Welcome back to the Learn English Podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
On today's episode, I want to talk about a very scary story.
That is because it is almost Halloween.
Halloween is the 31st of every October and it is a large holiday here in the United States.
It is a cultural event and throughout the month of october and, of course, on halloween, you have things that are very scary ghosts spirits magic witches, anything that could possibly be a little paranormal or a little bit scary.
On today's episode, I want to talk about a scary story that's actually true.
It is one of the stories that we as Americans learn when we are in school here in the United States.
We learn it when we are very young.
And I think after you hear the story you might think it might not be completely appropriate for very young students.
If you're interested in learning more about this story and what happened to the people who were involved in it.
Well, of course, practicing your listening comprehension and English vocabulary helps.
Then follow along because we're about to begin.
Before we get started, I want to remind you to look at the description of this podcast episode.
There you will find a list of the words and phrases that I used in the episode.
You can take it, study it and continue to build your English vocabulary.
Now let's talk about this scary story.
The story I'm going to tell you about is called the Donner Party.
Have you ever heard of the Donner Party?
If you haven't, don't worry.
We're going to talk all about it.
But it is an actual event that took place here in the United States but a long time ago, in the 1840s.
To set the stage, which means to talk about the history behind it and why it happened, is that during this time, the United States did not look like what it looks like now.
There was a lot of colonization on the eastern part of the United States and it was starting to spread across the country towards the west coast.
The territory that now makes up the united states actually belonged to other countries and at the time where i live right now in california, this was actually part of mexico.
However, throughout this time, there was this idea called manifest destiny.
You might have heard this term manifest if you are someone who's into spirituality or wellness.
This idea of manifesting something means to believe that something's going to occur and so therefore, it will occur.
You see this in a lot of new age religions, modern spirituality the idea of manifesting what you want to occur, Manifest Destiny.
It was this idea that Americans were chosen by the Creator, by God itself, to spread throughout the continent.
And this has a lot to do with even modern American culture.
I know in some countries and some cultures, people might be a little bit more pessimistic.
And the stereotype about Americans is that we are very optimistic.
And that optimism is tied a little bit into this idea, this idea that because we are Americans, because we live in the United States, we are able to do whatever we are wanting to do.
As these settlers were moving out west, one of the more popular places to go was what is now called California.
Like I said, this was actually Mexico at the time, but there were people who were coming in and trying to settle and take over the area.
In 1846 there were 90 people from the states of Illinois and Missouri who joined together and decided to travel out west together.
Because this was in the 1840s.
There were no airplanes, there were no modern cars, no real modern means of transportation.
Instead, people had to travel by wagon that were either pulled by horses or by oxen.
This was called a wagon train.
I believe there was even an old show in the 1950s that was called wagon train.
That showed these people who were traveling across the country in a wagon.
This wagon train that was formed in 1846 was comprised of 90 people, but there were two main families that were part of it.
One family was called the Donner family that was their last name and another family was called the Reed family.
This wagon train left independence missouri in may of eighteen forty six, and that is part of the problem.
Because they were traveling by wagon, it was going to take a long time to get to their destination.
Leaving in mid-May, which means the middle of the month of May, was actually too late.
They should not have left at that time.
But they had a lot of optimism.
They had supplies, they had wagons, they had people with them on part of this wagon train and they were ready to go.
This wagon train started traveling out west, and when it reached what is now Wyoming, the people in the group had a choice.
They could go by a known path that they knew would take them a pretty decent amount of time to get through.
Or they could take what was told to them to be a shortcut.
This shortcut was called Hastings Cut-Off.
And it got its name from the person who was promoting it, whose name was Lanford Hastings.
Lanford Hastings claimed that this cutoff was faster and easier, but he did not tell them a crucial bit of information.
Crucial means very important, so he did not tell them something that was actually very important.
And that was that he had never traveled through this cutoff with wagons.
They were part of a wagon train.
They were not people who were just going on horseback or walking.
And because he had never tried it, he actually didn't know anything if wagons would be able to go through this particular route or if it would actually be faster.
