No More Secrets

The fine focus is gone from the memory now. All Pat Ramsey can recall is an indistinct image of a picture hanging in her grandparents’ house in Sacramento. “I remember somebody saying that behind the picture frame was something my grandfather didn’t want to talk about,” says Carmel resident Ramsey, 68.

In Mary Murray’s case, it was not a photograph but a book she wasn’t supposed to discuss. In fact, her grandmother told Murray, 93, that she’d disown her if she ever read this particular book--a history of the Donner party.

Murray’s grandmother, Leanna Donner, the daughter of the party’s original leader George Donner, and Ramsey’s great-great-grandfather, Lewis Keseberg, were members of the tragic band of 90 emigrants who set out from Independence, Mo., in April 1846, only to be trapped by a 22-foot snowfall in the Eastern Sierra, a few days’ journey from their destination.

In what was to become the most sensational episode of the Westward movement, nearly half the party succumbed to starvation. The 48 survivors resorted to cannibalism and even to killing. When help finally arrived more than three months later, rescuers found dismembered human limbs and broken skulls strewn around the snow, bodies with flesh stripped from the bone and a carcass with the heart and liver cut out. The survivors seldom spoke of the horrors they’d seen, and forbade their progeny from talking of it. But time has a way of unearthing even the most entrenched taboos. Now, 150 years after the Donner party erected their makeshift shelters at Donner Lake, descendants of the party members are finally getting together to share their family legends.

More than 200 descendants of George and Tamsen Donner are expected at the first of two Donner party events this summer, on Saturday and Sunday. The second, the Donner Party Sesquicentennial, will be hosted by the California State Parks Department on Aug. 15-18. Organizers expect some 300 descendants representing all of the 11 families on the ill-fated wagon train. Both events will be held at Donner Lake, now a popular recreation area between Truckee and Soda Springs northwest of Lake Tahoe.

“The descendants are still searching for answers,” says the park department’s sesquicentennial organizer Frankye Craig. “What about the cannibalism? Was it as bad as it was made out to be? And who actually took part? Many of them say: ‘Our family didn’t but we know the others did.’

“And they all want to know: Did Lewis Keseberg kill Tamsen Donner? We’re going to hold an inquest to address the question.”

It’s not only family members who are obsessed with the Donner story. The public, also, has an appetite for the constant stream of new books, papers, plays, novels, TV movies and documentaries on the subject.

Aside from the timeless appeal of disaster, the story fascinates because it’s a reminder about what happens when social bonds break down. Historians speculate that if the Donner party had pulled together, members might have made it over the Sierra before the snow fell.

Historians say feuding was fueled by the decision in July to take an untried shortcut to California, the so-called Hastings Cut-Off around the south side of Great Salt Lake--a fatal mistake that delayed the party’s arrival in the mountains until October. As the party lost time on the tortuous desert crossing, tempers snapped and human decency crumbled. An old man couldn’t keep up with the group and was left behind to die. James Frazier Reed was attacked by an overtaxed wagon driver. Reed stabbed the man to death with his hunting knife.

Everyone began looking for someone else to blame for their troubles. “Each pulled into their own family,” says James Frazier Reed III, the 60-year-old great-great-grandson of Reed.

“All the bickering was the cause of the tragedy, when you get right down to it,” says 85-year-old Nona McGlashan, a writer and authority on the Donner party. “They would stop and haggle and it delayed them.”

The disputes continued in camp, one family accusing another of not sharing food and water, others arguing over which man should lead them out. The survivors packed the bickering and blame-casting out of the mountains with them. Over the following generations, some of the incidents were forgotten, but the generic grudges were passed on leading to one of the most stubborn intra-family spats in California history.

“I think these kinds of family feuds can be carried on generation to generation easily,” says Reed. “Look at Bosnia. Look at Ireland.”

Reed hopes this summer’s get-togethers will begin to heal the rifts. “Maybe we can bring together some families who were pushed apart by history,” he says.

When the Donner party survivors reached safety at Sutter’s Fort, they quickly dispersed, going to work as farmers and laborers throughout the Sacramento Valley. The three orphaned Donner girls, Frances, Georgia and Eliza, all younger than 7, were adopted.

“The families wouldn’t talk to anybody about being with the Donner party,” says McGlashan, granddaughter of Truckee newspaperman C.F. McGlashan, who was the first to tell the story in depth in his book “The Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra” in 1880. “They suffered a lot for being identified with it,” says McGlashan. “They were ostracized and shamed, so they went underground.”

It was the cannibalism that weighed most heavily on the survivors. In addition to that stigma, all of the party were branded as accident-prone buffoons. After all, of the hundreds of wagon trains that came West in 1846, all the others got through. It was only the Donners who failed, and failed spectacularly.

“I think the Donners were very, very foolish,” says Ann Houghton Smith, the 72-year-old granddaughter of Eliza Donner. “They used very poor judgment.” Smith, of Arroyo Grande, says the Donner legacy is like the legacy of the Titanic.

