Donner Lake

Donner Lake is located immediately beside Truckee. The lake is approximately 3 miles long, 3/4 miles wide, and 200 feet deep.

In 1846 a great westward movement began. A small part of the movement, the Donner Party, a looseknit band of midwestern farmers and adventurers, left Independence, Missouri, in April of 1846.Traveling west through the Great Plains, they crossed the Rocky Mountain crest at South Pass, in Wyoming territory, and then headed southwest through a relatively new and unexplored shortcut. This shortcut was their undoing, for rather than a shortcut, it added precious weeks to their travel time. The party finally reached present day Truckee in late October, 1846. It was too late.

Already starving, their stamina depleted, the emigrants were greeted by one of the earliest and most severe of Sierra winters. The emigrants could not climb out of the Truckee basin, and they remained there to wait out the winter. In January, 1847, a few broke through westward, over the 7,088 foot pass (now Donner Pass) and they summoned relief parties. By April 1847, only 48 of the 89 emigrants who comprised the Donner Party were still alive. The others, 41 in all, had died along the way.

All but a few had died of starvation or cold in the long Sierra winter. Those that survived subsisted on their few meager provisions, the ox hides, and finally the bodies of their dead friends and relatives. There is not a more tragic and gruesome story from the American west.

Donner Memorial State Park is now located where many of the emigrants spent their last days, and the site of one of the emigrant cabins is now marked by a massive monument to the western pioneers; its base is 22 feet high, the same height as the snow in that terrible winter of 1846-47. More fortunate emigrant trains traveled through the Truckee area in the summer and fall of 1847, and in January, 1848, James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter's Mill near Coloma in the Sierra foothills. Word spread quickly, and the great California gold rush was on.