Virginia reed 1846

Their own deep freeze?

[Laughs.] Yup, they went to the deep freeze.

Virginia reed donner party biography of albert einstein The Reed family was part of the ill-fated Donner Party which was trapped in the Sierra Nevada Mountains during a snow storm in while emigrating to California. They suffered extreme hardship. The survivors resorted to consuming human flesh to stay alive.

Over the years, people would ask me, 'What are you working on now?' The short answer was 'A book about the Donner Party.' The long answer was, 'A book about the folly and arrogance of Manifest Destiny, as told through the eyes of its foot soldiers.' But if I’d just say the Donner Party, they’d invariably say, 'Aren’t those the pioneers who got trapped in the mountains and ate each other?' I’d say, 'Yes.' But then I had to explain that that’s only a slice of the Donner pie, albeit an important one.

In the book, you say, “The Gothic tale of cannibalism draws a real parallel between the individuals consuming flesh and the desire of a country to consume the continent.” That’s a pretty harsh judgment, isn't it?

There are so many metaphors and elements of history that crossroad at this particular point from to The term Manifest Destiny was first coined in , by John L.

O’Sullivan of the New York Post, in an editorial. Many people, including politicians of course, and others interested in the commercial interests of the U.S., came to the conclusion that God Almighty had mandated the Anglo-Americans as the Chosen People and it was their destiny, their manifest destiny, to take over the entire continent.

(Read how a 2,mile trail helped define the American mindset.)

Timing couldn’t have been better. We had a bellicose, expansionist president, James Polk, who schemed up a convenient war with Mexico, which owned much of the land we were to take in the West. The story line was, 'There are no people out there, anyway, so let’s take this land!' Of course, there were a lot of people out there, like the Mexicans, and tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of Indians.

Virginia reed donner party biography of albert Across the Plains in the Donner Party: A Personal Narrative of the Overland Trip to California. By Virginia Reed Murphy, - As printed in The Century Magazine, Volume 42, , pp. race, class, religion.

What we did was gobble up nations.

The most infamous member of the party was a German emigrant named Lewis Keseberg. Give us a bit of background—and describe his heinous deeds.

For me, there are no shining heroes or demons in this story. Keseberg was made into the master villain of this whole tragedy, and he didn’t help his own cause.

He and his wife, Philippine, came from Germany. He was a son of a Lutheran clergyman, and they decided to join this vanguard moving west. He was a sharp-tempered fellow, who was sometimes abusive to his young, pregnant wife.

Virginia reed The Donner-Reed Party is mainly known for two things: having a mountain pass named after them and resorting to cannibalism to survive. However, there is so much more to tell regarding each family’s story, including that of the Reeds.

He was also accused of plundering Indian burial sites.

When the fourth rescue party reached him in April , he was the only survivor. He was reportedly found with a cauldron of cooked flesh and discarded bones. There were even rumors from some of the surviving children that he had taken one lad to bed with him to comfort him and the next morning the boy was dead, hung up on the wall of the cabin, like a slab of meat, and later eaten.