author
Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
A child survivor of the Donner Party later became one of its most important witnesses, preserving a deeply personal account of one of the best-known tragedies of the American West. Her writing brings together memory, grief, and frontier history in a voice shaped by lived experience.
1 Audiobook
The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate
by Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
About the author
Born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1843, Eliza Poor Donner Houghton was the youngest daughter of George and Tamsen Donner. As a small child she survived the doomed 1846 Donner Party journey to California, while both of her parents died in the ordeal.
In later life, she became an American memoirist and is best known for The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate, published in 1911. The book is valued as a firsthand family account of the disaster and its aftermath, and it helped shape how later readers understood the people behind the famous story.
Archival records also show that she wrote and spoke about early California history and remained closely connected to preserving the memory of the Donner Party. She died in the early 1920s, leaving behind one of the most personal and enduring narratives of that journey.