The Dougout

For those knowledgeable about the Donner Party the phrase "The Forlorn Hope" (or "The Snowshoers") has much meaning and conjures images of heroism. To those less familiar the Donner Party only means the story about some pioneers stuck in the Sierra snow who resorted to cannibalism.

The above picture is of the pioneer monument at Donner Lake in Northern California. I have visited there many times, the national park is just off Highway 80. The base of the Monument is twenty-two feet high, which was also the snow depth in the winter of 1846/7.

It is a pity that most of the American people know so little about the Donner Party. The Forlorn Hope left the cabins around Donner Lake on 16 December 1846 in a desperate attempt to reach Fort Sutter in what is now downtown Sacramento (still there and well worth a visit). Seventeen individuals made the attempt, two turned back and seven made it through. Of these fifteen three stand out as giants of charactor and strength: William Eddy, Mary Ann Graves and Charles Stanton. As Bernard DeVoto states in his classic work The Year of Decision: 1846:

He refused to die. One Indian was still helping him and they met another one whose help could be bought by a promise of tobacco. Supported on their shoulders, Eddy left bloody footprints across six miles of rough ground and came, an hour before sunset, to a little shack on the edge of Johnson's Ranch, the first outpost of settlement, at the eastern wall of the Sacramento Valley. The shack belonged to M.D. Ritchie, an emigrant of '46, one of a number who had settled near Johnson's for the winter. Young Harriet Ritchie came to the door and Eddy asked her for bread.

Harriet Ritchie burst into tears. But she got him to bed, got bread for him, and ran out among the other shacks, summoning help. Before long, four Americans were hurrying back to find the six survivors whom Eddy had described, and were able to find them by following his bloody footprints. The Forlorn Hope had reached the succor of their own kind, seven of the fifteen who started out, thirty-three days after the beginning of the effort for which they had laid in six days' rations of two mouthfuls a day.

A small rescue party left immediately for Donner Lake. They would take horses as far as possible and then walk. This was no small matter. Every man in the rescue party was risking sharing the fate of the Donners' in the unforgiving Sierra winter. As Sheriff McKinstry said:

I will again give you a list of their names, as I think they ought to be recorded in letters of gold: Glover, "Dan" Tucker, Sept Moultry, Ned Coffeemeyer, Joe Sels and the two Rhoads brothers.

This is quoted from George R. Stewart's classic work on the Donners, Ordeal by Hunger. I wonder if either Stewart's or DeVoto's work is much read in college classrooms. They are both so retrograde, portraying American pioneers in a sympathetic light. The Donner Party themselves are representative of early American pioneers. As, I believe, DeVoto stated about Mary Ann Graves, she was one dot of Manifest Destiny. Even mentioning the words "Manifest Destiny" without sneering the words out is virtually unknown in college classrooms.

This is how Devoto characterizes the Mexican-American War:

Few Mexicans lived there in '46, practically none when the colony was made. The occupation of Texas neither usurped a community, a culture or an economy. Instead it created all three.

Moreover, it is a fundamental mistake to think of Mexico, in this period, or for many years before, as a republic, or even as a government. It must be understood as a late stage in the breakdown of the Spanish Empire. Throughout that time it was never able to establish a stability, whether social or political. Abortive, discordant movements of revolution or counter-revolution followed one another in a meaningless succession, and each one ran down in chaos from which no governing class ever arose, or even a political party, but only some gangs. Sometimes the gangs were captained by intelligent and capable men, sometimes for a while they stood for the merchants, the clergy, the landowners, or various programs of reform, but they all came in the end to simple plunder. Furthermore, the portions of Mexico with which we are concerned, Texas, New Mexico and California, were precisely the portions where Spain's imperial energy had faltered and run down. To this frontier Great Spain had come and here it could go no farther, here it began to ebb back. ... Stephen W. Kearny and Alexander Doniphan brought more safety, stability, and hope to the New Mexicans in two months than Spain had found for them in two centuries, or Mexico after Spain. The annexation of Texas was a tragedy to some Mexicans but it was not a tragedy for Mexico. It was the last episode in the erosion of an empire.***

Imagine this viewpoint finding its way into an American history college classroom! Both DeVoto's and Stewart's are still available and in print. Read them for a "Triumphalist" view of the settling of the American West.




*** DeVoto, Bernard, The Year of Decision, 1846, pp.12-13.

Update, 1/22/06: Ron Briley over at History News Network confirms my contention that revisionists are rewriting the history of the American West with the standard Race/Class/Gender interpretation. Briley in his review of Brokeback Mountain (I haven't seen it) is cheerleading for the "New Western History." The tragedy of this is that while undergrads are imbibing the "New History" they will remain ignorant of such scholars as Dale Morgan. There will be no balance in the classroom. Fortunately, the classics are still in the library, but will any professor point a student to them?

One last point, anyone familiar with the literature knows that with this quote Briley (and the revisionists) is attacking a strawman:

The New Western History of scholars such as Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard White have expanded our Western horizons by including the voices/stories of women [See above], Native Americans [Dee Brown?], Asians [Huh?], Latinos [Huh, again], and common laborers [Cowboys, Railroad workers?]. [Interestingly, Briley does not include blacks. One-third of post Civil War cowboys were black. I learned this from reading "unenlightened" histories that the revisionists disparage.]

They should be honest enough to note their problem is with interpretation, not "inclusion."