A SAD MEMORIAL TO THE DONNER PARTY.

Byline: Eric Noland Travel Editor

TRUCKEE - As you stand in a copse of pines and behold a giant rock - which once formed a cabin wall and partial fireplace chimney for some desperate men, women and children - the most ironic sound is a hum.

It's of engines, gears and tires, emanating from an interstate freeway just a short distance away through the trees. Today, even in winter, travelers climb out of Truckee Meadows and into the Sierra Nevada Mountains at 80 miles per hour, zipping along on an asphalt strip that is scraped clean of snow as the need arises. Even in the foulest weather, they can get from here to Sacramento, where John Sutter once maintained a life-sustaining settlement, in a couple of hours.

What a difference from 156 years ago, when a bedraggled - and, frankly, inept - band of pioneers reached this spot in autumn and ran smack into a freakish and prodigious snowstorm that halted them in their tracks.

George Donner and the wagon train he captained had little idea then that the weeks ahead would hold unthinkable hardship, hunger, death and depravity.

Today, Donner Memorial State Park, which hugs Interstate 80 north of Lake Tahoe, stands on the site of their encampment. The Emigrant Trail Museum relates their travails - but, thankfully, in a sanitized manner, sparing the visitor (and certainly young ones) the grisly details of starvation, cannibalism and suspicion of murder that occurred there in the winter of 1846-47.

For that, you have to go to the books.

``I felt guilty when I first pulled into that state park, as though I were wallowing in the macabre,'' said a La Canada Flintridge librarian as she surveyed the Donner chronicle I was checking out. ``But it's such an important story.''

Indeed, the story of the Donner Party is a stark treatise on human nature - of impatience, sacrifice, greed, heroism, selfishness, resignation and indefatigable spirit, all jumbled together.

For those minimally familiar with the story (as I was), one of the most startling facts when you reach the memorial is that the families of the wagon train did not build their rough cabins or pitch their crude tents in a close, communal cluster, the better to share their meager resources and bolster one another's spirits. Instead, you learn that two cabins near the shores of Donner Lake were 100 yards apart. Another was nearly a mile away. And the Donner families themselves were camped still farther away, a good seven miles to the north.

By that point, after an interminable journey from the Midwest that had produced moronic decisions, angry disputes, sickness, the banishment of one member and a fight that ended in death, it's almost as if the families wanted to maintain some distance from one another.

Although historians are in dispute about the exact site of the Donner families' encampment, a national forest picnic ground occupies a possible site on the shores of Alder Creek, alongside Highway 89 about six miles north of I-80.

Another site, where the Graves family huddled in a makeshift cabin, lies along Donner Pass Road less than a mile from the state park. A white cross and a simple memorial mark the spot, but time has marched past this sad piece of history. It's in the corner of a factory outlet mall that grew up around it, steps from the Izod shop.

On my visit in January, it was also depressing to see that some numskull utility worker, in laying down a dotted line of bright-orange paint swabs to mark an underground power line, had sprayed one of the stripes squarely on the memorial rock, next to a bronze plaque commemorating the victims.

At the state park, the Pioneer Monument stands at the site of one of the cabins near the lake. As you linger at its base and peer upward at the sculpture of a father, mother and young daughter, all looking with despair to the forbidding Sierra summits to the west, one aspect of its design will cause you to shake your head in wonder. The base on which they stand is 22 feet off the ground - that was the amount of snow that fell that winter, an occurrence seen about once every 100 years in this area.

The snow arrived early, too, beginning to fall in earnest before October was even gone. Because of a series of blunders, the 91 members of the party were bringing up the rear on that season's migration of pioneers along the California Trail. They should have been able to reach Sutter's Fort weeks earlier.

But the ever-mounting drifts of snow at what is now called Donner Summit, where I-80 now knifes through the mountains, prevented them from crossing the range.

Six months later, when the last of a series of rescue missions was completed - 155 years ago this month - the wagon train's death toll numbered 42. Nearly half.

