Season 1, Episode 9 — The Forlorn Hope & "Stout" John Stark: The Untold Heroism of the Donner Relief Parties (1846–1847)

Almost every telling of the Donner Party is a horror story. Underneath it is one of the West's great stories of courage. In the winter of 1846–47, after Lansford Hastings' "shortcut" and an early October blizzard trapped some 87 emigrants below the Sierra Nevada crest at Truckee (now Donner) Lake, ordinary people risked everything to save one another.

In Episode 9 of American Tapestry, we follow the 15 snowshoers of the "Forlorn Hope," who set out on December 16, 1846, on snowshoes Franklin Graves made from oxbows and rawhide; Charles Stanton, the bachelor who came back over the mountains for strangers and stayed behind by the fire saying, "Yes, I am coming soon"; William Eddy's 33-day walk to Johnson's Ranch with help from Miwok villagers; the First and Second Relief parties, and James Reed's return for his children Patty and Tommy; and the March blizzard that created "Starved Camp." Finally we meet "Stout" John Stark of the Third Relief, who refused to leave anyone behind ("I will not half do the work") and carried the starving children down the mountain in relays until every one he took was safe.

Season 1 · Episode 9 · American Tapestry: the stories, struggles, and spirits that built a nation.

Season 1, Episode 8 — Into the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell's 1869 One-Armed Descent of the Grand Canyon

In the summer of 1869, the year the golden spike was driven, the canyons of the Green and Colorado Rivers were still a blank space on the map of the United States, labeled with a single word: Unexplored. On May 24, a 35-year-old Civil War major who had lost his right forearm at Shiloh pushed off from Green River City, Wyoming Territory, with nine frontiersmen and four wooden boats to find out what lay inside.

In Episode 8 of American Tapestry, we follow Major John Wesley Powell and his crew roughly a thousand miles through the Gates of Lodore, the wreck of the No Name at Disaster Falls, a camp fire that drove them into a rapid, Desolation Canyon (where Sgt. George Bradley saved the one-armed Major from a cliff with a pair of long drawers), Cataract and Glen Canyons, and finally into the black granite of the Grand Canyon. Back east, a hoaxer told newspapers the whole party had drowned. Down in the gorge, with rotting flour and a roaring rapid ahead, three men, Oramel and Seneca Howland and Bill Dunn, chose to climb out at what became Separation Rapid. Powell and five others ran it and floated into open country the next day. The three who walked away were never seen alive again, and how they died is still a mystery.

Season 1 · Episode 8 · American Tapestry: the stories, struggles, and spirits that built a nation.

In February 1867, seven thousand feet up in the freezing darkness of the Sierra Nevada, crews inside Summit Tunnel No. 6 were battering their way through solid blue granite at the agonizing rate of seven inches a day—while outside, the "Winter of 44 Blizzards" buried entire camps under forty feet of snow and a Scottish chemist named James Howden brewed unstable liquid nitroglycerin by hand in open wooden tubs.In Season 1, Episode 7 of American Tapestry, pull up a chair by the hearth for the epic true story of the Transcontinental Railroad (1863–1869)—the six-year war against geography that bound a fractured republic together in iron and blood.In this episode, we explore:• "Crazy Judah" & The Impossible Survey (1860–1863): How obsessed civil engineer Theodore Dehone Judah and Dutch Flat druggist Daniel Strong mapped a continuous grade up the sheer granite spine of Donner Pass, pitched four skeptical Sacramento shopkeepers—Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker—above a hardware store at 54 K Street, and secured Abraham Lincoln’s signature on the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 in the darkest summer of the Civil War.• The Wall of Granite & Cape Horn (1865–1866): Facing a crippled labor force in California, one-eyed construction boss James Harvey Strobridge reluctantly hired fifty Chinese laborers—who soon grew into a disciplined army of twelve to fifteen thousand men from Guangdong Province, carving the narrow ledge around Cape Horn 1,300 feet above the sheer American River canyon.• Summit Tunnel No. 6, Liquid Nitroglycerin & The Winter of 44 Blizzards (1866–1868): Sinking a 73-foot vertical shaft into the center of the 1,659-foot Summit Tunnel powered by a Sacramento riverboat engine; chewing through four feet of granite a day with volatile liquid nitroglycerin; surviving deadly avalanches at Camp 4; and framing 37 miles of timber snowsheds—"The Longest Barn in the World."• "Hell on Wheels" & The Ten-Mile Day Wager (1868–April 28, 1869): General Grenville Dodge and Jack Casement’s Union Pacific army of Civil War veterans and Irish graders racing west across the Plains; rival grading crews blasting rock onto each other’s parallel beds in Utah; and the legendary April 28, 1869 wager at Victory, Utah, where eight Irish rail handlers—Michael Shay, Michael Kennedy, Michael Sullivan, Patrick Joyce, Thomas Dailey, George Wyatt, Edward Killeen, and Fred McNamara—and four thousand Chinese workers laid 10 miles and 56 feet of track (4.3 million pounds of iron, wood, and spikes) in a single twelve-hour shift.• The Telegraph Click Heard Round the Nation (May 10, 1869 – Today): Central Pacific’s Jupiter (No. 60) and Union Pacific’s No. 119 meeting cowcatcher to cowcatcher at Promontory Summit, the single word "DONE" flashed coast to coast, and where you can still walk through the dark granite bore of Summit Tunnel No. 6 on Old Donner Pass Road today.Subscribe to American Tapestry, leave a review, and tell us whose legend we should cover next!