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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Kelly Dixon, a thirty-five-year-old professor at the University of Montana in Missoula, describes herself as an archeologist of the West. A wooden plaque with six styles of nineteenth-century barbed wire nailed to it hangs on her office wall; her shelves are crammed with books like "Antique Western Bitters Bottles," "The Glass Glossary," and the 1897 Sears, Roebuck catalogue, and treatises on windmills, barns, and human bones. She works exclusively on sites in the historical period--in the United States, that means the past five hundred years--and has spent a lot of time in ghost towns. In Virginia City, Nevada, a gold-and-silver boomtown on the Comstock lode, she dug the buried remains of the Boston Saloon, the first African-American bar in the Old West to be excavated. Contrary to popular notions of Western saloons as raucous places for brawls and shootouts--and of black establishments as dives--the Boston Saloon, she discovered, served the finest cuts of meat, used crystal stemware, and offered live music and games. The fragments she uncovered, she wrote in a book on the subject, helped tell "a more complex and vivid Western story."
In Virginia City, Dixon, who is tall and patient, with a husky voice and hair that is the white-blond color of corn silk, encountered another young archeologist, Julie Schablitsky, whom she had met some years earlier. Schablitsky--excitable, dark-eyed, quick--was conducting her own dig, a few blocks away, and had managed to extract four distinct strands of DNA from the copper needles of a hundred-and-thirty-five-year-old syringe, which she thinks was used, perhaps in a brothel-like setting, for the recreational injection of morphine. Her finding, which, she says, was the first example of DNA being recovered from an inanimate object in an archeological context, inspired Dixon to try to do the same. Dixon retrieved DNA from a clench mark on a pipe stem found in the Boston Saloon; it turned out to belong to a woman. The two archeologists decided to team up on their next dig. Schablitsky had been considering the O.K. Corral. Then someone suggested a site that engaged even more directly with the high drama of Western settlement: the Donner Family Camp, in the Sierra Nevada, near Truckee, California.
A scandal in its day, the saga of the Donner Party--a group of emigrants snowbound in the mountains during the winter of 1846-47--remains notorious for its association with cannibalism. The group was in the first wave of what became a sweeping westward migration, and its disastrous fate is deeply embedded in the national psyche. Over the years, the story has taken many forms. First, it was a gripping news event, and then it was a tabloid sensation; with the gold rush, it became a spooky campfire legend told by forty-niners, whose own perilous journeys West were burnished by the tale. The next generation--comfortably established, historically self-conscious, and already experiencing nostalgia for the old days--made pioneer heroes of the vilified company. The major proponent of this view was an enterprising Truckee journalist and jack-of-all-trades named Charles Fayette McGlashan. In 1879, he set out to write the true history of the Donner Party. He later explained, "I had been seven years in Truckee, as teacher, lawyer and editor, and from the best information I had then been able to acquire, believed the Donner Party consisted of four people: Donner, his wife, a Dutchman, and somebody else, and that the Dutchman ate the others up."
As McGlashan soon discovered, the party actually consisted of eighty-one people, two-thirds of whom camped near what is today called Donner Lake. The rest, including all the members of the Donner family, stayed in a meadow some seven miles away. His careful investigation--he studied all the existing records, and corresponded with twenty-four of the twenty-six survivors then living--yielded a series of articles for the Truckee Republican and, a short time later, a book that for many years stood as the authoritative version. He befriended several of the survivors, and eventually used his influence to help build a massive bronze sculpture on the shores of Donner Lake, dedicated to the emigrants, called Pioneer Monument. (It is inscribed with the words "Virile to risk and find; kindly withal and a ready help. Facing the brunt of fate; indomitable,--unafraid," and when it was completed, in 1918, it weighed eighteen tons.) But McGlashan's emotional Victorian prose, and his essential delicacy, managed in some respects to obscure more than it revealed. Other accounts--both first-hand and after-the-fact--were equally compromised.
It has long been accepted that cannibalism occurred at the lake and among those trying to escape the mountains. Survivors admitted it, and, in the nineteen-eighties, an archeologist from the University of Nevada named Donald Hardesty found human bone fragments at the lake in a deposition with burned and butchered cow bones. But everything about the Donner Family Camp--even its location--has been disputed, and among the eleven survivors, most of them orphaned children, the subject of cannibalism was especially contentious. To this day, descendants of the family say that they don't believe any such thing occurred. Nonetheless, "Donner" is still a byword for cannibalism, and the descendants, like their forebears, want to disentangle their family's experience from that of the larger group that bore their name.
In a phenomenally unreliable historical record, cloudy with misperceptions, contradictions, self-deceit, and macabre exaggeration, Dixon and Schablitsky saw an opportunity. As historical archeologists, Schablitsky says, their job is to "confirm, contribute to, or contradict the written record," and always to keep in mind by whom and for what purpose history is written. (She also says that historical archeologists are the "red-haired stepchildren of archeology," looked down upon by archeologists of the prehistoric period, who don't realize how much their discipline can add to already documented sites.) In most tellings, the Donner Party story begins with the travellers being snowed in and ends with cannibalism. "We want to know more," Dixon says. "We want to know about the experiences not only of the men but of the women and the children out there. We want to say something about human behavior. They were trying to adjust very quickly to a terrible situation. What did they do in that camp when pushed to the limits?" Using a modern hybrid of anthropology and forensic science, and drawing on the expertise of a large research team, the archeologists hope to reframe one of the most enduring and confused myths of the American West, turning it from a horror story about ghoulish appetites or a melodrama of pioneer travail and triumph into a case study of starvation, adaptation, and survival. The goal, Dixon says, is to "affect the way history is told--to affect the way collective memory exists as we know it."
In 1845, the United States Senate published the report of Captain J. C. Fremont, of the topographical bureau, on his expeditions to Oregon and California, and helped launch an era of exploration and Western colonization. Many of those who travelled with the Donner Party were respectable agrarian types, who had given up stable Midwestern existences for the extravagant promise of California: a place where, it was rumored, a man could live two hundred and fifty years and, when he died, be resurrected by the "health-breathing Californian zephyrs." George Donner, the party's captain and namesake, was a farmer from Springfield, Illinois, in late middle age. His wife, Tamsen, a teacher born in Massachusetts, held a regular literary salon; during the winter before they embarked, she used the gatherings to read from a popular book, "The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California," which exhorted flatlanders to "exchange the sterile hills, bleak mountains, chilling winds, and piercing cold of their native lands, for the deep, rich, and productive soil, and uniform, mild and delightful climate, of this unparalleled region." The author, Lansford Hastings, was a young adventurer who hoped to make his name in the emerging territory. California was a place, he claimed, "in all respects, to promote the unbounded happiness and prosperity, of civilized and enlightened man."
George and Tamsen left Illinois with three ox-drawn wagons in April of 1846, bringing with them...
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