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The story of the Donner Party is one of the most grisly, macabre, and perennially interesting little episodes in American history.  A small band of hardy pioneers strike out from the safety of their Midwestern towns, bound for the promised land in the west.  While we  might not know the particulars of the  story – who made up the party?  Where did they leave from?  Where were they headed?  How many got there? – we know the important part:  that somewhere short of their destination this unfortunate party got snowed in on a mountain pass, a lot of people died, and the rest of them had to eat each other to survive.

It turns out that the particulars of the story are pretty interesting, especially the fact that Abraham Lincoln was personally acquainted with one of the party’s leaders.  James Frazier Reed was a native Irishman who moved to Springfield, Illinois in 1831.  Around 1834 he became engaged to Elizabeth Keyes, who died in a cholera epidemic that same year.  Elizabeth’s brother-in-law Lloyd Backenstoe also died, leaving a widow and infant daughter.  James Reed began courting that widow, Margret Keyes Backenstoe, his dead fiancee’s sister, and married her in 1835.  Margret was in such frail health that they were married as she lay in bed, with Reed beside her holding her hand.

The Reeds went on to have four children in Springfield, one of whom, a boy, died as an infant.  James tried his luck at a variety of entrepreneurial endeavors, including running a farm, a general store, a starch factory, a sawmill, and a furniture factory, along with railroad contracting. 

In 1845 Reed conceived the idea to go west and spent a year preparing for the journey.  In mid-April 1846 the party, consisting of Reed and his family, brothers Jacob and George Donner and their families, and their hired hands set off from Springfield, Illinois bound for California.  Reed, who had attained some level of pecuniary comfort by this point, had a special wagon built so his ailing wife and mother-in-law could ride in comfort. The group joined up with another party of settlers led by William Russell somewhere west of Independence, Missouri on May 19.

The group traveled west happily enough for a few months.  Oh, sure, they had their misfortunes – Reed’s elderly and ill mother-in-law died near Independence, for example (but then again a 70+ year old invalid woman probably had no business joining a wagon train west to begin with) – but at least no one was freezing or starving or eating people.  Yet.

Things went bad somewhere in Wyoming, when several dozen impatient souls, the Reeds among them, decided to take a “shortcut.”  They elected George Donner their leader and broke off from the rest of the group.  As anyone who has ever driven anywhere unfamiliar can attest, it’s never a good idea to take a “shortcut” in a remote area, especially when your map is the product of slipshod 19th century cartography.  Predictably, the Donner group arrived at the western edge of California weeks later than they would have had they stuck to the original route.  Their path had taken them through an alkaline desert in Utah eighty miles across and devoid of water or vegetation.  Along the way a good portion of their oxen and cattle ran off in search of water, never to be seen again.

Things went really bad when they tried to cross the Sierra Nevadas.  By then it was October, and the snow was starting to fly.  Their “shortcut” had left them physically exhausted and low on supplies.  But the worst was yet to come.  By the end of October their path through the mountains was completely blocked with snow.  The pioneers first slaughtered their oxen and cattle.  Then they started eating animal hides.  Then, weak from hunger and exhaustion, they started to die.

Then came the part of the story with which we are all familiar:  the desperate pioneers, trapped and isolated in the high mountain pass, consumed the flesh of their dead compatriots to survive.  The story has been exaggerated through the years, of course.  Not everyone resorted to cannibalism, and those that did held out for months, until February or March 1847, until they gave in.  But many did eat human flesh.

Not the Reeds, though.  They were the only family unit to survive the entire ordeal intact (excepting the loss of Margret’s mother, of course), and they did it without cannibalism.  James Reed had pushed on ahead into California in October (not quite of his own volition – he had gotten into a fight with a hired hand who was driving a team of oxen too hard with a whip.  When Reed protested, the hired hand hit him in the head with the handle of the whip.  Reed, disliking this treatment, went back to his wagon, grabbed a long knife, and “continued the argument,” by which I mean he plunged his knife into the man’s chest, killing him.  The other pioneers wanted to hang Reed, but finally they settled on “voting him off the island,” so Reed got a horse and went on alone), only to find the path back to his family blocked by snows.  He was finally reunited with them in February, when Margret and two of the children walked out of the mountains.  The other children had been left in camp under the care of a Mr. Glover, who, acknowledging the bonds of Freemasonry that united both he and Reed, declared that he would rescue the little ones or die trying.  He was as good as his word, and all the little Reeds lived to see one another again.

The foregoing is more or less well known.  Less well known is the fact that Abraham Lincoln was well acquainted with James F. Reed.  They had served together in the Black Hawk War in Captain Jacob Early’s company.  After that, Lincoln conducted a great deal of legal business involving Reed and his many mercantile endeavors. 

Lincoln represented Reed on at least three occasions. Two were debt collection cases, both of which Lincoln lost.  The third was when James F. Reed, acting as executor for the estate of his late friend, Jacob Early, sued Early’s widow and two minor children to sell some of Early’s land to pay off debts against his estate.  This time Lincoln won.

Lincoln also represented parties suing Reed on a half dozen occasions, most often for failure to pay promissory notes. 

One wonders what Lincoln thought when reports floated back to Springfield of the harrowing Donner Party debacle.  Twelve of the deceased were originally citizens of Sangamon County, and Lincoln might well have known them.  He certainly knew James F. Reed.  We can imagine him reading the newspaper's lurid accounts of deep snow, exhaustion, exposure, and starvation and shaking his head to think that the man with whom he'd gone to war and gone to trial would one day come to such hardship.
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