Donner Party – Tahoe Nuggets

On June 6, 2018, California State Parks celebrated the centennial anniversary of the Pioneer Monument that towers over Donner Memorial State Park. Erected after 20 years of effort in the early 1900s, this thought-provoking tribute to America’s westward pioneer families was dedicated in 1918.

Since then the monument has withstood a century of harsh Sierra winters. Year after year, the cast-bronze parents protecting their small children on top of the pedestal resolutely face west, determined to cross forbidding Donner Pass in their effort to reach California.

America’s storied yet controversial westward expansion movement in the mid-19^th century is being re-written by scholars and historians focused on the cultural and environmental impacts of this historic migration.

However, when it comes to the pioneer monument at Donner Memorial State Park, the focus on family is appropriate. A large portion of the overland emigrants traveling in wagon companies consisted of small or extended families. During the Donner Party entrapment in the winter of 1847, family units far surpassed single men in survival rates.

School teacher Charles F. McGlashan first moved to Truckee, California, in 1872 where natural curiosity led him to learn more about the Donner Party wagon train and what really happened that winter. He explored the encampment sites near Donner Lake and at Alder Creek Meadows north of Truckee. McGlashan interviewed many of the survivors and in 1879 published his book, History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra. McGlashan’s research was unprecedented at the time and his book is still considered a classic.

Charles McGlashan spoke to the California service organization Native Sons of the Golden West (NSGW) about raising the money for a monument to the Donner Party. The agreed and appointed Nevada City dentist Dr. Chester W. Chapman as chairman of their Donner Monument Committee in charge of fund raising.

Dr. Chapman wanted to raise $30,000 or more for an appropriately-sized structure, but many, including San Francisco’s mayor James Phelan, felt that a simple engraved slab of polished granite would suffice. Chapman resisted all efforts to economize the project and his committee scheduled a ground-breaking ceremony with the placement of a cornerstone to strongly signal the forthcoming monument.

Dr. Chapman brought much-needed energy and organization skills to the endeavor, but he also asserted that it should be dedicated as the Pioneer Monument to honor all overland emigrants, not just the Donner group. Chapman’s idea to recognize all who crossed the plains spoke to the pride of those who wished to honor the memory of their forefathers, beyond just the Donner Party.

Completed in 1917, the base pedestal for the pioneer statue was constructed of rock and gravel from around Donner Lake. It was McGlashan’s measurements of tall tree stumps cut during the winter of 1847 that dictated the 22.5-foot height of the pedestal for the monument, representing the depth of snow that winter.

An analysis by this writer of the peak snow depth at Donner Lake in 1847 suggests a maximum depth of about 17 feet but reducing the number by 5 feet or so would have made no difference to the starving emigrants. See my book The Donner Party: Weathering the Storm.

All eight remaining survivors of the Donner Party were invited to the dedication ceremony on June 6, 1918, but only three felt healthy enough to appear. Nearly 3,500 people attended the event, but instead of covered wagons there were 300 automobiles in the parking lot.

McGlashan told the Native Sons organization that he would allow them to re-publish his Donner Party book with profits earmarked for a statue. Other financing could come from selling small glass vials containing wood from a log used to build one of the emigrant’s cabins. Further financial help would come from the Native Daughters of the Golden West as well as the State Legislature.

Charles McGlashan was adamantly opposed to Chapman’s proposal to minimize the Donner connection. He told the committee that the monument was going to be built on the exact site of one of the three cabins that sheltered the emigrants at the lake. McGlashan himself had excavated the location and found period artifacts like dishes and cooking utensils.

Above is the original historic plaque installed on the east side of the pedestal. Note that the wording starts with "On this spot." Due to the insistence of Dr. Chapman and the Sons & Daughters organizations a new plaque was created that began with "Near this spot." That is how the plaque reads today. The change infuriated McGlashan.

Overlooking Donner Lake.

Angry and frustrated at the wording change and the changed dedication focus, Charles McGlashan felt that that his goal of a Donner Party memorial had been compromised — he never visited the site again. Dr. Chester Chapman succeeded in his vital role as chairman of the monument committee, but due to procedural process he was left off the Native Sons official list of committeemen. In the end, however, McGlashan’s dream prevailed as most park visitors today see the pedestal and statue as a monument to the Donner Party.

View of the Sierra Crest west of Lake Tahoe through rimed trees from Donner Peak ski area, circa March 2018.

READ MY TAHOE WEEKLY Magazine article for more details about the monument’s origins.

CHECK OUT this new 8 minute documentary video about the Donner Party rescuers and their stories of survival and heroism in the mountains. This short film was produced for the new theater at the Visitor Center at Donner Memorial State Park. Yours truly is the host and narrator.

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#242 FATE OF LANSFORD HASTINGS & BRAZIL

TAHOE NUGGET #242: FATE OF LANSFORD HASTINGS & BRAZIL
If you ever hear about Portuguese-speaking Brazilians dressing up in American Confederate uniforms, waving the Rebel flag, wearing Southern-belle skirts, and playing the banjo at a Fourth of July barbecue, one of the people you can blame is Lansford W. Hastings. Anyone familiar with the Donner Party story will remember Hastings. He is often cast as the villain in that tragic tale.

Young Brazilian, descendant of an American Confederate family, circa 1998.

In early November 1846, members of the Donner Party were trapped east of the Sierra Nevada by deep snow. One of the reasons that their wagon train was attempting to cross the mountains so late in the season is because Lansford Hastings, a California land promoter and lawyer, had convinced leaders in the Donner group to take his untried shortcut through the Wasatch Mountains in Utah.

