donner party

birch · Oct 20, 2010

Couldn’t they have eaten fish from the lake?

Theoretically they could have, and they did try. Lovina Graves told a granddaughter she "distinctly remembered going with one older brother and sister to the lake to fish. The ice was so thick they had to cut a hole in it about a foot and a half square, through which they dropped their lines, but they could not catch a thing. They could see the fish plainly, but caught nothing. It was very hard for them to go away without any fish for they were very hungry." --Edna Maybelle Sherwood, "Tragic Story of the Donner Party."

"There was an abundance of beautiful trout in the lake, but no one could catch them. W. C. Graves tells how he went fishing two or three different times, but without success. The lake was not frozen over at first, and fish were frequently seen; but then were too coy and wary to approach such bait as was offered. Soon thick ice covered the water, and after that no one attempted to fish. In fact, the entire party seemed dazed by the terrible calamity which had overtaken them." --C.F. McGlashan, History of the Donner Party.

"The failure of the emigrants’ attempts to catch fish has long formed a subject for debate. Any experienced native of the district can testify that lake fish may be taken easily (if not legally) during the winter months. The facts seem to indicate that members of the party failed to catch fish chiefly because they lacked experience and equipment and because they were too bewildered and dispirited to acquire them." --Ibid.

There’s a certain amount of criticism implied in some of these comments. I think that whatever the problems might have been at first, the emigrants simply became too weak to make the effort.
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it seems such a shame that there was food there. do you think they were responsible for their demise?

they only tried two or three times.

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spidergoat · Oct 20, 2010

They might have not used the right technique or equipment, and it's true that starving will affect your ability to carry out survival strategies.

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Syzygys · Oct 21, 2010

Humans probably taste better than trout. End of story...

I mean seriously, somebody was actually bitching about the luck of fishing ability???

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John99 · Oct 21, 2010

Syzygys said: ↑

I mean seriously, somebody was actually bitching about the luck of fishing ability???
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They didnt have fishing line either. Imagine catching a fish with a string and a home made hook.

M00se1989 · Oct 21, 2010

Make a net before the ice freezes... or bring a stick like "Without A Paddle".

AlexG · Oct 21, 2010

John99 said: ↑

They didnt have fishing line either. Imagine catching a fish with a string and a home made hook.
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Yeah, they didn't have any fishfinding sonar either.:bugeye:

birch · Oct 21, 2010

It seems they died of a combination of food prejudice and stupidity. i just saw a film come on tv about this usual story and how they starved so i looked it up. it never mentions what some or most probably wondered which is did they really 'have' to starve? we know that there are circumstances where there is absolutely no resource but this doesn't seem the case. not only were they next to a lake teeming with fish but in a forest, with a cabin, fire/firewood and guns. it doesn't seem they really tried to be creative by considering everything around them. this cognitive dissonance had some part in killing them or causing them more suffering.

http://rewild.info/anthropik/2005/10/why-people-starve/index.html

But the Donner party died in the middle of a large pine grove. They used the pine trees for fuel and even cut many of them down–but they never used them for food. Pine bark and pine nuts are entirely edible. Nor were they unaware of this:

On 12th January, Eddy’s group reached a Paiute village. They took pity on the travellers and gave them a corn meal. This gave them the strength to move on and five days later found another village. This time they were given a meal of pine nuts. Eddy then paid a warrior a pouch of tobacco to act as a guide to Sutter’s Fort.

Despite this, and despite their desperation, they never ate the pine. Pine had long been a “starvation food” for Native Americans in these areas; when all else failed, you could always eat the pine. It was rarely the first choice, but in desperate circumstances, it would suffice. The Donner party was desperate, and ate every “food” they could think of–even rawhide, bones and leather. But they didn’t eat things that weren’t “food”–and pine simply wasn’t “food,” even though they had been fed a meal of pine nuts a short time before.

Or, consider the plight of the Viking colonists of Greenland, as related by Jared Diamond in Collapse. As Malcolm Gladwell relates it in his review for The New Yorker:

Diamond writes, for instance, of the fact that nobody can find fish remains in Norse archeological sites. One scientist sifted through tons of debris from the Vatnahverfi farm and found only three fish bones; another researcher analyzed thirty-five thousand bones from the garbage of another Norse farm and found two fish bones. How can this be? Greenland is a fisherman’s dream: Diamond describes running into a Danish tourist in Greenland who had just caught two Arctic char in a shallow pool with her bare hands. “Every archaeologist who comes to excavate in Greenland . . . starts out with his or her own idea about where all those missing fish bones might be hiding,” he writes. “Could the Norse have strictly confined their munching on fish to within a few feet of the shoreline, at sites now underwater because of land subsidence? Could they have faithfully saved all their fish bones for fertilizer, fuel, or feeding to cows?” It seems unlikely. There are no fish bones in Norse archeological remains, Diamond concludes, for the simple reason that the Norse didn’t eat fish. For one reason or another, they had a cultural taboo against it.

…

When archeologists looked through the ruins of the Western Settlement, they found plenty of the big wooden objects that were so valuable in Greenland–crucifixes, bowls, furniture, doors, roof timbers–which meant that the end came too quickly for anyone to do any scavenging. And, when the archeologists looked at the animal bones left in the debris, they found the bones of newborn calves, meaning that the Norse, in that final winter, had given up on the future. They found toe bones from cows, equal to the number of cow spaces in the barn, meaning that the Norse ate their cattle down to the hoofs, and they found the bones of dogs covered with knife marks, meaning that, in the end, they had to eat their pets. But not fish bones, of course.

The Greenland Vikings knew that fish was edible. They lived in full view of the Inuit, who lived happily as they starved to death. They called them skraelings–”wretches”–because they were naught but ignoble savages. Savages who survived–and quite happily–while the civilized Europeans died a long, agonizing death.

It’s not a lack of desperation that’s at fault here; it’s a lack of imagination. It’s the cultural construction of food. We like to point to such stories with modern pride, and think, “My, how stupid people were in those unenlightened days before my time! Why, to think they would starve to death just for cultural pride!” But consider what you might honestly have done in their place. If there was no bread to be found, and all you had were fields and fields of dandelions. Would it ever honestly occur to you that you can eat dandelions? Or would you starve, desperate for anything to eat.

In many ways, our cultural revulsion at the idea of cannibalism makes us more prone to actually do it, not less. It is part of our vision of “the savage.” Yet, because this floats around in our culture, we know that humans are food. Other people are, for us, the same kind of starvation food that pine nuts were for the Amerindians. It’s certainly not our first choice, but in a pinch, we know we can eat each other.

We don’t know that we can eat pine bark, or dandelions, or plantain, or burdock root, or any of the other thousands of plant and animal species that surround us–even in the middle of the city. Walking to work every day, I pass an enormous stand of Lady’s Thumb, growing up out of the cracks around a parking meter. It would be enough to feed Giuli and I for a week, if it weren’t so close to the road and choked with exhaust fumes (and why we haven’t gathered it). That doesn’t stop us from collecting acorns from the nearby parks, leeching the tannin and making a delicious, honey-covered and nutritious candy out of them. But when we do gather food, we get lots of dirty looks. The reactions range from shock to horror, generally. What? How can you do such a thing? That could be poisonous! How can you eat that? That’s not food!
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jmpet · Oct 21, 2010

Yes- don't stray from the main road.

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