The Donner Party, Part 1

The Morbid Curiosity Podcast

Hallie Lloyd

Cryptid, Serialkiller, Science, Disease, Medicine, Scary, Skeleton, Historyofmedicine, Social Sciences, Ghost, History, Medical, Anthropology, Monsters, Archeology, Murder, Creepy, Skeptic, Paranormal, Prison

4.8 • 634 Ratings

🗓️ 17 August 2020

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Donner Party left Illinois in April 1846. Hoping to reach California by covered wagon before winter, they decided to take a brand new short cut. This short cut proved disastrous, and led to much hardship and horror when the group was snowed in for the winter in the Sierra mountains. In this first part of the episode, we discuss the journey leading up to that short cut and the trials they faced while taking it.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode contains discussions of racism, starvation, spousal abuse, and death, in some cases involving children.
0:09.1	If this isn't something you want to hear about, this may be a good episode to skip. Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so the mysterious and unsolved.
0:32.5	Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped hundreds of people
0:39.3	throughout the ages. I am one of those people. My name is Halley, and this is the Morbid Curiosity
0:47.3	podcast.
1:14.7	Thank you. When most people hear the Oregon Trail, they think of either the 1985 computer game, created by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, or a stereotypical mid-1800s American pioneer
1:21.6	family in a covered wagon, bravely crossing a sea of undulating grasses and grand mountains to reach a new and better land to settle in.
1:31.4	On the other hand, when most people think of the Donner Party, all they remember are that they were a family
1:37.3	that was somehow lost or stuck in the woods and ended up eating each other.
1:42.7	Most people don't know that the Donner Party traveled the Oregon Trail,
1:47.2	but instead of aiming for Oregon, their goal was California. While there was an established wagon
1:53.4	trail to California, which branched off from the Oregon Trail, the Donner Party, which was made up of
1:59.2	many families other than just the Donners, decided to take a shortcut, one that had been advertised as a massive time saver.
2:07.4	Unfortunately, that shortcut hadn't been tested, leading to trouble on an already difficult journey.
2:14.6	While cannibalism does feature in the true story of the Donner Party, it was only the
2:19.6	most miserable piece of their long journey west, a journey fraught with hardship, culminating
2:25.4	in a forced stay over the winter in the Sierra Mountains without food or help. In this first
2:32.0	part of this episode, we'll discuss why the Donners and their companions
2:36.0	were traveling west, why they decided to take a shortcut, and just how disastrous that shortcut
2:42.2	turned out to be. In part two, we'll discuss their terrible winter in the Sierra's and their
2:48.2	eventual rescue. But for now, let's begin at the beginning in April of 1846.
2:55.6	The United States was still quite a new political body,
	...

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