Fueled by rumors of saving weeks of travel, they gambled on what was called the Hastings Cutoff, which instead of the normal route, crossed the Rocky Mountains and the Great Salt Lake Desert in present-day Utah. By early November, they reached the Sierra Nevada, but winter hit early and quickly they became trapped by the heavy snowfall high in the mountains. By mid-December, some of the group set out on foot to obtain help, but the first relief party did not arrive until the middle of February 1847, four months after becoming trapped. Of the 87 members of the party, 48 survived the ordeal. It's clear that some of the migrants resorted to cannibalism to survive, eating the bodies of those that died of starvation, sickness, and the extreme cold, but there's also speculation that some victims were murdered for their flesh. Now interestingly enough, when I was 16 years old, back in 1988, I was hiking the Continental Divide and one early evening we spotted in the middle of like nowhere these lights and cameras and we discovered that they were anthropologists excavating some of the bones of the deceased to see if they could figure out if there were stab marks on the bones, to figure out if there were stab marks on them, to try and see if the victims who were consumed had died naturally. Now, an important element of the story was that the Donner-Reed party had splintered due to the horrible traveling conditions, each looking out for themselves and not trusting the other family.