Donner Party Narrative

The people on the Donner party are from the plains of Illinois, they are farmers. They don’t really have experience with the new terrain of the west. In order to reach California they had to pass by deserts, canyons, and mountains. It was difficult for them to go through these land features, there whole life they had been farmers, these lands were new to them. Before this tripe they didn’t know that there was such thing as a salt lake. What made things worse was that they had no guide, and Hasting was wrong about the shortcut. This short cut was actually longer and it wasn’t a very good trail. At one point Hasting had left a note behind telling anyone that was following him to stop following the trail and follow him through a detour, because …show more content…
He had killed a man named John Snyder. There was a high sand hill in which the wagon party had to cross. They all stopped to examine their options on what they should do, and how they should get over. The wagon driver from behind John Snyder thought that he could get his wagon over the hill by himself, he believed that his oxen were capable enough to get over, so he got out of line and made his team of oxen rush pass the John Snyder's team to try to get over it and reach the other side. As he did this his lead-yoke got tangled with some of Snyder's oxen. The two drivers got mad and began to argue among themselves. Snyder got so mad that he started to beat the other’s oxen with his whip. Reed got furious he didn’t like what Snyder was doing to the oxen of the wagon which he was riding in. Synder then started to argue with Reed instead of the driver. Reed is a young man he, and he is not to be messed with. Snyder threaten the other driver with the whip. This was when Reed took out his hunting knife. Alarmed Snyder then started to hit reed with one end of the whip. Within the entanglement Reed strike Snyder with the knife. Snyder kept on wiping Reeds. Ms Reed's try to get in the middle to stop them but she ended up getting