Lansford Hastings

I have friends who live in Reno, and they tell the weirdest stories.

It's all Lansford Hastings' fault.

Anyway, road ahead, kicking off a four-game homestead now, starting with your reigning NHL champion, Carolina Hurricanes on Sunday the 18th.

Mark Jankowski revenge game.

George Donner's two brothers, Jacob and James Reed, follow with their families.

[dramatic music] Donner has read one of the many popular new trail guidebooks by Lansford Hastings.

Hastings was trying to garner support from the government for his so-called shortcut to the West.

Hastings Cutoff claimed to shave two weeks off the journey time.

Lansford Hastings would not publish this emigrant's guide showing us the best route to California if he did not travel every step of it himself.

Problem was, he never traveled it himself, let alone with a trail of wagons.

Tomorrow, I turn my wagons to the Hastings Cutoff.

At Fort Laramie, the emigrants typically received the latest information about trail conditions ahead, compared notes with other travelers, and sometimes reorganized their parties.

It was here that some members of the company received a letter from a man named Lansford Hastings.

Lansford Warren Hastings was twenty-seven years old in 1846, a lawyer from Ohio who had made the California crossing in 1842 and had returned east with a plan so large and so impractical that it is difficult, in retrospect, to understand how anyone took it seriously.

His plan was to become the president of an independent California republic, a nation he would found, govern, and lead into a glorious future that was part Manifest Destiny and part Lansford Hastings's personal ambition in proportions that were not always easy to distinguish.

To achieve this, he needed settlers, American settlers in large numbers, enough to tip the demographic balance of California away from its Mexican population and toward the American one he intended to govern.

To attract settlers, he published a guidebook, The Emigrant's Guide to Oregon and California, in 1845, that described the trail to California in terms that were, to put it charitably, optimistic, and which included a description of a shortcut that would save emigrants approximately four hundred miles of travel.

The consensus is that the three weeks lost in the Wasatch Mountains were the decisive factor.

Arriving at the Sierra Nevada three weeks earlier would in all probability have allowed the party to cross before the November snowfall.