When
The Donner Party and Climate at the End of the Little Ice Age
Dr. Erika Wise
Professor in the Department of Geography
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Abstract: The Donner Party wagon train left Springfield, IL, in April 1846, intending to arrive in central California after a four-month journey. In fact, the last survivor did not reach their destination until a year later, in April 1847. This group was unlucky, as the story goes, trapped by an early and severe winter in the Sierra Nevada. But is this true? This talk will examine why this period at the end of the Little Ice Age was so climatically dramatic and discuss our ways of knowing what the weather was really like during this time. Results from new research to combine historical climate records with tree-ring science are used to investigate climate extremes in the 1840s-1860s, including the winter of 1846-1847, and assess the reliability of climate information from this time period.