Virginia Reed Murphy

Remember, never take no cutoffs, and hurry along as fast as you can.

[horse gallops] Virginia Reed.

And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler.

And what a story we just heard, with the Donner family itself paying the highest price for George Donner's mistake.

He died in poverty in Sacramento in 1895, unable to escape the shadow that the Donner Party had cast over him.

Virginia Reed, James Reed's daughter, who was thirteen years old when she came out of the mountains and who became one of the most articulate witnesses to the ordeal, wrote a letter to a cousin in Illinois that was later published and that contains one of the most frequently quoted passages in the entire Donner Party literature.

She told her cousin about the journey and the winter and the rescue and the ordeal of crossing the mountains, and then she said, "Never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can." She was thirteen years old, and she had learned the most important thing that her experience had to teach, and she said it in eleven words with the directness of someone who has paid for the lesson in full.

The Donner Party has been a symbol in American culture since the newspapers got hold of the story in the spring of 1847, and the symbolism has shifted with the times in ways that tell us as much about the eras doing the symbolizing as about the events being symbolized.

The ones who survived lived their lives, married, had children, grew old, and died in the ordinary way that people die when they are not dying in the Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1846.

The ones who did not survive died in the cold and the snow, far from home, having tried to get somewhere that most of them eventually made it.

"Never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can." Virginia Reed, thirteen years old.

She knew.