The Donner Party Villain: How Did Lewis Keseberg Survive?

It’s been over 175 years since the last few surviving members of the Donner Party reached civilization, and yet everyone still knows the story of how the desperate group resorted to cannibalism to survive. But did you know that one man was made into the villain of their story? For years, survivor Lewis Keseberg was haunted by suspicions that he murdered Tamsen Donner in order to eat her — so what is the case against him? Help us reach 10k followers on Instagram! @⁠theconspiracypod⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:06Speaker 00

  April 17th, 1847. A brutal winter in the Sierra Nevada has turned to spring at last. A mountain man named William Fallon has led a group of men from Sutter's Fort through the mountains for four days straight. Now, they reach their destination: a camp at Truckee Lake, where they find a horrific scene that leaves them speechless. Dismembered corpses lie everywhere, with mutilated legs, arms, and skulls scattered across the snow in every direction. A woman's body has been left near the entrance with her limbs severed.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  Most of her flesh has been eaten from the bones by something or someone. This is what remains of the Donner Party, a group of more than 80 immigrants who traveled almost 2,000 miles from Independence, Missouri, only to become trapped by a snowy impasse last November. They had no choice but to make camp for the long winter with little food to survive. Fallon's men are actually the last of four relief parties. The previous rescue groups miraculously saved more than 40 starved survivors.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  Many had endured only by committing an unholy act of terrible desperation: cannibalism. It's been a month since the last relief party left the camp, and now there's little hope of finding more survivors. Now, this final mission is not so much a rescue effort as it is an attempt to salvage any valuables left behind. They scour the lake cabins for two hours before moving on to the nearby Alder Creek, where George Donner and his family had made their camp. The salvage party has been told they'll find a large sum of money in the Donner's old tent.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  When they get there, not only do they find another horrific scene with more signs of cannibalism, the tent has already been ransacked. The money appears to be gone. To further add to the mystery, they spot a fresh trail of footprints in the snow. Fallon's party spends the next day gathering as much as they can, while half the group stays behind at Alder Creek to continue their search. The other half makes their way back to the lake cabins. When they arrive, they're shocked to find someone alive. It's the last survivor of the Donner Party: Louis Keseberg.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  But it's not a happy ending to a tragic tale, far from it. The men find Louis lying next to a pan full of water and what appears to be a human liver and lungs. The 32-year-old German man admits to eating the remains of Tamsen Donner, George's wife. She'd been relatively healthy when the previous rescuers saw her last. Even more suspicious is the fact that Louis is found with silks and jewelry worth $200, a brace of pistols that had belonged to George Donner, and $225 in gold hidden in his waistcoat.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  If you adjust for inflation, that's more than $17,000, plus some guns. The rescue party quickly suspects that Louis is not just guilty of cannibalism. They think he's also committed a crime that most of his fellow survivors could never sympathize with: murder. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Wednesday. We would love to hear from you, so if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts, or check us out on Instagram at the conspiracy pod.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  This episode includes discussions of death, murder, domestic violence, and cannibalism. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. Stay with us.

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• 5:25Speaker 00

  When the rescue party finds Louis Kiesberg standing over what appears to be a meal made of human organs, he certainly looks guilty. I mean, they pretty much find him with a smoking gun, right? But there's a lot more to this story than it may seem. Louis, for his part, claims his innocence through it all. Well, at least when it comes to the whole murder bit, he never tries to hide his cannibalism. Yet it doesn't matter what he says, because the men who found him, the members of William Fallon's rescue party, have already made up their minds. When they return to Sutter's Fort with Louis, several of the rescuers openly accuse him of killing Tamsen Donner.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  Within a few weeks, the California Star publishes William Fallon's diary. The grisly details solidify Louis's public image as a bloodthirsty, ghoulish, man-eater. However, that image changes with time. Many historians eventually arrive at a different conclusion: that Louis was likely nothing more than a scapegoat. And a conspiracy theory emerges that Keseberg was framed. But the question is, why him? Before we dive any deeper into this rabbit hole, let's take a step back to talk about

• 6:51Speaker 00

  the broader story that Louis becomes a main character of: the infamous and ill-fated Donner Party. Now, you might already be familiar with the Donner Party, and if not, maybe you just don't know that you are. Dozens of books have been written about them. Filmmaker Rick Burns wrote and directed a PBS documentary about the traveling group in 1992. Plenty of movies have been inspired by the harrowing events of the Donner Party, from 1999's Ravenous to the TV series Yellowjackets. Our story begins in the time of manifest destiny, when American settlers sought as

