was bad, but it wasn’t as bad as everybody’s been told,” said Schablitsky, a historical archaeologist at the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History.

Not so fast says archaeology-savvy Cronoca:

No human remains found among the debris at the Donner Party’s Sierra Nevada campsite, according to today’s AP reports — which rather misleadingly state that this disproves the allegations that the survivors resorted to cannibalism in extremis. Read more closely and you’ll see that the only thing definitively established was the absence of cooked human bone. Not to spoil anyone’s appetite, but from what I recall about documented cases of survival cannibalism, it’s usually more a matter of a strip of flesh here and another there, keeping the rations as unrecognizable as possible.

We’ll never actually disprove that members of the party tried to survive by resorting to cannibalism. The best we could do is by locating a midden and, through analyzing the feces or coprolites found there for DNA, determine that some did resort to cannibalism.

Ah, the romance of science.

BTW, can anyone verify that somewhere in the California university system there’s a cafeteria in a student union named for the Donners? That’s what I’ve heard, anyway.

6 comments… add one
  • Ann Julien Link

    Don’t know about California, but Emily’s cafeteria at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin is called “Downer Hall”, or “the Downer” by those who love it (not). Pretty close?

    Just a bit of silliness for a Friday—have a nice weekend, all. AJ

  • You may be thinking of a college in Colorado where supposedly a school eating facility was named after Alferd Packer, who allegedly survived a winter upon the others trapped in the mountains with him. And that is Alferd, not Alfred.

  • Patrick Link

    Yes, the student dining hall in the student center at C.U. is called the Alferd Packer dining hall.

  • That may well be what I’m thinking of. It’s a 40 year old memory so it’s bound to be a little fuzzy.

  • Hey wait, this story doesn’t say that nobody in the “Donner party” resorted to cannibalism. It’s saying that the cannibalism took place at the main site but the Donner family wasn’t there, and off at their campsite 6 miles away there’s no evidence of it.

  • Maybe they only dropped by for Sunday Brunch.

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