By now the infamous Donner Party has acquired legendary status in American history, fiction and film. Who did or did not resort to cannibalism to survive that horrific ordeal varies depending on the historian. Patrick Breen was the only member of the Donner Party to keep a diary as events unfolded. (Excerpts from Breen’s diary are set in italics.) I have taken the liberty of correcting the spelling of names, although Patrick spells Donner, for example, as ‘Donno’ in his diary. ‘Peggy’ was Patrick’s nickname for his wife, Margaret Bulger Breen.
The Breen family’s staunch Catholic faith is said to have helped them endure the ordeal with somewhat more equanimity than the rest of the party, and to resist cannibalism, depending on which historian you believe. Patrick Breen seems to have kept his head; while others were gobbling down their supplies, he put his family on rations early on. That this is so is indicated by the fact that he notes people coming to him asking for food long after other families’ supplies had run out.
Although it seems unlikely Patrick Breen would have been educated enough to reference Dante, it seemed an apt reference, given Patrick’s frequent scriptural allusions. Though unintentional, the line in the third last verse, our eyes seared / with scenes that murder sleep,
echoes Shakespeare’s line in MacBeth, Act II, scene 2, Macbeth does murder sleep…
It also struck me as tragically ironic that the height of the Irish Potato Famine coincided with the crisis suffered by the Donner Party.
Aside from Patrick Breen’s diary, I have relied largely on Joseph A. King’s book, Winter of Entrapment: A New Look at the Donner Party (Toronto: P.D. Meany Publishers, 1992). His seems to be the least embroidered or lurid of the many accounts written of the Donner Party.
I am descended from the Breens through my maternal grandmother, Maree Evelyn Hazie, (genealogy of the Breens by Jeanne Mullen MacLardy, privately published, 1993), and through Samuel Breen, brother of Patrick Breen of the Donner Party. According to the obituary of Edward C. Breen, son of Samuel, published in the Lewis County Journal, October 2, 1925: He was born Feb. 14, 1822 at Ft. Stanley, Canada. He came with his parents Samuel and Margaret Breen to the United States in 1833 where they first settled in Burlington, Iowa, a town then of only four houses. In 1837 they came to Tully, MO., ten years before there was a store in Canton and only two in Tully.....He was in a company that crossed the plains in 1853. He drove a ten–mule team hauling quicksilver for a mining company in a town of 300 people in California.
(Town not named in obit.)
It’s not clear from this obituary whether Edward crossed the plains
with his parents Samuel and Margaret in 1853. If so, it would appear that the benefits of living in California for the Breen family had by then eclipsed the horrors of the winter of 1846.
©2010 Sean Arthur Joyce