There was debate in the group.
Some people thought it would be a little bit too risky, a little bit too dangerous.
But the Donner Party decided to go forward and to use the cutoff.
And again, this was another mistake.
Instead of saving them time, it actually cost them weeks.
This cutoff took them through the Great Salt Lake Desert.
The Salt Lake is in Utah and if you've ever been there or seen pictures, you will see that it is a very desert-y area.
It's very hot, there's a lot of sunshine And, in addition to that, it's very difficult terrain for wagons that are being pulled by oxen.
The Donner party therefore had to deal with all of these difficult conditions.
Some of their oxen died and a few of their wagons even broke while they were trying to go through this cutoff.
By the time they reached the regular trail that they would have taken if they had not gone through Hastings Cut-Off, they were now weeks behind schedule.
By the time it was October, they had reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
The Sierra Nevada Mountains are a very large mountain range that is here on the western part of the United States.
It's a very beautiful area.
It's a touristic part now where you can go and see this natural beauty.
But Think about it if you were actually traveling by wagon, where you didn't have a lot of shelter, where you had already just struggled going through the desert.
You can see how reaching the Sierra Nevada mountains would maybe not be such a pleasant experience like when you come as a tourist.
The sierra nevada mountains are mountain ranges, which means that they get snow.
If the donner party had actually arrived just a few days or even weeks earlier, they might have had a better outcome, but because it was october, the snow was already starting to fall.
They were actually only about 13 miles from where they needed to be.
I know most of the world does not know miles, so you might not know what that means.
That's about a little bit less than 21 kilometers.
That shows you how relatively close they were to where they needed to be.
But they didn't get to that location.
The snow started falling and it didn't stop.
They decided to try to wait out the snow.
I've actually done an episode on the phrasal verbs wait.
One of the ones that we covered was wait out.
I will leave a iCard and a link for that.
But that phrasal verb wait out means that you're trying to wait until a difficulty passes.
You know that there is a difficult situation, but you think that if you just spend enough time waiting, that difficult situation will resolve itself.
So in this case, they were trying to wait out the snow.
They thought if they just got some shelter, if they just waited a couple days, the snow would stop and they would be able to get through the mountains.
Because they were stuck in the snow, they started running out of supplies.
Their food started running out, and then they started getting desperate and started eating anything they could to survive.
That meant that they were starting to eat their oxen.
They started eating tree bark, which is really not nutritious at all.
There's almost no nutritional value in tree bark, but they were so desperate and so hungry.
They also started boiling leather.
So leather is cow skin that's usually made into some type of product like shoes, purse, a belt.
Any leather that they had, they actually started to boil just to try to get some type of food.
Because of the cold, because of the lack of food, people started getting sick and sadly, they started dying from these conditions.
In December, after two months of being stuck at this particular part in the mountains, 15 people from the group decided to walk on foot and actually try to go find help.
They thought that they might be able to walk to safety and then bring a type of rescue party back to rescue the people who were going to remain at the campsite.
This group of 15 people started walking, but as you can imagine, this was very difficult.
It was still very cold.
It's wintertime in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and they didn't have enough food.
They didn't really have the supplies they needed in order to survive.
Of the 15 who left the camp, only seven survived.
And this is where the story starts getting really dark and has that really tragic turn.
As people started dying and as people realized that they didn't have anything to eat, they resorted to cannibalism.
Cannibalism means they started eating the people who had not survived.
And sadly, this is what occurs when people are desperate, when they don't have any other choice.
There was a movie that came out, I think, rather recently, called society of the snow, which is about a plane crash.
There is a football team who is traveling on an airplane for a match and they crash in the andes mountains, which is in south america.
They kind of go through the same thing they run out of food and then they resort to cannibalism when nothing else is left.
So people have to do what they have to do in order to survive.
But that's really what makes the Donner Party so infamous is that this started to happen.
The people who engaged in this told later on that they did not kill anyone.
No one was actually killed for this, but if someone did die, they had to eat what they had to eat in order to survive.