A film shown regularly in the museum chronicles the ill-advised decisions that plagued the group's progress across the mountains of what is now Wyoming and Utah. Chief among them was the decision by the heads of several families to heed the words of a gadfly traveler, Lansford Hastings, and break off from a larger wagon train to take a shortcut west.

In ``The Donner Party Chronicles,'' a book by Frank Mullen Jr. that was published recently to coincide with the 150-year anniversary of the tragedy, it's intriguing to note that George Donner's wife, Tamsen, had grave misgivings about the decision, and voiced them to her husband and her brother-in-law, Jacob Donner. She was a school teacher, educated and sensible by all accounts, but in the middle of the 19th century, the opinions of a woman were given little heed.

The ``shortcut'' was taken. It ultimately would add three weeks to the journey, a fatal delay.

Another example of the prejudices of the time period is wrenching to read about today. When some of the pioneers attempted to leave the lake encampment and hike over the mountains on snowshoes, they first engaged in cannibalism when members of their group died, but eventually they resorted to murder with the same intent. William Foster gunned down the group's two Miwok Indian guides, known only as Luis and Salvador, ostensibly because they were considered more expendable than the white members of the group. Foster survived, and there were never any repercussions for his act.

The taint of murder for the same purpose would cling to Lewis Keseberg for the remainder of his life. He was suspected of killing Tamsen Donner when the two were the sole remaining survivors at the camp following the third rescue effort. The final rescue party was dismayed that Keseberg was subsisting on human flesh even though the carcasses of long-lost oxen were protruding from the receding snow.

It's probably instructive of base human nature that the families did not pull together and share what they had. Instead, there are stories of one family selling another family a dead ox for an exorbitant price (gold coin was plentiful but inedible), and of a woman who had grown sick from a diet of boiled animal hides being turned away at the cabin door of a family that had food.

Mixed in with these woeful stories are ones of great poignancy, though. The museum contains a few personal items belonging to Patty Reed, an 8-year-old member of party who survived the winter camp. In a display case are a tiny glass dish, a pewter spoon, a wooden doll and a pocket-size book, items she'd hidden in her dress when her family cached goods in the Salt Lake Desert (the doll is a replica of the original).

The items obviously sustained her through the ordeal and no doubt contributed to her survival. An information card tells a moving tale about her crossing the Sierra with rescuers in March 1847 when a sudden snowstorm nearly doomed rescuers and survivors alike. After they were able to scramble to shelter and make camp, she was seen by the campfire, telling the doll of the narrow escape.

The museum has few other artifacts of the encampments. In the spring of 1847, salvage operations stripped the sites of anything valuable. And Stephen Kearney took care of the rest. A general in the U.S. Army, he arrived with a contingent of soldiers in June. He was so disgusted by what he encountered that he had his men gather the remains and bury them at the site of the Murphy cabin - where that enormous boulder, which served as a wall and part of their fireplace, bears a memorial plaque today.

Then he ordered that the makeshift settlement be torched and burned to the ground.

A fitting conclusion, perhaps, to an American pioneer horror.

IF YOU GO

GETTING THERE: Donner Memorial State Park lies just west of Truckee, alongside Interstate 80. Exit at Donner Pass Road. It is 100 miles from Sacramento, 15 miles from the north shore of Lake Tahoe, 45 miles from Reno, Nev.

MUSEUM: The Emigrant Trail Museum at the park is open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (until 5 p.m. in summer). Admission is $1 for anyone over age 16. A 26-minute film airs every hour on the hour. In summer, a day-use parking fee of $2 is assessed. Also in summer, guided walks and campfire programs are offered.

INFORMATION: [phone]; www.parks.ca.gov.

CAPTION(S):

3 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- color) The Pioneer Monument commemorates the Donner Party members who suffered terribly in the winter of 1846-74.

(2) In the winter of 1846-47, the Donner Party camped on the shores of what is now called Donner Lake. This was their view west, and those mountains were so choked with snow that passage was impossible.

(3) When the Murphy family built a cabin on this site, this great boulder served as a wall and part of the fireplace. A plaque lists the names of both the survivors and the dead.

Eric Noland/Travel Editor

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IF YOU GO (see text)