Mountain Men, the Donner Party and the Mormon Trek
Mountain Men: The First Pathfinders
Long before wagon trains, the trails west were scouted by a small, hard fraternity of fur trappers known as mountain men. Operating from the early 1820s, they hunted beaver in the Rocky Mountains for the eastern hat trade and lived for months among Indigenous nations such as the Crow and the Shoshone. Names you should know are Jim Bridger, who founded Fort Bridger in 1842 as a supply post on the Oregon Trail, Jedediah Smith, who in 1824 located South Pass through the Rockies, and Kit Carson, who would later guide the US Army.
Their economic moment was short. By 1840 silk had replaced beaver fur in fashionable hats and the great rendezvous gatherings of trappers were over. But the maps they had drawn, the passes they had charted and the diplomatic relationships they had built with Indigenous peoples were inherited by the wagon trains of the 1840s. Without South Pass and Fort Bridger there would have been no realistic Oregon or California Trail.
Mountain men of the 1820s and 1830s mapped the mountain passes, founded forts and built relationships with Indigenous nations. Their work made the Oregon and California Trails possible after the fur trade collapsed around 1840.
The Donner Party: A Lesson in What Could Go Wrong
In May 1846 a group of 87 emigrants led by the brothers George and Jacob Donner left Missouri for California. They were a typical wagon train at first — mainly families, well supplied, on schedule. The decision that would destroy them was taken at Fort Bridger in late July, when they chose to follow a guidebook by Lansford Hastings, who claimed a new route — the ‘Hastings Cutoff’ — would save them weeks across the Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake Desert.
The shortcut was a disaster. Hastings had never taken loaded wagons through it. The Wasatch range had to be hacked through tree by tree, costing precious days. The salt desert dried out the oxen and split the train. By the time the Donners reached the Sierra Nevada in late October, they were a month behind schedule and already short of food. The first heavy snow of the year fell on 28 October 1846 — a freak early storm. They were trapped at what is now Donner Lake.
Roughly half of the party died over the winter of 1846–47 — from cold, starvation and exhaustion. A small group attempted a snowshoe rescue and got through. Some of the survivors, after weeks without food, resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. When relief parties from California reached the camps in February and March 1847, they found a tragedy that newspapers across the country reported in horrified detail.
Students often write that the party were ‘unlucky’ with snow and stop there. The stronger answer stresses linkage: the freak storm was the final blow, but its danger came from a chain of earlier choices — trusting an untested guidebook, taking the Hastings Cutoff, losing weeks in the Wasatch, splitting the train in the salt desert. Top-band answers chain the events: because they took the cutoff, then they lost three weeks; because they lost three weeks, then they reached the Sierra in late October; because they reached it late, then the storm trapped them. Weather alone is not enough.
Why the Mormons Went West
The Mormon story is the opposite of the Donner story — an organised migration that succeeded because of disciplined planning. Joseph Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in upstate New York in 1830, claiming to have been led by an angel to a new scripture, the Book of Mormon. From the start the Mormons faced violent persecution — in New York, Ohio, Missouri (where Governor Boggs issued an ‘extermination order’ in 1838) and finally Illinois.
Their distinct beliefs and the practice of polygamy — plural marriage — outraged neighbours, and Mormon political and economic power frightened them. In June 1844 a mob stormed Carthage Jail in Illinois and murdered Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. The young Church now needed both a leader and a refuge. Brigham Young, head of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, took charge.
The Mormon Trek of 1846–47
Young deliberately chose somewhere no one else wanted: the basin of the Great Salt Lake, in Mexican territory beyond the Rockies. The migration of 1846–47 covered roughly 1,300 miles from Nauvoo in Illinois to the Salt Lake Valley. It was unlike any other wagon train. Young sent a pioneer company ahead in 1847 to build way stations, mark the trail and plant crops, and the main body followed in disciplined groups. From 1849 a Church emigration fund also paid for poorer converts to follow.
Once in the valley, the Mormons named their territory Deseret. They began irrigation farming the moment they arrived — channelling water from the canyons onto land that no neighbouring tribe was farming — and built Salt Lake City to a planned grid. The community was tightly organised under Young’s direction, with the ward (local congregation) as the unit of social welfare.
Three differences explain the gap. First, leadership: Brigham Young exercised firm authority over a religious community that obeyed him; the Donner Party was a coalition of independent families. Second, planning: pioneer companies and way stations replaced individual decisions about routes and supplies. Third, geography: the Salt Lake basin was somewhere no other power wanted, so the Mormons did not have to fight for it — they only had to make it productive, which their irrigation methods and the ward system did. Many of these themes of organisation, leadership and timing are exactly what an analytical narrative on the period rewards.
The Mormon Trek of 1846–47 covered 1,300 miles from Nauvoo to the Salt Lake Valley under Brigham Young’s leadership. Pioneer companies, way stations and irrigation farming turned a religious refuge into the planned settlement of Deseret.