DECLARING THAT there may be a shortage of evidence for cannibalism in the Donner Party is like announcing that the Titanic may still be afloat -- the most notable chapter of a legendary story is thrown into doubt.
The tale of the ill-fated pioneers of 1846 has transfixed Americans for a century and a half at least in part because of one universally known fact: snowbound and starving in the Sierra Nevada, members of the company were forced, out of dire necessity, to eat the dead.
So it's no surprise that when an archeological team revealed last month that excavations at the campsite of the Donner families had produced no proof of cannibalism, the news came as a shock. But in reality, the information changes nothing about our fundamental understanding of the story. Company members did resort to cannibalism, and yet that is not, nor has it ever been, the utmost truth about the tale.
Much of the current befuddlement stems from the limited nature of the archeological dig along the banks of Alder Creek, not far from Truckee. This was the campsite of the two Donner families, including that of George Donner, whose election as captain lent the party its name. For the first time, archeologists located the families' cooking hearth, allowing them to search for charred fragments of human bone. They found none, although there was plenty of evidence that the Donners ate game.
But this was one site among many in the story of the Donner Party, which included dozens of other people as well as the Donner families. When the early winter snow trapped the wagons, most members were several miles ahead of the Donner families, at what is today Donner Lake.
No one disputes that cannibalism occurred at Donner Lake or at other sites involved in the story. Even at Alder Creek, the new finding does not disprove the practice of cannibalism. There may be no evidence to find. Uncooked human bones would long ago have disintegrated, and the literature of survival cannibalism is replete with cases in which desperate survivors sliced the flesh from cadavers and cooked only this gruesome "meat." Bones are usually boiled, so they can be eaten only after the supply of flesh is exhausted. Given what we know from the archival record of letters, journals and remembrances, cannibalism at Alder Creek would have occurred only for a short time by a limited number of people at the end of the tragedy. There simply may have been no need to cook and eat the bones.
