American Experience: The Donner Party

It is hard to find words to describe this that haven't been used in many earlier reviews --- "haunting, mind-blowing, chilling," all come to mind.

Suffice it to say, everyone of us has had a moment in life where we could make the right choice or the wrong choice. All too often, making the wrong choice leads to more wrong choices. Most of the time, the results are unfortunate, and sometimes they are perilous. Rarely are the results as grisly as the fate that befell the Donner Party.

As another reviewer noted, these were not bumbling fools done in by their own incompetence. In fact, many members of the Donner Party were intelligent men & women who really should have known better. When sound decisions really counted, they consistently made the wrong choice, and these series of bad choices now means that most of us remember the Donner Party alone out of the thousands of wagon trains that went west in the 19th century.

It is an awesome documentary that will not be easily forgotten. The narrative & the music only augment the eerie, depressing quality of the production. Ultimately, it leaves all of us with that nagging question: what would we have done in that same situation?

The Donner Party has to be one of the best documentaries ever made, a tale of impossible hardship, a journey that tests the human endurance and puts a new meaning to the words, survival instinct.
I first watched the Donner Party on UK's Channel 4, way back in '92, with the title 'Death of a Wagon Train', and it really blew my mind, and I have been searching since then for it to no avail, until quite recently when I was pleasently surprised by its release on DVD. Thanks PBS.
In a way, we should consider ourselves lucky, for despite the atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty that palgues the 21st century, our age offers us vast technological advances that makes life much easier in all aspects. Yet we do take so much for granted, for there was another time, a time of continious struggles to survive. The 1840s in the States was also, I would imagine a very exciting time, for along with the difficulties, there were dreams to seek a better life and fulfil them through uncharted and virgin territories, a vasteness that can devour as much as lead to 'eldorado'. The 'eldorado' in question was California, and emigrants way before the Gold Rush of the 1850s, rushed there to improve their lot and seek their fortunes.These people were really brave! To decide to leave the certainty of their established lives, and jump into the unknown needed a lot of courage! But it is this courage that made the emigrants of the Mayflower leave Plymouth, and it is this courage that made America the great power that it is today.
The Donner party was one of the unlucky ones, who decided against the advise of a more experienced tracker,to take a shorter route to 'eldorado',a mistake that would cost most of them their lives, and would push some to the darkest recesses of the human soul.While many emigrants successfully made it to California and rebuild their lives and rewritten the country's history in the process, most are fogotten. The fate of Donner Party on the other hand is not, not only because most failed to reach their destination, but because of the horrors that they experienced trying.
Ric Burns brilliantly captures this ill fated journey, through the letters of both the dead and few survivors (perfectly read with an errie tone), soundbites from historians (just a few), and beautiful cinematography that captures the beauty and hostility of the landscape. Brian Keane adds so much power with his gorgeous music.(I am still waiting for the soundtrack to be released, it is worth it!!!)
You have to buy the Donner Party and look in awe and fascination at the courage of early emigrants, and in sheer terror at the tests that the human being is put under and the lenght that he/she will go to to survive. Scary Indeed!

Outstanding video that tells the tragic story of the ill-fated Donner Party and their attempt to move West in 1846. The story is tragic in the sense that just about anything that could go wrong, did go wrong for these people. I bought this video to show in my history classes several years ago and I still have not tired of it. More importantly, my students, year in and year out, become engrossed in the story of what people will do to survive and perservere and they watch and pay attention to the story. The descriptions of what the suvivors did to survive can be a bit graphic, but not overly so.