Archaeology team digs Donner Pass, now looking for local historians, Donner enthusiasts

Stuart Rathbone first learned about Donner Pass after he moved to Northern Nevada from the UK five years ago. As he got to know the story, he became increasingly fascinated with the scale of the journey over the Sierra, and the scale of the engineering involved in opening that route to traffic.

Since then, Rathbone and the team at Broadbent and Associates, Inc. have been undertaking an archeological survey on the Donner Pass Route between Reno and Sacramento, which was a natural route that has been in operation since the 1840s until it was transformed to the modern roadway we know today.

In order for western-seeking pioneers to reach California, they needed to traverse the Sierra Nevada first. In 1844, the Stephs-Townsend-Murphy Party of pioneers followed the Truckee River into the Sierra until they reached Donner Lake and were able to locate the pass.

Two years later, the ill-fated Donner Party followed suit, only to find the route blocked by heavy snow drifts after making their way through the salt flats of Utah. Half of the party died in the Sierra, and the other half were forced to engage in cannibalism in order to survive.

But the pass itself has more stories to it than just the Donner Party, which is what Rathbone and his team found so exciting about the archaeological prospects of the area.

“It seems to me to be one of the two most important stories in Northern Nevada, alongside the Comstock,” said Rathbone. “In terms of archaeological research, the Comstock is certainly far more advanced, so I guess that made working on Donner Pass more appealing to me. The project I have been working on started out as my own attempt to make sense of the massive and complex sequence of activity connected to this particular route.”

The route has been home to wagon roads, railway tracks and highways, all leaving pieces of history behind. Rathbone and his team are attempting to understand the route itself as a gigantic archaeological site, rather than a series of individual locations.

“To do this we have created a new type of schematic diagram that allows us to enter the chronological position of each individual area of activity but get rid of all of the physical space in between their positions,” said Rathbone. “Essentially this compresses the activity along the whole route down into a manageable format, and allows us to examine how major changes, such as the replacement of an earlier road by a latter road, affected activity along the entire route.”

The goal of the project, he said, is to allow a better understanding of the changing patterns of activity, and the first stage was to find a way of presenting the data in a useful way.

At this time, major features and sites along the first 40 miles of the route from Reno have been charted out, and last month Rathbone and the team gave a presentation of this new method of archaeological techniques at the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference in Boston, where they received a positive reception.

The project will take years to be completed, bu once it’s finished, Rathbone believes they will have a useful tool for anyone who is looking to understand the history of the route.

“Archaeology is about examining our collective history, so while it’s certainly enjoyable to present results to other archaeologists at a conference, and it’s important to provide solid data to the government agencies tasked with managing the resources, it’s equally important to share the results of our work to a wider audience, whenever that’s feasible,” said Rathbone. “If we are able to let people know about interesting sites they can visit that they might not know about, or provide explanations about sites that they may have been viewing for years without necessarily understanding, that’s great, because everyone should be able to enjoy the archaeological resources of their area.”

The team is now hoping to make contact with local residents, history enthusiasts, and the local historical societies, who they hope to collaborate with in the future.

“We have established what we think is a robust and useful method for organizing information about the Donner Pass, now we are hoping that we can work with local individuals and groups to fill in all the blank areas where we haven’t yet been able to either locate or date sites.”

In the Photos:
1. Looking into Verdi from the Mogul Airmail Beacon site, showing the river, railroad and Interstate as they exit from the base of the Truckee Canyon 



2. The Mogul Airmail Beacon site. Constructed in the 1920’s, the arrows were used to guide airmail pilots during the day, and a now missing beacon would have been used during night flights.
 
3. Farad Power Station. This was the first of four power stations constructed in the Canyon between 1900 and 1911. The power stations were initially constructed to provide Electricity to Virginia City.
 
4. The overflow at Fleish Power Station, crossing over Steam Boat Ditch, which runs in a box flume along this section of the Truckee Canyon.
 
5. Concrete foundations believed to be the remains of the Marmol Marble Works, over-looking the river to the south of Verdi.
 
6. Hirschdale Road was cut off by the construction of I-80 in 1964, and this historic trash dump is located near to where the road dead ends.