It took 33 days for the seven people who survived leaving the camp to actually find help.
They reached a ranch in what is now known as California's Sacramento Valley, which is up in the northern part of the state.
And they were able to find locals and tell them that there was a group of people who were stranded back up in the mountains.
By then, it was already January of 1847.
Even though they found help, the people who were going to go back to the camp and rescue their survivors had to get ready for the journey, and the journey back to the camp also took time.
It wasn't until February when the rescuers first reached the camp.
This was four months after the wagon train.
Members had originally gotten stuck because the people in the camp had run out of food.
They were very, very sick very, very thin.
A lot of them were about to perish, which means that they were about to die.
They were not going to survive much longer because of the conditions that they had endured.
Reports afterwards said that rescuers actually wept, which means that they cried when they saw the condition that the children were in.
And that's the condition that they said the children were in.
And of course, that's a very horrifying thing to see.
They started rescuing people from the camp, but they could not take everybody at once.
So they had to make multiple trips back and forth to safety and then back up to the camp to keep rescuing more people.
It took two more months and four separate trips to finally rescue everyone from the camp.
Of the original 87 members who had settled when they got stuck in the snow, only 48 survived.
The reason why the Donner Party is called.
That is because a lot of members of the Donner family did unfortunately not make it to California.
Members of the Reed family all survived and were actually part of the group that organized the rescue parties.
But the Donner Party had a lot of its members pass away.
To help memorialize the Donner Party, the lake where the settlers originally got stuck.
It was called Truckee Lake.
Now it is actually called Donner Lake in memory of what occurred there.
And like I said, the Donner Party is a story that we get told here in the United States.
I can remember being about nine years old in school and we learned about the Donner Party.
It was when we were learning about the migration West, how people migrated, settled from the eastern part of the United States to the western part of the United States.
And when we were learning about that, we learned about the Donner Party.
So I was about nine, maybe 10 years old.
And I remember having to watch a movie that showed the Donner Party.
It had actors reenacting what was occurring.
And that's what I mean by.
Once you hear the story, maybe you think it might not be 100 appropriate for children to learn about.
Public school in the United States is a little bit crazy sometimes.
I don't know if I would teach young children about this story, but it is something that gets taught.
It is something that most Americans know.
If you mention the Donner Party to someone who is in the United States, most likely they will know what you are talking about or at least have some general idea about this party that had tried to come to the western part of the United States but did not make it.
There are documentaries about the Donner Party and there are movies.
Like I said, I think I had to watch some movie, but it was a historical reenactment of what had happened.
There is a PBS documentary from 1992, which means it is a little bit older, but it is considered to be one of the most accurate tellings of the story.
So this is a topic that you can learn more about if you're interested in it, if you want to hear more about it.
And because it is such a known story, because it does get taught in schools.
There are some other things that maybe aren't so nice.
For example, there was a board game called The Donner Party where you played the game and you had to try to survive and maybe turn on other players who were playing the game.
It seems a little distasteful for me, which means it seems maybe not such a nice thing to do, not a pleasant thing to do.
There's also a game that was very popular when I was a kid in the 1990s, which was called Oregon Trail.
It wasn't specifically about the Donner Party, but in it you went on the trail from the eastern part of the United States to the western.
You went in a wagon with a bunch of people and you had to try to survive while you were traveling.
And it was a very difficult game to beat.
A lot of people did not make it.
It was not specifically mentioning the Donner Party, but showing how difficult the conditions were and how it was hard to actually make it to the western part of the United States.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
I hope you learned a little bit about the Donner Party and why it is called a scary story or spooky story.
And it's really just a tragedy that these people had all of these things go wrong during their journey.
And sadly, not all of them made it to what is now modern-day California.
If you enjoyed this episode, if you want more spooky or scary stories, especially around halloween time, please let me know.
Or if you just want more podcasts about different historical topics, please let me know, because there is definitely a lot that we can still talk about.
A reminder to look at the description of this podcast episode so you can find the list of the words and phrases that I used in the episode, so you can use it to continue to build your English vocabulary.
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