Christmas on the Emigrant Trails Series

An 1843 emigrant party of about 17 emigrant men, women, and children, led by famed mountain man Joseph R. Walker, hoped to get their eight wagons through the Sierra Nevada and into the California interior. Theirs would be the second wagon train to attempt the feat.

The Donner-Reed Party were much less fortunate than the Walker wagon train. They were on a tried-and-true wagon trail, the 1844 Truckee Route, not lost but late. These emigrants attempted to cross the central Sierra Nevada in early November 1846 but became trapped by blizzards near present-day Truckee, California. By December, the emigrants were living on boiled bone and strips of ox hides from the dead livestock they dug from beneath the snow. The wrote of their Christmas...

On the Lassen branch of the California Trail, ‘49er J. Goldsborough Bruff celebrated a rustic but more pleasant Christmas in the Cascades Mountains, north of the Sierra Nevada. Bruff, a professional draftsman and a strong-willed individual, ended up stuck in the mountains at Christmas largely due to his own pride and stubbornness.

The Rev. James W. Brier, a Methodist preacher from Ohio, wanted to reach the California gold fields in the worst way, so that’s exactly what he did. He chose the very worst way imaginable: a “shortcut” across the untracked badlands of southern Nevada.