George Donner

June 1846, nine brand-new covered wagons rattle out of Springfield, Illinois, and head west.

One of their leaders is 62-year-old George Donner.

His wife, Tamsen Donner, is a schoolteacher, but on the trail, women must be ready to do anything.

Baby.

I could never have believed we could have traveled so far with so little difficulty.

Indeed, if we do not experience anything worse, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started.

But as leader of the wagon train, Tamsen's husband, George Donner, is aware there's one final obstacle to their journey, the Sierra Nevada.

Peaks up to 14,000 feet.

It's about a ship that made it through but left something vital behind.

This is the story of Captain George R. Donner and the night he walked out of a locked room and right off the face of the earth.

Now, it was late April 1937.

The calendar might've said spring was on its way, but Mother Nature up on The Lakes didn't pay any mind to paper calendars.

Oh, no.

The wind coming off the water was sharp enough to slice open a canvas sack, and the ice flows were still thick, grinding against the hulls of the steel freighters like the teeth of some great starving beast.

Now, Captain George R. Donner, he was a company man, a seasoned sailor who knew The Lakes like the back of his own weathered hand.

He was at the helm of the O.M. McFarland, a massive coal freighter hauling 9,800 tons of the black stuff from Erie, Pennsylvania, all the way up to Port Washington, Wisconsin.

The place we are is not quite the place we need, and the place we need is somewhere to the west.

George Donner made this calculation in the winter of 1845 to 1846.

He was sixty-two years old, which was genuinely old for the standards of the era, and particularly old for the beginning of a two thousand mile overland journey.

He had already made the westward move several times in his life, born in North Carolina, moved to Kentucky, moved to Indiana, moved to Illinois, following the frontier's receding edge with the restless energy that the century seemed to generate in its men.

She had reservations about the journey.

She expressed them.

George listened, as he seems to have listened to her in most things, and then he made his decision, and she packed her botanical specimens and her journals and her Latin books and her three daughters and the older girls, and she got into the wagon.

George's brother, Jacob Donner, was going too, also elderly, also with a large family, also persuaded that California represented a final opportunity worth the considerable risk.