As children, Smith and the other descendants were never able to entirely shake their association with the bad-luck band. Whenever their classmates found out the truth, the taunts and jeers began. Pat Hillman, 68, a great-granddaughter of Leanna Donner remembers: “Children would say, ‘Oh, you’re a descendant of cannibals.’ My mother had never wanted to talk about it, so I thought they [the children] were lying.”

Alice Elitha Baker, a great-granddaughter of another of George Donner’s daughters, Elitha, remembers going on a fourth-grade field trip to Sutter’s Fort, in Sacramento, where relics of the party were then on display. “Mama mentioned it [the family connection to the Donner party] to my teacher, and I just wanted her to be quiet,” says Baker, 50.

If it wasn’t classmates or historians talking, sometimes family members themselves broke the silence to bring up old hostilities. James Frazier Reed III heard his uncle disparage other families in the band. Reed, a petroleum producer from Edmonds, Wash., asked his uncle: “Why do we still care at this point?”

His uncle shook his head sadly, says Reed. “He didn’t know.”

From the perspective of 150 years, Reed ascribes some of the fault to his forebear. “He’s the one who pushed so hard for Hastings Cut-Off,” Reed says. “You can blame him for what went wrong more than anyone else.” However, his ancestor also made his way through the Sierra before the pass was closed by snow, and later returned with a rescue party.

So he was both hero and antagonist. His great-great-grandson believes this is one of the lessons of the Donner party: Extremity brings out the best and worst in everyone, often both qualities in the same person.

One outcome of this summer’s reunions, then, may be to reassign some of the praise and condemnation that has followed the various party members all these years. “There are enough errors to go around and there’s enough heroism to go around,” Reed says, adding that even Keseberg may have been “over-villainized.”

Keseberg’s reputation dates from the time the final rescue party arrived at Donner Lake in April 1847. A number of survivors had already left with earlier rescue teams. There was only one person still alive at the lake--the towering, blond-bearded German immigrant, Keseberg. Rescuers found him, filthy and verminous, sitting beside a pot containing human entrails.

Piecing together what had happened the last few days at camp, the rescue party accused Keseberg of murdering Tamsen Donner and eating her body, although no evidence of this was found. Tamsen was a well-loved schoolteacher who planned to open a girls’ school in California. Because of her bravery in the mountains and her devotion to her husband and her children, she has been painted as a Western heroine, with poems and plays written about her.

Keseberg is remembered as a classic villain of the West, a reputation he did little to dispel in his lifetime. The self-confessed cannibal managed to further outrage the public by opening a restaurant in Sacramento. Rumors began to circulate: Keseberg was bragging to his drinking buddies that human liver was the sweetest tidbit he had ever tasted.

Keseberg’s wife, Phillipine, survived the trip over the mountains (their daughter, Ada, perished), and the couple had more children. However, after the couple’s death, the Keseberg line seemed to vanish like snowmelt.

Dozens of Breens, Eddys, Reeds, Murphys and Donners visit Donner Memorial State Park in Truckee every year, adding their names to a card catalog of Donner party descendants. But the Keseberg file has remained empty--until now.

Finally, one woman has come forth claiming Keseberg as her ancestor. Like many of the Donner descendants, Pat Ramsey received only sketchy information about her ancestor when she was young. There was the secret on the back of the picture, for one thing. She never saw it but believes it may have been a clipping about the Donner party or something about Keseberg.

“I gradually learned the story behind it as I grew up,” she says. “But because of the shame that was put on him, his heirs stamped on his memory, buried it, let it die.”

But Ramsey could not let the legacy perish. She donated money to have markers placed at the grave sites of Phillipine Keseberg and two of the Kesebergs’ children, Bertha and August, at the Sacramento City Cemetery. (Keseberg died a pauper and his grave was never found.)

“My interpretation is that Keseberg was a scapegoat because of his German ancestry,” Ramsey says. “There were racial tensions on that trip--so who do you blame? You create a scapegoat.”

Ramsey, a retired attorney, finds it difficult to put forth a solid defense of her great-great-grandfather. But when asked, “Did Keseberg murder Tamsen Donner?” Ramsey replies: “I don’t think so. It’s just a feeling I have, an emotional response.”

Tamsen Donner’s great-granddaughter, Ann Houghton Smith, has her own feelings on the matter.

Like Ramsey, Smith chooses her words carefully, aware that she may be rewriting history. Her theory: After Tamsen Donner’s husband died, Tamsen was alone in the mountains, except for Keseberg who was living in a nearby shack. Tamsen’s children had struggled on over the pass with a rescue team.

“I think her biggest thought was to get to those children and she just started walking, heading out,” Smith says. “There was no body ever found. Her journal was never found. Her body is probably in a bear den somewhere.”

If Ann Houghton Smith has a chance to talk to Pat Ramsey this August on the shores of Donner Lake, she’ll tell Ramsey she believes Lewis Keseberg is innocent. Says Smith: “I want her to know that, on my part, this thing is over.”