In mid-April, 1847, seven men set out from Johnson's Ranch in Yuba County, California.

William Johnson had bought the massive 22,000 acre ranch at auction two years earlier, and

that space is now occupied by the city of Wheatland, California, about 45 minutes north

of Sacramento.

For exhausted immigrants who had survived the trip to the west and successfully crossed

the Sierra Nevada Mountains into California, Johnson's ranch was the first place of civilization.

Others fort, the village founded by John Sutter further down the road near modern-day Sacramento,

was more well known.

But if travelers reached Johnson's Ranch, they knew they were home free.

They had made it.

Conversely, for people who wanted to leave the Sacramento Valley and cross the mountains

into Nevada, Johnson's ranch was the last stop before they had to brave the wilderness

that could kill them in a hundred different ways.

The seven men who left Johnson's Ranch in April 1847 were on a rescue mission.

It was the fourth and final rescue mission of its kind, and the men were not optimistic

that they would find any survivors.

By that time, anyone who was still alive at the camps near Truckee Lake, now Donner Lake,

had been trapped up there for five months.

They would be in terrible condition, and they would have done unspeakable things to maintain

even that condition.

Rescueers who had already been in the camps had seen evidence of those unspeakable things.

The reports that came out later made the camps of the Donner Party sound like they had

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