They went on to add, “The survivors fiercely denied allegations of cannibalism,” a statement contradicted by Donner Party survivors, rescuers, and historians alike. Finally, and as if to further convince the world that Donner Party members were actually humans and not crazed cannibals, the ASU PR crew announced that pieces of writing slate and broken china found near the cooking hearth “suggest an attempt to maintain a sense of a ‘normal life,’ a family intent on maintaining a routine of lessons, to preserve the dignified manners from another time and place, a refusal to accept the harsh reality of the moment, and a hope that the future was coming.”
The response was predictable. Media types, from obscure bloggers to major newspaper reporters and popular science writers, latched onto the story and within days their readers were being informed that serious and scientifically based doubts had risen over the question of cannibalism by the members of the Donner Party. Formerly a textbook example of survival cannibalism, the claims of people-eating by the starving Donner Party were now being blamed on Victorian-era journalists and ethnic prejudice.
In reality, though, there was no controversy at all, at least among most Donner Party experts. The PR department at ASU had simply blown it by badly misrepresenting the study’s preliminary results. The key statement by the PR mavens, and one that should have prevented the entire mess, can be found in the previously cited quotation about the statistical probability of finding a human bone among those examined by researchers. Such a discovery, they wrote, would have been statistically probable “if humans were processed in the same way animals were processed.” As I’ve mentioned, this is a requirement for determining whether cannibalism has occurred or not, but therein lies the problem. As it turns out the Donner Party did not process human bones and animal bones in the same way, and there’s a good reason why.
Of the thousands of bone fragments from the Meadow Hearth examined by researchers, 362 of them showed evidence of human processing. About one quarter of those had abrasions and scratch marks, which indicate that the bones had been smashed into bits. Other pieces of bone exhibited a condition known as “pot polish,” a smoothing of the edges that results from the bones being stirred in a pot. To anthropologists this was another strong indicator that the bone fragments had been cooked.
As starvation set in, the stranded members of the Donner Party ate whatever they could find. According to historical accounts, they consumed rodents, leather belts and laces, tree bark, and a gooey pulp scraped from boiled animal hides. By the end of January 1847, they began consuming their pet dogs. The analysis by Gwen Robbins and her coworkers indicated that bones from several types of mammals had been smashed, boiled, and burned by someone at the Alder Creek Camp. This would have been done in an effort to render the bones edible, while extracting every bit of nutrient possible. In all likelihood, these would have been the types of last-resort measures undertaken before the survivors turned to cannibalism, which did not begin in the mountain camps until the last week of February 1847—sometime after the departure of First Relief on February 22 and before the arrival of Second Relief a week later. The practice of consuming dead bodies continued until the survivors either died or were rescued, and for everyone except the soon-to-be-christened Donner Party monster, Louis Keseberg, cannibalism would have lasted only a week or two at most, a vitally important point.
Given the large number of bodies present at the Truckee Lake and Alder Creek campsites, and the short amount of time during which cannibalism occurred, there would have been no need to process human bones in the same manner in which animal bones had been processed previously. Essentially, that’s because once cannibalism began at the camps there would have been ample human flesh for the ever-dwindling number of survivors to eat—more than enough to make cooking and re-cooking the human bones completely unnecessary. For similar reasons, once Louis Keseberg was the only person left alive at either camp, between the human bodies and the livestock carcasses uncovered by the melting snow, he would have had plenty of food (grisly though it was) on which to subsist until his rescue by Fourth Relief a month later.
Because uncooked bones would not have been preserved in the acidic soil of the conifer-dense Sierras, there would be no human bones for archaeologists to uncover. Therefore, the absence of calcined human bones from the Meadow Hearth only proves that human and animal bodies were not processed in the same way. The evidence does not place the practice of cannibalism by members of the Alder Creek Camp into doubt, nor does it have any bearing whatsoever on the cannibalism that took place at the Truckee Lake Camp, within The Forlorn Hope, or at the Second Relief’s Starved Camp.