Donner Monument

The pedestal's wording is the residue of an argument. C. F. McGlashan, who wrote the first full history of the party and spent decades pinning the cabin sites, testified the Breen cabin had stood exactly here. The monument committee overruled him: the statue honoured all overland emigrants, and naming one party pushed the rest into the background. So the bronze hedges, near this spot. Eight survivors were still living when it was dedicated in June 1918. Three were well enough to come.

What the plaques say

[the plaque on the back of the monument] Near this spot stood the Breen cabin of the party of emigrants who started for California from Springfield, Illinois, in April, 1846, under the leadership of Captain George Donner. Delays occurred and when the party reached this locality, on October 29, the Truckee Pass Emigrant Road was concealed by snow. The height of the shaft of the monument indicates the depth of the snow, which was twenty-two feet. After futile efforts to cross the summit the party was compelled to encamp for the winter. The Graves cabin was situated about three-quarters of a mile to the eastward, the Murphy cabin about two hundred yards southwest of the monument, and the Donner tents were at the head of Alder Creek. Ninety people were in the party and forty-two perished, most of them from starvation and exposure. In commemoration of the pioneers who crossed the plains to settle in California. [the plaque on the front of the monument] Virile to risk and find; kindly withal and a ready help. Facing the brunt of fate; indomitable, - unafraid.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Donner Memorial State Park — steps away
  Where the Donner Party spent the winter of 1846, marked by cabin stone and a monument built to a remembered snow depth.
• Donner Summit Tunnels — 5.1 mi
  Granite bored by hand at fourteen inches a day, by Chinese crews the country spent a century forgetting.
• Sand Harbor — 18 mi
  The crown of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore—car-sized granite boulders standing in water so clear the boats above them seem to float on air, on a beach the Washoe kept for thousands of summers
• The Flume Trail & Marlette Lake — 20 mi
  The other thing the Comstock took off Lake Tahoe—not its trees but its water, hauled over a mountain range through the highest-pressure pipeline on earth, on a flume grade that is now one of the country's great mountain-bike rides

More markers nearby

• First Transcontinental Railroad — Truckee — 2.5 mi
• The Great Incline of the Sierra Nevada — 17 mi
• Mount Rose Weather Observatory — 18 mi
• Sand Harbor — 18 mi