Location:
Emigration Canyon: Donner Hill
Distance: 1,283 miles from Nauvoo

Nearly one year to the day before the Latter-day Saints entered this canyon, the final geographic obstacle between Big Mountain and the Salt Lake Valley, members of the Reed-Donner wagon train heading to California blazed its length and carved its first rough road. After hacking their way through nearly a dozen miles of choking river willows and scrub oaks that infested the bottoms of this narrow canyon, the group chose to go up and around the final constriction near the valley's mouth instead of through it. The choice to make this exhaustingly brutal climb over rock and sage all but spent their draft animals' final reserves of strength and likely contributed to the historic tragedy that befell the travelers three months and 600 miles to the west.

On 22 July 1847, an advance team from the Latter-day Saint vanguard company chose not to climb Donner Hill, but to stick to the valley floor, fighting not gravity, solid rock, and exhaustion, but merely brush, boulders, and adrenalin. The team hacked its way through the riverine jungle in less than four hours and stepped, merely winded, out onto the bench overlooking the basin of the Great Salt Lake. After more than a year on the westering trail, the Latter-day Saints had arrived.

Orson Pratt

21 July 1847

"No frost this morning but a heavy dew. We resumed our journey, came 2½ miles and ascended a mountain for 1½ miles; descended upon the west side one mile; came upon a swift running creek, where we halted for noon: we called this Last Creek. Brother Erastus Snow (having overtaken our camp from the other camp, which he said was, but a few miles in the rear,) and myself proceeded in advance of the camp down Last Creek 4½ miles, to where it passes through a kanyon and issues into the broad open valley below. To avoid the kanyon and the wagons last season had passed over an exceedingly steep and dangerous hill. Mr. Snow and myself ascended this hill, from the top of which a broad open valley, about 20 miles wide and 30 long, lay stretched out before us, at the north end of which the broad waters of the Great Salt Lake glistened in the sunbeams, containing high mountainous islands from 25 to 30 miles in extent. After issuing from the mountains among which we had been shut up for many days and beholding in a moment such an extensive scenery open before us, we could not refrain from a shout of joy which almost involuntarily escaped from our lips the moment this grand and lovely scenery was within our view. We immediately descended very gradually into the lower parts of the valley and although we had but one horse between us, yet we traversed a circuit of about 12 miles before we left the valley to return to our camp, which we found encamped 1½ miles up the ravine from the valley and 3 miles in advance of their noon halt. It was about 9 o'clock in the evening when we got into camp. The main body of the pioneers who were in the rear were encamped only 1½ miles up the creek from us, with the exception of some wagons containing some who were sick, who were still behind" (The Orson Pratt Journals, comp. Elden J. Watson [1975], 452-453).

Brigham Young

24 July 1847

"This is the right place. Drive on."

February 1849

"We have been kicked out of the frying-pan into the fire, out of the fire into the middle of the floor, and here we are and here we will stay. God has shown me that this is the spot to locate His people, and here is where they will prosper." (quoted in Life of a Pioneer: Being the autobiography of James S. Brown [1900], 121-22).

William Clayton

23 June 1847, Cottonwood Creek

"After breakfast I went to the top of the high bluff expecting to get a good view of the country west but was disappointed in consequence of the many ridges or bluffs but a little distance beyond us. At seven o'clock the camp moved forward and immediately after saw a graveyard on the left of the road with a board stuck up with these words written upon it: 'Matilda Crowley, B. July 16th, 1830, and D. July 7, 1846.'

"On reflecting afterward that some of the numerous emigrants who had probably started with a view to spend the remainder of their days in the wild Oregon, had fallen by the way and their remains had to be left by their friends far from the place of destination, I felt a renewed anxiety that the Lord will kindly preserve the lives of all my family . . . rather than be left far away in a wild country" (Stewart E. Glazier and robert S. Clark, eds., Journal of the Trail, 2nd ed. [1997], 115).

Journal photographs courtesy of Infobases, Inc.

Photograph of the Reed-Donner party: Courtesy of the Denver Public Library, Western History Collection