More on the Donner Party

Some of you will remember a post I put up last month on the Donner Party and Alferd Packer, that was occasioned by a report that excavations at one of the Donner Party camps had provided no evidence of cannibalism. Well, yesterday the LA Times had an op-ed by Ethan Rarick entitled "Cannibals with Courage" that hit the subject again. Rarick goes on about the evidence (or lack of) that the archaeologists uncovered:

"Much of the current befuddlement stems from the limited nature of the archeological dig along the banks of Alder Creek, not far from Truckee. This was the campsite of the two Donner families, including that of George Donner, whose election as captain lent the party its name. For the first time, archeologists located the families' cooking hearth, allowing them to search for charred fragments of human bone. They found none, although there was plenty of evidence that the Donners ate game.

But this was one site among many in the story of the Donner Party, which included dozens of other people as well as the Donner families. When the early winter snow trapped the wagons, most members were several miles ahead of the Donner families, at what is today Donner Lake.

No one disputes that cannibalism occurred at Donner Lake or at other sites involved in the story. Even at Alder Creek, the new finding does not disprove the practice of cannibalism. There may be no evidence to find. Uncooked human bones would long ago have disintegrated, and the literature of survival cannibalism is replete with cases in which desperate survivors sliced the flesh from cadavers and cooked only this gruesome 'meat.'"

Rarick seems to be busy demolishing a strawman, as he pronounces as "corrections" re-statements of the archaeologists' original caveats: this was only one camp of several and that this should not be regarded as proof that cannibalism did not occur. His statement that "human bones would long ago have disintegrated" is just wrong, as the Alder Creek site had 16,000 pieces of preserved animal bone. I'm not sure who Rarick thinks is befuddled.

Also his pronouncements on the archaeologists' attaching moral weight to their findings seems a bit much:

"But unfortunately, and perhaps unintentionally, the researchers have
occasionally fallen into the trap of attaching a moral weight to the issue of
whether the Donners were cannibals. Acknowledging that the lack of bones doesn't
disprove the possibility of cannibalism, one researcher said, 'no body doesn't
necessarily mean no crime.'"

All that is apparent here is that Rarick has fallen into the trap of not understanding a metaphor.

I'm not sure what purpose this op-ed was supposed to serve. Rarick is apparently in the middle of writing a new history of the Donner Party. Maybe someone at the Times owed him a favor.