is this too dour for the holidays? i highly recommend it! whenever it snows and storms and my hands get really cold scraping the windshield, i think about this doc i used to show my students. its an amazing part of US history, the Go West! movement of only 150 years ago that truly tested the endurance of new americans looking for their own personal promised land. this group of migrants, whole families, traveled 2500 miles on sheer grit and faith. us californians know all about the Donner Party, and the pass on the way to tahoe, and the cannibalism. on this day, december 17th, 1846, they had been stuck at donner pass for about seven weeks, with another four months of some of the worst weather ever seen in the sierras ahead of them. they missed making it over the pass by one day...that night the first of many storms set in. what amazes me most is that most of the children survived, the youngest 3 and 4 years old, and they actually walked their way out of the mountains. two thirds of the women and children survived. not one of them ate human flesh. many of the men went crazy... Of the 60 at Truckee Lake, 19 were men over 18, 12 were women and 29 were children, 6 of whom were toddlers or younger. Farther down the trail, close to Alder Creek, the Donner families hastily constructed tents to house 21 people, including Mrs. Wolfinger, her child, and the Donners drivers: 6 men, 3 women, and 12 children in all. On the evening of November 4, it began to snow again. It was the beginning of a storm that would last 8 days. -Wikipedia
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 12:17:50 +0000
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