• 7:33Speaker 00

  their divine right to expand westward across North America. Few had ever braved the long journey across the plains that stood between the Mississippi and California. It's in this culture of ambition and opportunity that the Donner Party is formed. The group arrives in Independence, Missouri on May 10th, 1846. They had actually started their voyage the previous month in Springfield, Illinois. Nine covered wagons contained the families of James Fraser Reed, George Donner, and George's younger brother Jacob, along with their hired teamsters.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  But Independence is what the pioneers referred to as "the jumping-off point for the journeys onto the Oregon and California trails," was the dividing line between the safety of civilization and the treacherous unknown of the wilderness. On May 12th, the Reed and Donner families leave Independence as part of a massive train featuring nearly 500 wagons, and unfortunately for them, they're late to the party. They're starting this trek near the rear of the train. That's important, because they have to reach their final destination before the first snows of winter block the mountain passes.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  In this cross-country race against the weather, every hour is precious, and every decision is crucial. And no decision would prove to be more important than the one that the group makes on July 20th. Two months into the journey, the wagon train has reached a fork in the road at the little sandy river known as the Parting of the Ways. Up until this point, every wagon had been traveling west along the same identical path toward the Rockies, but now, a choice between two routes emerges. The first is the traditional established route, which would take them farther north into what is modern-day Idaho, before swinging back south toward California.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  The second route is much more direct, taking them through the future states of Utah and Nevada to reach California head-on. Now, that second option is pretty alluring. It would cut the total distance by maybe 300 miles in the process. The only problem with this newer, supposedly faster route, well, no one had actually taken it before. James Reed and the Donner Brothers only knew of this proposed shortcut by reading The Immigrant's Guide to Oregon and California, a book written by a young lawyer from Ohio named Lanceford Warren Hastings. Hastings was an ambitious man.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  He was plotting a California boom and trying to position himself at the center of it. He wrote this guide in hopes of attracting settlers to the future Golden State. Part of his sales pitch was this faster route, called the Hastings Cut Off, naturally. The thing is, he'd never even set foot on it before writing the book. About a month before the Donner Party reaches the parting of the ways, an incredible coincidence happens. Reed and his traveling companions run into a man named James Clyman at Fort Laramie in what is now eastern Wyoming. Clyman is an old buddy of Reed's, and he just so happens to be coming from the west.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  And as fate would have it, this old buddy had just traveled the Hastings Cut Off with, well, none other than Hastings himself. Yeah, turns out he decided it was probably a good idea to check it out. Clyman's conclusion is steer clear of the Cut Off. That Hastings had no idea what he was talking about. He tells Reed, “Take the regular wagon track and never leave it. It is barely possible to get through if you follow it, and it may be impossible if you don’t.” But Reed doesn’t heed his friend’s advice. Reed’s like, “Yeah, sure, I have eighty-seven lives at stake, but, you know, I read a book, dude.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Doesn’t matter what you’re telling me.” Sort of like looking at a website and thinking, “Well, it’s on the internet. Must be true.” At the parting of the ways, most of the wagons veer right to continue along the trail northwest, the established route. Meanwhile, the Reeds, the Donners, and a few other families agree to turn left toward Hastings Cut Off. As George Donner is elected to lead this new group, this fateful decision marks the true beginning of the Donner Party and the true beginning of their troubles. Hastings Cut Off proves to be a much more difficult route than advertised in the book. The Donner Party has to carve their own trail through the wilderness of the Wasatch Mountains.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Then they have to crawl through the arid conditions of the Great Salt Lake Desert. The detour is a full-blown disaster. By the time they rejoin the main California trail, they’ve lost thirty-six cattle, multiple families have had to abandon their wagons, and several people have nearly died of thirst. Food supplies are running low, and everyone is exhausted. Instead of shortening their trip by three hundred miles, this shortcut adds roughly a hundred and twenty-five miles to the journey. Worst of all, Hastings Cut Off costs the travelers about a full month. That’s precious time they can’t afford.