“I expected to find heroes and villains, monsters and saints,” Mullen concludes in The Donner Party Chronicles, a new book that collects his reports. “Instead, I found families and a cascade of events which swept them to disaster. They made mistakes; the biggest one was allowing the differences of class and race and national origin to keep them apart.”

What was the Donner Party’s fatal flaw?

“I used to hem and say there were so many mistakes they made. They took too long in the Wasatch Mountains. They dallied too long in Reno before going into the mountains. I did a lot of thinking about this because people always wanted me to say it was one thing that caused the tragedy. But looking at it day by day, the thing that stands out as their fatal flaw is that they could not act as a cohesive unit. They were not a team, a company, a group. They were just independent families who at times traveled together. The money people, the Donners and Reeds, stood apart from everyone. They didn’t go into it thinking they had to stick together or they were lost. That was their main mistake. It shows the ultimate consequence of that kind of bickering and independent thinking when you have to be a cohesive group—and not just in name.”

Was the Donner Party different from other pioneers?

“No, this wasn’t a mistake particular to the Donner Party. On wagon trains, it was not uncommon for the Irish to stick with the Irish, Germans with other Germans, the rich to stay with the rich, and for the least moneyed to stick together. They were a moving village and they acted like a village. The people in the Donner Party were Americans. We don’t have to take orders from kings or wagon leaders. They were democratic. They had meetings about everything. They voted. And if you didn’t like the rules you didn’t have to follow them. You could leave the wagon train.

They didn’t become the Donner Party until Wyoming when they decided to take Hasting’s shortcut, and split from the Russell group, which was already really fragmented. So they split and elected a new leader. Reed lobbied heavily for the position. He was a natural leader. But he was vain and arrogant and flaunted his wealth. Americans like to elect rich people. But they don’t like rich people to flaunt it. They elected George Donner on a popularity vote. They called him Uncle George. They didn’t elect Reed because he was rich and showed it with his thoroughbred horses, his great clothes, and his custom wagon. Uncle George was seen as an ineffectual leader. But they knew they would rather be led by Donner who would say, “Let’s wait,” whenever there was a problem, than be led by Reed who would ride up and down on his stallion and say, ‘Ride on!’

“Every wagon train had this kind of massive dissension and cliquishness, except for the Mormons. They understood they had to do it as though they were the military. Other wagon trains would split up and then join together again in hostile Indian country. They would let this bickering occur. But the Donners couldn’t afford that luxury. And they paid the greatest penalty when something went wrong.”

How are we like the Donner Party?

“They were like us because we make the same mistakes. Nothing has really changed. They are us in every way. Their hopes and dreams. Their desire to be heroic. Their ‘watch out for number one’ attitude. In a sense we haven’t learned anything from history. I think we seldom do.

“We make the same mistakes. We allow the same divisions of class, race, national origin, and wealth to keep us apart. We act the same way, except maybe in a big flood like the one we had in Reno last year, where we saw homeless people filling sand bags beside casinos bosses downtown. But you see it in most cases of adversity in general life and in politics especially, where people blame each other instead of working together.”

Do you see people like the Donner Party in stories that you cover today?

“I didn’t find any larger than life people in the Donner story. It’s really a human story. And when you see the human personalities in the Donner Party, when you see how people reacted to adversity, you realize you know people like Donner, Reed, Breen, and the others.We really know these people because they haven’t changed much in 150 years. In our daily lives we run across people like this. I’ve covered a lot of city politics and development issues. I see a lot of the NIMBY—not in my backyard—kind of attitude. People who say, ‘I got mine. You’re not going to put that AIDS hospital or elderly care in my neighborhood. I worked hard for what I got. I’m not going to allow somebody to come in and lower my property values.’

“You see this with environmental problems and what to do with the homeless.Sparks says the homeless problem is Reno’s problem. Sparks was the original hobo town. It’s a problem for all of us because we live in same valley for one thing. The attitude is if you give them anything it will be a magnet.So the less you provide the better. And then they’ll go away. People say, ‘The dirty bums. They don’t work. Let them rot. To hell with them.’ People don’t want to look deeper. They want to lump them all together. So they tend to overlook mental illness, for instance, where someone has a life and then becomes schizophrenic and loses it and goes to another city and lives out of a dumpster. Prejudices tend to lump people together and say, ‘Let’s get rid of all of them.’ But there’s something wrong with the logic of that. It doesn’t work.

“A few years ago, there was a gang shooting at a soccer match at a park in a very good neighborhood in Reno. Suddenly terror became a Spanish word for these people. They were saying, ‘Why are they bringing this problem to us.’ It’s already their problem, even if its not in their neighborhood.

“If people could just pull together something would happen. But because of these issues, like class and race, things don’t happen.”

Why haven’t we learned from the Donner Party?

“The lessons of the Donners remain unlearned over 150 years because of human nature. You’ll always see these problems because people are people. I’m not saying it’s a hopeless situation. In journalism you see hope all around. And that’s what moved the people in the Donner Party. No matter who they were, they were going west with hope. You see that every day. It keeps cropping up. You can’t get rid of it. Hope remains with us. People are still looking for a better life. They still think they can move to it. They come here because they heard there are jobs in the casinos. They don’t know they are low wage jobs. But at least they’ve found a job. You still see that hope, especially in immigrant families”

“You see hope everywhere, unless you just look at the downside. So the Donners are us in the area of hope as well. Most of the ones who got to California went on with their lives. They became successes. They were in the promised land, they paid a lot to get there, so they did well. That’s a lesson too. Even an ordeal like that doesn’t have to destroy the rest of your life. Hope does spring eternal. But then you screwup. And it’ll bite you in the butt.”

Frank Mullen is author of The Donner Party Chronicles (Nevada Humanities Committee).