Eliza Poor Donner Houghton

Born in Illinois in 1843, she was one of the youngest members of the Donner Party, the emigrant group whose disastrous 1846 journey became one of the most haunting episodes in western American history. She survived the ordeal as a child, and that experience shaped the rest of her life.

In 1861 she married Sherman Otis Houghton, a California lawyer and politician. Years later, she wrote The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate, a memoir that helped preserve the story for later generations and remains one of the key personal accounts of the event.

Her papers show that she continued to collect and protect the history of the Donner Party long after the journey itself had passed into legend. For readers today, her work stands out not just as a record of tragedy, but as the voice of someone who lived through it and chose to remember it clearly.