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  At this point, the group is made up of eighty-five people from various states, religions, and nationalities, including Irishmen and Germans like Louis Keseberg and his family. Intentions are running high after the month-long setback. As resources run out, it gets harder and harder for this diverse company to agree on anything, and the clock is ticking all the while. At the end of October, the party reaches the Sierra Nevada. They only have about a hundred miles left to go in their two-thousand-mile odyssey. They finally landed on Californian soil, but the mountains standing before them are like this unbeatable final boss of a video game.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  The Sierra Nevada is one of the largest mountain ranges in the United States. They feature more than five hundred peaks that exceed twelve thousand feet in elevation, and if the heights aren’t bad enough, the mountains are home to some of the snowiest conditions in all of North America. On October 31st, some of the Donner Party reaches Truckee Lake while the rest of their company legs behind. They’re prepared to push forward up the near vertical slope into the high Sierra. That way, they can find a pass between the peaks to travel through, but snow is already covering the ground, and the climb is too challenging.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  The exhausted group decides to rest, and then overnight, a new storm hits. Now, the snow is too deep for them to go any farther. After traveling for so many miles over half a year, they lose their race against the weather by a single day. Their only option is to turn back to Truckee Lake and take shelter for the winter. The story of the Donner Party is a series of unfortunate events, most of which were avoidable. Some were just sheer bad luck. Eighty-one people are now trapped by the snowy impasse.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  About three-quarters of them spread out among three cabins at Truckee Lake. The rest remain at Alder Creek close by. More than half of these winter prisoners are under eighteen years old, and a quarter of them are just five or younger. By December 16th, one person has died, and it might not be long until more follow the same fate. There are too many mouths to feed, and the meager food supply is dwindling. And so, the Donner Party sends fifteen of its strongest members through the snowy mountains to seek aid from Sutter’s Fort on the other side of the Sierra. They’re joined by two Miwok guides, Louis and Salvador.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  They’ve been with the Donner Party ever since they brought relief provisions from Sutter’s Fort in mid-October. Altogether, this seventeen-person crew becomes known as the Forlorn Hope. Sounds ominous. Their journey is brutal. They trudge through deep snow and blizzards with a limited supply of rations that’s expected to last for just six days. It’s not enough. And once their food runs out, they start to humor the idea of sacrificing one of themselves for the others to eat. But it never comes to that, because by Christmas, the first members of the Forlorn Hope succumb to cold and hunger.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  An intense blizzard claims four of their lives, and the others, except for Louis and Salvador, eat the flesh of the dead to survive. As far as we know, this is the first time that anyone in the Donner Party resorts to cannibalism, but it will be far from the last. The appalling act will forever haunt a few of the company’s survivors, and most will refuse to even speak of it publicly. For the Forlorn Hope, it’s a necessary evil that becomes a pattern in the coming days, as more people die and the remaining survivors subsist on their corpses to finish their mission by any means necessary.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  On New Year’s morning, the group discovers that Louis and Salvador have vanished in the middle of the night, likely fearing for their lives, and their fears are well warranted. When the crew later spot their guides’ tracks in the snow, they follow them until they find Louis and Salvador collapsed there reportedly at death’s door. Then William Foster shoots them both in the head. He justifies their murders by claiming, well, they would have died soon anyway. Whether that’s true or not, it appears that no one tries to stop him, and Louis and Salvador, their one-time saviors, are eaten.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  On January 17th, William Eddy reaches Johnson’s Ranch, the first American settlement on the western side of the Sierra. Eddy is among the seven survivors of the Forlorn Hope. With their mission complete, the rescue efforts at Truckee Lake can finally begin. Meanwhile, the rest of the Donner Party is doing their best to survive until help arrives, enduring one blizzard after another. The snow reportedly piles up to twenty-two feet in height around Truckee Lake. The first relief party arrives on February 18th, and the rescuers find a shocking scene:

• 19:14Speaker 00

  corpses half-buried in the snow, others merely covered in quilts. Forty-eight people still cling to life, but some have lost their minds, and others are already too far gone to be saved. At this point, no one outside of the Forlorn Hope has been reduced to survival cannibalism, but that’s going to change soon enough. The first relief party takes twenty-three people with them through the mountains, but two children quickly have to be sent back to the lake camps because they’re too weak to make the trip, and a third, Louis Keseberg's three-year-old daughter Ada, dies on the first night.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  By the time the next rescue effort arrives at Truckee Lake on March 1st, no one else at the lake camps has died, but the survivors have had to start eating the dead. The second relief party tries to bring seventeen more people back through the mountains, but they’re hit by yet another storm, the worst of the winter, and three more perish during the journey. Before the third relief party arrives a couple weeks later, there’s an incident that occurs involving our guy Louis Keseberg. After his wife and daughter left with the first relief group, he’d been staying at a cabin with Lavina Murphy and six children. One of those kids is George Foster, William Foster’s two-year-old son.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  Louis sleeps in a bed with George one night, and by morning, the child is dead. George’s grandmother had been caring for little Georgie ever since his parents left as part of the Forlorn Hope, and she cries bloody murder. In front of the other kids, she takes George’s corpse and accuses Louis of strangling him to death overnight. According to young Georgia Donner, who’s in the room that day, Louis then takes the body and hangs it up, quote, “in sight, inside the cabin, on the wall.”

• 21:17Speaker 00

  When William Foster and William Eddy arrive as part of the third relief party, they're devastated to discover that not only is George dead, but so is Eddy's three-year-old son, James. Louis and a few others had eaten both of them, too. According to at least one account, Eddy was so furious that he told Louis he would kill him if he ever saw him again. Foster, Eddy, and the rest of their rescue team leave with the four remaining children and two others, leaving behind just four last survivors at the camp. Louis refuses to go with them.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  George's grandmother is too weak to make the trip, and George Donner likely only has a few hours left to live. That leaves only Tamsen Donner, his wife. She appears healthy enough to return with her children, but she won't allow her husband to die alone. As for what happens next, the only one who lives to tell the full story of the Donner Party's final month at Truckee Lake is Louis Keseberg. And not everyone is ready to take his word for it.

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  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  When the final relief party finds Louis Kiesberg as the lone survivor of the Donner Party, no one seems happy to see him. Louis had already earned himself a bit of a reputation among his traveling companions, and that was before he was accused of murdering little Georgie Foster or Tamsin Donner. So why were people so quick to assume the worst of Louis? Well, it's about time we zoomed in on the man who becomes known as the villain of the Donner Party. Louis is a German immigrant, described in contemporaneous accounts as being a tall, handsome man with blond hair and blue eyes. He's skilled with languages.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  He can speak English, German, French, and eventually Spanish. Before leaving Europe for the United States, he married Elizabeth Philippine Zimmer, who goes by Philippine, and is almost a decade younger than her husband. They share a daughter, Ada, and during the journey, Philippine gives birth to a second child, Louis Keseberg Jr. But Louis Sr. has few, if any, close personal relationships with others on the trail to California. He's known to have a nasty temper, and several people witnessed him take it out on his wife. More than one member of the Donner Party sees Louis beating Philippine.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  Virginia Reed reports, quote, "He treated her like a brute." Beyond his anger management issues, some also think Louis defiles an indigenous burial ground. According to author George R. Stewart, Louis steals the buffalo robes from a dead Native American man. When others fear retaliation from a nearby Sioux tribe, they make Louis return the robes, and James Reed apparently lobbies for his banishment from the company. Needless to say, Louis isn't exactly Mr. Popular on the trail, but this relationship between him and James Reed is a particularly thorny one.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  And that may be a factor in a pivotal dispute that takes place after the Hastings Cut-off detour, when tensions in the Donner Party are at a boiling point. On October 5th, a hired teamster named John Snyder is toward the back of the wagon train. It's struggling its way through the harsh terrain surrounding the Humboldt River. The wagons in front of him are slowly making their way up a tough ridge by stopping to double hitch. It's basically the covered wagon version of getting towed, but Snyder stubbornly attempts to climb without the extra help. This causes all sorts of confusion and chaos. Rains get tangled, wagons crash into each other. Snyder loses it.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  It's like the original road rage, except for maybe like 5 miles per hour. Snyder is getting into it with one of the wagon drivers when James Reed decides to intervene, and now they're getting into it. Snyder strikes Reed in the head with his ox whip, and Reed pulls his hunting knife on Snyder before stabbing him deep in the chest. Within minutes, Snyder is dead. This dramatic scene is perhaps the most controversial incident on the entire Donner Party journey, before they make it to Truckee Lake, of course. In the immediate aftermath, a council is formed to decide Reed's punishment.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  As the travelers offer up potential solutions, Louis props up his wagon tongue with an ox yoke. It's his way of making a silent call for a hanging. Although some may have supported the radical suggestion, as Reed wasn't all that popular himself, the punishment is ultimately deemed too severe, but James Reed certainly doesn't forget about it. He tries to get Louis kicked out, and Reed ends up being banished instead. So Louis is looking like a hard-headed troublemaker. Shortly after that, two more incidents occur that further add to Louis's growing reputation.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  The first involves a near-60-year-old Belgian man, known only as Hardcope, who suddenly goes missing. Hardcope is a driver for the Keseberg family, and so Louis is questioned about Hardcope's whereabouts. But Louis claims he doesn't know what happened to him. When Hardcope is later found, trailing behind the company by about 5 miles, he explains that Louis kicked him out of the family wagon. Like many others, Louis had to shed one of his wagons in the Great Salt Lake Desert, and so he later argues that he didn't have room for the old man and his only remaining wagon. After all, he has a young daughter and a wife carrying an infant son, and even they are walking.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  The next day, Louis refuses Hardcope a ride again, and it doesn't take long for him to start struggling once more. Hardcope is ultimately left behind for good, and Louis is blamed for his abandonment. About a week later, another tragedy strikes when a young merchant named Wolffinger goes missing, too. Wolffinger is believed to be a wealthy man. He's supposedly carrying a lot of money in gold coin and other valuables, and the last person he's seen traveling with is, well, who else but Louis? The missing merchant is never seen alive again.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  At the time, the prevailing theory is that Louis killed the man for his money and hid the body. It isn't until a couple months later that another man confesses on his deathbed, he was the one who murdered Wolffinger. Fair or not, Louis enters the winter camps with all of these incidents, rumors, and accusations swirling around him like a storm cloud. And it doesn't help that he has the reputation of being a mean, angry, antisocial man who seems to be an all-around bad hang. When the first, second, and third relief parties come and go, Louis stays behind at Truckee Lake.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  There are some who believe that he had been strong enough to make the journey at each opportunity, though. They suspect that he's only hanging back in waiting for more people to die so he can be the one to snag their property and money. By the time Louis does return to civilization in late April, news of the Donner Party tragedy has already started to spread like wildfire, and since Louis is the only one who lived through that last month and a half up in the mountains, everyone is wondering the same question: How did he survive for so long?

