“I have not wrote you half the trouble we have had but I have wrote enough to let you know you don’t know what trouble is.” With these...

In 1846, Independence, Missouri was a westernmost city of the United States, as well as the crossroads for the Santa Fe and Oregon...

1800s photo of a Caw boatman poling a raft that carried pioneer wagons across the Kansas River. After following Virginia Reed’s route via...

Once on the other side of the Kansas River, the Donner and Reed families joined up with the much larger Russell Company, which was made...

The Big Blue River camp is an important landmark because it’s where Virginia Reed’s grandmother died of consumption. It was the first...

Explorers, trappers and eventually, all west-bound emigrants followed the winding Platte River four hundred miles across the Great Plains...

Fort Laramie, in what is now Wyoming, was the only real community pioneers saw on their long trek across the frontier. In 1846 it was...

(1800s illustration of wagon train parked beneath Independence Rock.) Independence Rock was the halfway mark to California. Some claimed...

(Above: The newly named Donner Party took this left hand turn near the Little Sandy River, in what is now Wyoming. They hoped to save...

Fort Bridger was so small and unpopulated compared to Fort Laramie that Virginia Reed must have felt quite disappointed as she rode...

It didn’t take long for Virginia Reed and others to realize that her father’s friend back at Fort Laramie, Jim Clyman, had been right...

The Donner Party expected the Salt Desert to be forty miles wide, a journey of two days and one night. They loaded their wagons with as...

A major turning point in the Donner Party’s story–and the definitive turning point for Virginia Reed and her family–was the killing of...

The two areas of the dry, arid Great Basin that pioneers on the California Trail most dreaded were the Humboldt Sink and the waterless...

(The eastern slope of the Sierra from Reno, Nevada. When the Donner Party camped here, it was called Truckee Meadows, and the nervous...

This familiar drawing of the mid-1800s shows those already trapped at the lake camp hastily building shelter to brave out more storms...

Virginia Reed, her mother, and her siblings were in danger of dying very soon. They had been subsisting on boiled ox hide, a thick,...

Sutter’s Fort in the mid-1800s. All pioneers on the California Trail eventually made it here to Sacramento. Once within the safe walls of...