Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 19, Number 1-4, 1951

T H E JOURNAL OF JAMES FRAZIER REED July 31-October 4,1846 INTRODUCTION )Y FAR the most celebrated of the companies which traveled B, the Hastings Cutoff in the summer of 1846 is the Donner party.

The horror and the drama of their plight when caught by snow in the Sierra Nevada, the relief efforts—at once heroic and grisly— carried on in their behalf, the spiritual and physical stresses to which they were subjected, the grim expedient to which so many of the survivors had to resort to preserve their lives—all these have made the ordeal of the Donner party one of the classic episodes of Western history.

These travelers came so close to escaping their hard fate>—a difference of a few hours in reaching Donner Pass might have seen them through to safety—that no single day of their journey, from the time they left the main-traveled trail at Fort Bridger, goes unattended by history's remorseless "if." Had they made one decision instead of another, journeyed some one day instead of resting, taken this possible route instead of that . . . how different their story. Our concern with them in their experiences upon the Hastings Cutoff is constantly attended by our painful consciousness of their eventual fate. But it is not simply their progress toward death that makes the day-to-day experiences of the Donner party so fascinating. The route over the Wasatch Mountains which the Donners pioneered for wagons became the Mormon Trail to Salt Lake Valley, and with the smallest of variations served for two decades as a principal highroad for transcontinental travel.

Only lately has it become possible, in the light of an actual daily journal kept by a member of the company, to deal definitely with the Donner party on the Hastings Cutoff, and particularly on the important section of the trail between Fort Bridger and Salt Lake Valley. The journals of the Mormons who traveled the road next year have, before now, sufficed to identify most of the Donner route, and to provide some insight into the trials that attended the opening of the new road, but the daily record that would fix their experiences in a chronology has been lacking.