• 30:40Speaker 00

  At Sutter's Fork, some of William Fallon's rescuers openly accuse Louis of murdering Tamsen Donner. That way, he could cannibalize her and save himself. One of his accusers is a man named Ned Coffeymire, and Lewis takes him to court for slander. The trial of Keseberg versus Coffeymire is held on May 5, and Lewis seeks $1,000 in damages. Lewis wins the case, yet he's awarded the grand sum of $1. There's no record to show what the jury's reasoning was for sure, but some have speculated that they must have viewed him as damaged goods.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  You can't really slander someone whose reputation is already ruined. And as an extra slap in the face, Lewis is ordered to pay costs for the trial. It all seems like a little bit of a screw you to Lewis, which probably explains what happens next. A few weeks later, The California Star publishes The Diary of William Fallon. Fallon provides graphic details of the horrific scene at the camp. And though he doesn't directly accuse Lewis of murder, he paints a pretty damning picture nonetheless. According to Fallon, Lewis admits to eating Tamsen Donner, and he seems almost enthusiastic about it.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  He claims Lewis even says that her flesh was "the best he had ever tasted." After the rescuers find all of the silk, jewelry, gold, and guns that he was hiding from them, they start to threaten him. They know that George Donner had more gold than this. They threaten to hang Lewis, but he doesn't budge. Their interrogation continues the next day when the rest of Fallon's party arrives. They push Lewis around, tie a noose around his neck. Finally, Lewis leads them back to Alder Creek to reveal where he's hidden the rest of the Donner money. But before they rescue him from the mountains, there's still something else lingering on their minds.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  Earlier, they saw a few ox legs, which had been preserved in the snow, along with an uneaten horse carcass. So they ask him why he didn't eat any of that instead. As The California Star publishes in full detail, Lewis allegedly says, "Oh, it's too dry eating. Humans were better. The brains made for good soup." Um, okay. What? It didn't matter that Lewis won his slander trial. It didn't even matter that Fallon's account contains lies and clear embellishments,

• 33:35Speaker 00

  or that The California Star later has to retract certain claims. The public has already been captivated by the rumors of the man who had put a child to bed one night, ate him before morning, and then ate another by noon the next day. Lewis had survived hell on his perilous journey to California. So did his wife, Philippine, but both of his children had died. In this new life that he'd sacrificed so much for, he became known to the nation as "the human cannibal." Well, yeah, that may have been true. Yet you could say the same for roughly half of the 45 survivors of the Donner Party.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  And even without any proof, he was viewed as a thief and a murderer. Aside from that early slander trial, Lewis never defends his name in public again, even as newspapers drag it through the mud. But on April 4, 1879, almost 32 years after the Donner Party's journey, a writer sits down with the now 62-year-old Louis Keseberg for his first interview. And he has got quite a story to tell.

• 34:51Speaker 05

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• 35:19Speaker 01

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  In 1879, author C.F. McGlashan is preparing to publish the authoritative account of the Donner Party. He's collected thousands of letters, diaries, and firsthand accounts, and he conducts interviews with 24 of the remaining 26 survivors. And that includes the story's main villain, Louis Kiesberg. For decades, newspapers had cast Louis as a monster who killed no less than six people and who ate human flesh out of his own twisted perversion rather than his primal need to survive. In all that time, Louis hasn't bothered trying to defend himself to the public,

• 36:32Speaker 00

  but he does try to set the record straight with McGlashan. Louis tells him, quote, "My conscience is clear. I am an old man and am calmly awaiting my death. God is my judge, and it long ago ceased to trouble me that people shunned and slandered me." Over two interviews, Louis tells all. He pokes holes in many of the theories and suspicions that had been hurled against him. For example, he explains that before the rescue parties came, he'd suffered a gruesome injury. That, he says, is the real reason he did not leave until the very end. Here's the story behind the injury as Louis tells it.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  One day, while they're traveling on Goose Creek, Louis goes hunting. He spots some wild geese, which makes sense, they're on Goose Creek. And Louis says he gets a little too excited. He steps down a steep bank without looking where he's going and takes a branch to the foot. From that point forward, he says he could barely walk on it. Perhaps McGlashan isn't sure what to make of this whole goose story, so he asks the other survivors about it, and several of them corroborate the details surrounding Louis's bad foot. So it sounds like Louis is telling the truth. He stayed behind that winter due to an injury, not because of some dastardly desire to eat people and steal their stuff.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  To the claims that Louis boasted about eating human flesh and even preferred it to California beef, he calls it "a horrible, revolting falsehood." Louis was all alone in that lake cabin for two months, surrounded by the corpses of five of his companions, too weak to remove them himself, and the relief parties didn't have the time or will to do it either. He tells McGlashan, quote, "I am conversant with four different languages. I speak and write them with equal fluency. Yet in all four, I do not find words enough to express the horror I experienced during those two months

• 38:44Speaker 00

  or what I still feel when memory reverts to the scene." But there's no account more important than the one he gives about Tamsen Donner. As Louis describes it, she arrives at his cabin late on a cold, bitter night, just as his loneliness is becoming too much to bear. Tamsin's husband, George, had just died, and she was now preparing to make the journey through the mountains alone. She was desperate to reunite with her children. Tamsin fears that she won't survive the trip, and she's too weak to take any of her possessions with her.

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  According to Louis, she asks him to make her a promise. If she dies and he survives, he must retrieve the money she's left behind in her tent and bring it to her children. Louis agrees. Despite her hunger, Tamsin refuses the only food that Louis has to offer: human flesh. When she lies down to get some rest before her big journey, he covers her with blankets, and by the morning, she's dead. Louis suggests to McGlashan that Tamsin likely died from a combination of her starvation, mental suffering, and the freezing cold from the night before,

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  certainly not because he killed her. Sometime after her death, he regains enough strength to fulfill his promise to her. He walks the six or seven miles to the Alder Creek camps and finds all sorts of valuables and money. He spends the night at one of the Donner tents, buries some silver at the base of a nearby pine tree, and stuffs his pockets with gold before heading back to his cabin. But he gets lost on the way back, and he falls into a stream that was concealed by snow. By the time Louis finds his way back to the cabin, it's after dark. He's too tired and too cold to build a fire. In the morning, he's shocked when he notices

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  that someone had looted his camp in his absence. But then he realizes his rescue party has finally arrived. He is overwhelmed with joy at the prospect of finally being saved after suffering for so many grueling months. He can hardly believe his eyes. Yet all of that happiness vanishes in an instant. Instead of receiving a warm greeting from his would-be rescuers, Louis is met with a gruff, insolent demand. Where is Donner's money? Here's where Lewis's account begins to intersect with Fallon's diary.

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  Only, Lewis offers a very different perspective on the events that Fallon had described. While Fallon depicted a crazed, greedy man who was hiding a secret, Lewis presents himself as a starved survivor, being denied food by strange men who seemed to only care about money, the money he swore he would protect. To Lewis, it quickly becomes clear that these men aren't here to save him at all. They threaten to hang or shoot him until he finally tells them about his promise to bring Tamsin's money to her children, a promise he intends to keep unless they can prove

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  they have a better claim. This gets them so mad, Lewis says, that they acted as though they were going to kill me. After interviewing Lewis twice, McGlashan arranges a meeting between Eliza Donner-Houghton, the youngest surviving child of Tamsen Donner, and the man who was accused of killing her mother. Eliza was just four years old when she was rescued, and now she stands before Lewis as an adult. When Lewis sees her, he drops to his knees, and Eliza gets him to stand and place his hands between hers. He doesn't deny eating her mother's remains after she died, but he swears he didn't murder

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  her. And Eliza believes him. Now, in addition to being a journalist, McGlashan is a prominent defense attorney. He didn't set out to prove Lewis was innocent. McGlashan writes, "Let the god to whom Louis Keseberg appeals be his judge. It is not the part of this book to condemn or acquit him." But the author does appear to take Lewis at his word. He provides plenty of evidence to suggest that Lewis did not kill anyone, and that he was no more guilty than anyone else in other matters. Yet even the release of this successful book is not enough to sway public opinion during

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  Lewis's lifetime. There is no happy ending for Louis Keseberg, not after he landed in the safety of California or in the years that followed. Louis and Philippine had eight more children after losing two during the Donner Party tragedy. He outlives his wife by 20 years, and all but one of his children passes away before he does. All of his business ventures fail, whether due to some unfortunate event or some fault of his own. Among them is a questionable choice of enterprise, if not one of poor taste. Given his notorious reputation, Louis tries to open a restaurant.

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  Something tells me people weren't exactly lining up outside the door, unless maybe it was vegetarian. Louis dies homeless and penniless in a Sacramento Hospital for the Poor. He goes to his unmarked grave insisting that he didn't murder a soul. So what made everyone so sure that he killed Tamsin? There are several theories that could explain why he was singled out as the bad actor in this tragic tale. For one, every good story needs a villain, and Louis was the perfect scapegoat. He had a wicked temper, he was a foreigner, and therefore already more likely to be subject to discrimination and prejudice.

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  He showed suspicious behavior and was involved in several mysterious incidents. And of course, when terrible tragedies like what happened to the Donner Party occur, people often want someone to blame. Another possible explanation is that California's early newspapers wanted to sell copies. Author Michael Wallace writes in his 2017 book that "cannibalism in a doomed wagon train made good copy and even better headlines." Newspapers printed every word of all the letters and diaries, including some diaries that were forged. They also reported absolutely wild tales of people feasting on human flesh, not to

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  survive, but out of pure pleasure. You can probably guess who these papers chose to focus on in these "skrless stories," as Wallace puts it. As for those forged diaries? Well, many have guessed that William Fallon's diary was one of them. Fallon's account of rescuing Lewis played a big role in shaping the public's perception of the German immigrant. Yet Donner Party scholars have long questioned the diary's refined prose and lyrical quality. No offense to mountain men, but they say it just doesn't sound like the writing of William Fallon. Author Ethan Rarick introduces another intriguing element to the story.

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  In his 2008 chronicle of the Donner Party: Desperate Passage, he says that "the California press didn't want to scare away potential residents, and they didn't want a story that made manifest destiny sound risky. It was in their best interest to chalk up the Donner Party's fate to laziness and foolish decisions. If the goal of these early papers was to cast blame on the Donner Party, then what better way to do it than single out one of them as being a ghoulish, crazed people eater? In this way, the papers could both sell sensationalized stories and try to protect the image of manifest destiny."

