Some interesting backstory about the Donner Party that I hadn't heard before:
Some interesting backstory about the Donner Party that I hadn't heard before:
That’s exactly what happened to the Donner-Reed Party in 1846, when they found themselves trailing well behind other emigrants and decided to put their trust in Hastings. “Hastings’ motivation for the cutoff was pure capitalism,” says Sweeten. With California part of Mexican territory at the time, Hastings saw huge potential in settling the land and perhaps even making it an independent republic. “He figured that if he could get people to come to his communities and the specific areas that he mapped and created, by cutting across the Great Basin and arriving into what’s now the Sacramento area, then he might even become king of this new republic,” Sweeten says.
To encourage settlers, Hastings penned a guidebook called The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California. It touted the American West as a virtual Garden of Eden, and claimed his cutoff to be the “most direct route” to the San Francisco Bay Area. But the one thing he didn’t do? Test the cutoff himself before making the claim. Existing trails followed centuries-old paths established by animals and maintained by the local Shoshone people. The cutoff, though faster in theory, was new and full of treachery.
Some interesting backstory about the Donner Party that I hadn't heard before: