Cowboys & cannibals

Wagon trail pioneers faced disease and despair to grab Native Americans' land

- EMILY RETTER

THE Donner-Reed party paused, exhausted and starving, in the foothills of the unforgiving Sierra Nevada mountains. They faced a decision.

They had lost their livestock and wagons, and had little more than the clothes on their backs. Now these pioneers, on one of America’s brutal 19th-century wagon trails, had to either rest until tomorrow or strike on.

The beleaguered group, led from the eastern frontier in 1846 by Illinois businessman James Frazier Reed, decided on the former. It was a fatal mistake.

That night they were caught in a snowfall so heavy that they became trapped.

The only option as they began to die of starvation and sickness was cannibalism.

They agreed all those who perished would give their bodies to help the rest survive. “People died one by one, and when they died, the survivors ate their flesh,” says historian and author Katie Hickman. “The journey west was absolutely brutal.”

Pioneer Patrick Breen wrote in his diary: “Mrs Murphy said here yesterday the thought she would commence on Milt and eat him… it is distressing.”

These snaking wagon trains began in 1840, with most following the Oregon and California trails.

They were mainly farmers devastated by the economic depression of the 1830s and enticed by cheap land, oblivious to the devastation it brought to Native Americans.

Kevin Costner’s new epic Horizon: An American Saga, follows those on a brutal six-month journey across the continent to the hostile San Pedro Valley, Arizona.