In 1845 Hastings had published a popular overland trail guide to the Pacific, a book that promoted the virtues of the land, climate, and health found in California and the Oregon Coast. He traveled from Ohio to New York City giving lectures and hawking his book, “The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California.”

Lansford Hastings’ guidebook to California contained just about everything you needed to know to travel west in a covered wagon. In person, however, Hastings persuaded three wagon trains to try an untested route which was only suitable for horses or pack animals. Following Hastings was a mistake that cost the Donner Party dearly in lost time and provisions.

In New York City he met Mormon leader Sam Brannan who was preparing a ship to carry Latter Day Saints to the West Coast. Hastings tried to persuade Brannan to bring his followers to California’s Sacramento Delta region where Hastings was hoping to establish a settlement on a Mexican land grant, in the manner of John Sutter’s fort.

Mormon Sam Brannan and nearly 250 Latter Day Saints sailed from New York City to San Francisco onboard the ship Brooklyn, arriving in July 1846. Brannan and his followers were hoping to start a Mormon settlement in California, but the Mexican-American War foiled their plans. As a professional printer and journalist, he started the California Star newspaper in San Francisco. After gold was discovered in early 1848, Brannan became California’s first millionare, a boozer, womanizer, and an ex-Mormon.

Lansford Hastings’ message was perfectly timed as it fit in with a growing political push toward westward expansion, and an almost religious exhortation that inspired frontier families to search out new land. Everyone was swelling with the notion of American Exceptionalism and driven by the concept of Manifest Destiny.

In the years between 1840 and 1845, the total number of emigrants that traveled from the United States overland to the Mexican province of California was just 325. But in 1846 alone, at least 1,500 people took on the grueling, often deadly California Trail.

Spirit of Manifest Destiny, an 1872 painting by John Nash, represented the modernization of the new West. Columbia, who’s stringing telegraph wire and carrying a school book, illuminates the darkness of untamed wilderness and leads progress, technology and civilization westward.

There were plenty of people involved in the Donner Party’s trajectory to disaster, but historians often label Hastings as the “bad guy.” Technically, there should have been nothing wrong with Hastings promoting a new cutoff that would save time and distance. Others were also developing alternate routes and parts of the California Trail changed frequently during the 1840s, but Hastings failed to lead the late arriving Donner Party through his cutoff and they were abandoned to their fate. Hastings tendency to improvise as he went and overstate his knowledge of geography led directly to the Donner Party tragedy and tarnished his reputation.

The Hastings Cutoff navigated steep canyons in the Wasatch and crossed the barren, virtually waterless Utah Desert. Note Hastings lack of awareness about topography with the big detour around the Ruby Mountains.

Hastings arrived back in California just in time to join Major John C. Frémont in the war against Mexico. Fighting in California was short-lived and in 1847 Hastings moved to San Francisco where he practiced law and invested in real estate. He was elected to the School Board and later appointed a judge.

In January 1848, James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s sawmill and Hastings was soon plucking nuggets out of the American River. That summer, 29-year-old Hastings married 19-year-old Charlotte at Sutter’s Fort. (Hastings’ abandoned first wife had either died or divorced him by then.) Hastings formed a partnership with Sutter and opened a miner’s supply store, and then later ran a ferryboat operation.

John A. Sutter. Lansford Hastings hoped to emulate Sutter’s success at obtaining a Mexican land grant to develop and create his own fiefdom.

Over the next eight years, Charlotte Hastings gave birth to five children, four of whom survived. In 1858, Lansford moved his family to Arizona Territory, where Hastings became postmaster, practiced law, and in 1860 was again appointed a judge.

Although raised as a “Northern Yankee” in Ohio, Hastings saw opportunity in aligning with the Confederacy at the start of the American Civil War. He devised a scheme to annex Southern California and Arizona Territory with an occupation by anti-Union recruits from the Golden State.

During the Civil War, Hastings sided with the South. He dreamed up a scheme to separate California from the Union and unite it with the Confederacy. His plan didn’t work.

When Charlotte died in 1861, Hastings placed his children in the care of friends near San Francisco and travelled to Texas, Louisiana, and finally to Richmond, Virginia, where he met Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America. For his efforts, Hastings was commissioned a major in the Confederate Army.

After the South’s military defeat in 1865, Hastings headed for Mexico and then journeyed to Brazil to obtain permission from Emperor Dom Pedro II to establish an American colony for disaffected Southern families seeking relief from the victorious Union government. After choosing a large land parcel near the Amazon River, Hastings returned to Alabama to publish his next book, “Emigrants Guide to Brazil.”

Even today, Brazilian descendants of Southern Confederate families assemble near the town of Americana to dress in antebellum-era attire and honor their ancestral traditions.

In 1867, 115 ex-patriots sailed with Hastings to Brazil to develop tropical plantation lifestyles free from interference. In less than a decade, Hastings’ colony consisted of 22 families with more than 100 workers. But Hastings life-long dream of ruling his own settlement was dashed in 1870 when the 51-year-old died at sea while on another voyage from the U.S. to Brazil. He’s buried in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Brazilian cemetery where American descendants of the Confederacy are buried.

Overall, up to 20,000 ex-Confederates immigrated to Brazil after the Civil War where today their some of ancestors live in the community of Americana. Proud of their heritage, descendants gather four times a year and still celebrate Dixie traditions and the Fourth of July.

Read more about Lansford Hastings in my Sierra Sun column:

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