The Donner Party and the Rhetoric of Western Expansion
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Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Communication Faculty Publications Department of Communication Summer 2011 The Donner Party and the Rhetoric of Western Expansion Mary Stuckey Georgia State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_facpub Part of the Communication Commons, and the Rhetoric Commons Recommended Citation Stuckey, Mary, "The Donner Party and the Rhetoric of Western Expansion" (2011). Communication Faculty Publications. 24. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_facpub/24 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Communication at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Donner Party and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion Mary E. Stuckey Th ere have been numerous studies of the frontier myth as it operated in the early republic and throughout our history. As a result of this work, we know a lot about the frontier myth, its history, elements, and ideological functioning. We know less, however, about how that myth developed when its ideological elements met the empirical realities of western emigration. I argue that four specific cultural fictions—erasure, civilization, community, and democracy— are integral elements of the larger fiction of the American frontier myth. By understanding them through the vehicle of the Donner Party narratives, we can deepen our understanding of that myth and the ways in which it operates and resonates throughout the national culture and contributes to the development of American national identity. hatever else one can say about the nature and development of American national identity, the idea of expansion is central to it.1 WTh e years between 1841 when John Bidwell led the first emigrants west and 1893 when Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier closed were especially critical.2 Th ese were the years of the wagon trains, when hundreds of thousands of people traversed the roughly 2,500 miles between Independence, Missouri, and the West Coast.3 Many traveled on foot where Mary E. Stuckey is Professor of Communication at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Th e author thanks Chuck and Linda McCarty, whose knowledge of early California history in general and the Donner Party in particular got this essay started and made it smarter. Th anks also go to Sam Perry, David Cheshier, Stephen J. Hartnett, and the anonymous reviewers for their help in improving the essay. © 2011 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved. Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 14, No. 2, 2011, pp. 229–260. ISSN 1094-8392. 229 This work originally appeared in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 14:2, Summer 2011, published by Michigan State University Press. 230 Rhetoric & Public Affairs the average pace was about one mile per hour—the pace dictated by the oxen pulling the heavily laden wagons. Th e trip took between four and seven months.4 Given the hardships endured, the fear conquered, and the territory covered, it is no wonder that those who made the trek are remembered as integral to the nation, its history, and its identity.5 Among the hundreds of caravans that made their way west, no single wagon train has garnered as much attention as the one that became known as the Donner Party.6 Certainly the Donner Party is not the typical story of western emigration. And yet, it is also understood as emblematic, a “frontier foundation myth.”7 Ric Burns, writer, producer, and director of a film version of the Donner Party’s story, said, “Th e cannibalism becomes like the barker outside the tent. It’s what helps you bring people into the story, but then you end up telling them a story, once inside, that’s actually quite diff erent from what the barker has led people to believe, which is a story of really kind of infinite pain and sorrow and not a story really of immorality and ghoulishness at all, but a story of suff ering and stoicism and survival in the face of adversity.”8 Frank Mullen Jr. agrees, arguing that “the lurid tales of cannibalism first attracted the public’s attention, but in a deeper sense, the emigrants’ two thousand-mile walk remains a metaphor of American history.”9 Interestingly both unique and typical, the Donner Party is a useful case study through which we can better understand the rhetorical processes that undergirded an important element of that history. For one thing, the travels and travails of the Donner Party are among the best documented and most well known of the pioneer narratives. We have extensive primary and secondary sources on their experiences.10 Th e travels of the Donner Party remain one of the most prominent narratives of the western emigration.11 Second, the Donner Party served as a weirdly optimistic version of emigration. A widely publicized letter from one of the children who endured that winter in the mountains to a cousin in the east concluded, “we have left everything but i dont cair for that we have got throw with our lives but Dont let this letter dish[e]a[r]ten anybody never take no cutofs and hury along as fast as you can.”12 Ostensibly a cautionary tale, the story of the Donners nonetheless urged others west. Finally and most interestingly, the Donner Party and the western emigra- tion are already collapsed into one another. Th e Donner Party becomes “a symbol of America’s westward expansion”13; moreover, the famous monument standing at Donner Lake is not a commemoration of the Donner Party specifically; it is known as “Th e Pioneer Monument.”14 A spectacular homage This work originally appeared in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 14:2, Summer 2011, published by Michigan State University Press. The Donner Party and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion 231 to paternalism, the monument depicts a man with a small child clinging to his leg, one arm upraised, shielding his eyes against the western sun while embracing and protecting a woman. She is bent forward, cradling an infant, accepting the man’s protection and urging herself west. Th e entire family is considerably larger than life-sized, as befits those who symbolize the entire western emigration. Th e Donner Party is integral to the monument only in that the base of the statue is 22 feet high, the presumed depth of snow in the Sierra during the winter of 1846, and buried within the base are artifacts from the various cabins sited on what we now call Donner Lake. Th e emblematic pioneers literally stand upon the legacy of the Donner Party, whose artifacts are also contained by the greater monument. Th e statue thus invites us to “remember to forget”: remember the heroism of the pioneers, and forget the details of the suff ering many of them endured. Th ose details become abstracted, contained within the larger narrative of success and dominance of the continent.15 For all of these reasons, the Donner Party can be understood as a single case study that illuminates the rhetorical processes undergirding the development and expansion of the American nation during this critical period. I argue in this essay that the western emigration, seen here through the lens of the Donner Party, contains several important aspects of the rhetorical development of American national identity.16 Known for its association with cannibalism, the Donner Party is better understood as a complicated narra- tive of western emigration that captures both the perils and opportunities of expansion.17 Even as it acted as a cautionary tale of the perils of emigration, the Donner Party story also sheds light on national arguments regarding expansion and the cultural fictions underpinning those arguments. I take as my starting point the notion that the frontier myth functions as “America’s secular creation story.”18 Th is myth can be understood as amalgamating many of our national cultural fictions, or the “stories, norms, explanations, icons, justifications, and sustaining myths”19 created by a society, which are the building blocks of national identity. Th ese fictions are used by diff erent people at diff erent times, to diff ering political ends.20 My purpose in this essay is to uncover the ways in which some of these fictions were deployed as the nation expanded in the mid-nineteenth century.21 I argue that four specific cultural fictions—erasure, civilization, community, and democracy—are integral elements of the larger fiction of the American frontier myth. By understanding them through the vehicle of the Donner Party narratives, we can deepen our understanding of that myth and the This work originally appeared in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 14:2, Summer 2011, published by Michigan State University Press. 232 Rhetoric & Public Affairs ways in which it operates and resonates throughout the national culture and contributes to the development of national identity. Th ere have been numerous studies of the frontier myth as it operated in the early republic and throughout our history. As a result of this work, we know a lot about the frontier myth, its history, elements, and ideological functioning.22 We know less, however, about how that myth developed when its ideological elements met the realities of western emigration. In the Donner Party’s story, those ideological elements met specific affirmations and challenges; how those affirmations and challenges were resolved tells us a great deal about the ideological development of the frontier myth and its contribution to national identity. First, the story involves the erasure of indigenous peoples and other “nonwhites.” American Indians are central to the frontier myth but tangential to the Donner story, and do not appear as those whose loss becomes the nation’s gain.