The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party

by Daniel James Brown

In The Emigrants’ Guide, while he had made California out to be virtually a land of milk and honey, he had also sung the praises of Oregon, a destination that many of the emigrants felt was more easily and more safely reachable than California. He had written his paean to Oregon, however, before he had worked out his arrangement with Sutter. Emigrants who went to Oregon would not be interested in driving the Mexicans out of California, nor in purchasing lots in Suttersville. Hastings needed to divert them. Luckily, from his point of view, in The Emigrants’ Guide, he had inadvertently given the California-bound emigrants an extra incentive to head his way—a shortcut to California, a road that would shave several hundred miles off the trip. The most direct route, for the California emigrants, would be to leave the Oregon route, about two hundred miles east from Fort Hall; thence bearing southwest, to the Salt Lake; and thence continuing down to the bay of St. Francisco, by the route just described. At the time he had written about it, the mention of the potential shortcut probably hadn’t meant much to Hastings.