• 47:32Speaker 00

  Our last theory relates to William Fallon and his relief party. I mentioned at the beginning of this episode that the primary goal of Fallon's group was to salvage the camps rather than save any lives. A man named John Sinclair was the local alcalde for the area around Sutter's Fort, basically the local mayor, and he cut a deal with Fallon and his men. Half of the property that they salvaged from the two Donner families' camps would go straight into their own pockets, including gold and silver. The other half would go to the orphaned Donner children. I mentioned earlier that the Donners were wealthy, but I didn't mention just how wealthy they were.

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  The Donner camps were estimated to have anywhere from $6,000 to $14,000. Adjusting for inflation, that's a potential haul of up to $570,000. Fallon's party knew all of this before they ever reached the Sierra Nevada, so you can probably imagine how they felt when they showed up and couldn't find a single dollar. They assumed that someone had robbed the tents, and then they found Lewis. Fallon and his crew presumed that Lewis was their thief, and their suspicions were confirmed when he eventually revealed where the money was hidden. Oh, you know, after they tied a noose around his neck.

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  As McGlashan points out in his book, Fallon's party had good reason to hate Lewis, and those feelings were only intensified after they were taken to court and proven as slanderers. The author suggests that this hatred grew into all those public reports that amplified Lewis's notorious reputation. For many years after the tragedy of the Donner Party, Lewis was accepted as the story's main villain. McGlashan was the first writer to really suggest that there may be another side to that story. Many of the later Donner Chronicles have followed suit, if not fully acquitting Lewis

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  of his accused crimes, at least making the case for his innocence. Yet there are still others who have sought to maintain doubt in Lewis's statement. They suggest caution in exonerating him from the grisly crimes he may have indeed committed. In his 1936 book, Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party, George R. Stewart spends one of his final chapters discussing the court case of Keseberg v. Coffey-Meyer. There is little record of the slander trial, but Stewart attempts to present Coffey-Meyer's case in addition to Lewis's defense, which the author claims no one has tried to do before. Stewart tries to poke holes in Lewis's story to McGlashan.

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  That includes the fact that Lewis chose to eat Tamsen Donner's body when other corpses were already available to him. At least to Stewart, that suggests a motive, but he also sows doubt in McGlashan's account itself, which has long stood as a primary source in all matters concerning the Donner Party. Stewart emphasizes that McGlashan is clearly convinced of Lewis's innocence and that he considers him largely as a martyr. But he goes even further to criticize McGlashan's entire book. It has a hazy chronology and topography, it's stuffed with unnecessary notes about

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  the survivors, and it's written in a bad style of outdated sentimental oratory. After he gains access to McGlashan's extensive research, Stewart describes the many letters from the survivors to be disappointing. He says the majority of them had nothing about the Donner story at all. He suggests that McGlashan had gotten too attached to the story and its characters. It's entirely possible that Stewart took these shots at McGlashan to create some space for his own account on the Donner Party, but he may also have just been reminding his readers to always question the sources.

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  We may never know for certain whether Louis Keseberg killed Tamsen Donner or committed the other crimes he was accused of, but this much is clear. Louis wasn't the only member of the Donner Party to cannibalize their traveling companions to survive. And he wasn't the only one who made tough decisions under unimaginable circumstances. When people around them were starving, the Breen family hoarded their larger supply of meat and only shared it with others when they felt they could. William Foster killed their two Miwok guides so that he and his white companions could eat them.

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  And as Rarick notes toward the conclusion of his book, even Tamsen Donner orphaned her children so that she could comfort a husband who was about to die. He writes, "To judge such decisions from the comfort of modern life is a fool's errand." In other words, you can't know what you would do until you're in that situation yourself. All you can do is hope you never have to find out. Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday.

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  Be sure to check us out on Instagram at the conspiracy pod. If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Our sources for today's episode include Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West by Ethan Rarick, The History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra by C.F. McLashan, Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party by George R. Stewart, The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny by Michael Wallace, and the L.A. Times article, Tracking Down the Truth of What Happened to the Donner Party by Anne Depenga.

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  Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written and researched by Daniel Chin, edited by Justin Sales and Miki Taylor, fact-checked by Sophie Kemp, and engineered, video-edited, and sound-designed by Alex Button. I'm your host, Carter Roy.

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