#if anyone could make a really good miniseries about the donner party it would be the people who made s1 of the terror

[tomwambsmilk]

The thing about the Donner Party is that while most people know about the cannibalism, it's only one small part of a fascinating and complex and horrific saga about a variety of different people of different temperaments and personalities and from different socieconomic backgrounds navigating an extreme catastrophe together. So much of the drama of the story is rooted in the interplay of various types of human strength and weakness and the sometimes surprising outcomes of that interplay.

There's the trading post owner who destroyed letters warning the Donner Party to turn back so it wouldn't hurt the business at his trading post. There's the man who was banished for killing another in an altercation - and that banishment saved lives when he made it out of the mountain pass and was able to organize the first relief parties. There were families who collected 'debts' owed them by other members by taking the last of what they had to eat, and there were families who took them in and fed them from their own supplies. There were parents who lay down in despair and ignored the children in their care and there were parents who hoped against hope and played the fiddle to entertain and distract their starving children. There were 'rescuers' who took advantage of the survivors' desperation and extorted money from them only to abandon the children they were tasked with saving, and there were rescuers so determined to save the families they found dying in the snow that they brought the debilitated children down the trail piecemeal, carrying one for a few hundred meters and then going back for the next.

And yes, there was also cannibalism - there were men who left camp and committed murder for cannibalism and then returned to save their families only to discover their families had been cannibalized. There were young children who survived only because their mother fed them the remains of their father. There was a german immigrant with an unpleasant temper and a debilitating injury that left him unable to walk who might have murdered some of his desperate and dying companions so that he could eat them, or maybe he simply ate the already dead out of desperation and was vilified for it because of his immigrant status, or maybe the actual truth is somewhere in the middle.

The point is that the story of the Donner Party is a deeply human drama with ripe thematic potential and it's a shame that there's very little good historical fiction about it and somebody should really fix that. Terror season 3 I'm looking at you

sorry boss I can't come to work today I'm too busy thinking about the Donner Party