Behold this mighty tree! It’s in an unassuming bit of woods near my parents’ house in Silver Spring, Md. So unassuming, in fact, that this December 2021 visit was the first time I had set foot in that particular bit of woods, and my family moved to the neighborhood in 1985. The local parks folks have gotten ambitious in recent years and put in trails in places that used to be junky bits of woods. Now those woods turn out to be places worth walking in. This one is host to a lovely stream that flows over impressive chunks of bedrock and also this very, very large tree. I think it’s a tuliptree, and I look forward to going back in a time of year when it has leaves to confirm.
Bryn Nelson is a Seattle-based science writer whose book, Flush: The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure, came out September 13. Yes, that’s right–it’s a book about poop. So of course, Helen and Cameron wanted to take a deep dive into this important (seriously!) topic. Here’s our conversation with Bryn, which has been lightly edited and improved with additional poop puns.
Helen: Why poop? Why a whole book about poop?
Bryn: Ha, maybe not your typical protagonist? I trained as a microbiologist in graduate school, though, so I was already all about microbes, and it turns out that a good chunk of your poop is made up of living and dead bacteria.
After I wrote a feature about fecal microbiota transplants for the magazine Mosaic, I began to pay more attention to other poop-related stories and studies, and realized how amazing and completely misunderstood it is as a natural resource.
I became kind of obsessed with the idea of writing a book about it as a quirky, but hopefully accessible, way of highlighting our dysfunctional relationships with our own bodies and the rest of nature and how we might rebalance those interactions.
Cameron: I really loved that the book gave an overview of how the GI system works fairly early on (I’d forgotten how a lot of this worked), and then went into detail later about the many ways the gut and the immune system are linked. (It’s pretty amazing that the gut microbiome could even affect brain development in young kids!) Do you think knowing more about how much gut health is tied to overall health will bring more respect (or at least less squeamishness) to poop?
Bryn: I hope so! The connections between the microbiome, health, and development are so fascinating to me – there was so much I didn’t know before starting this project and I think the research will surprise a lot of readers.
Thinking about gut health in ecological terms – like the need for balance – may help people grasp how gut dysbiosis, or an imbalance in the microbial community, can lead to all kinds of radiating harm to other parts of the body. And if we think about poop as basically the growing medium or container for our amazing collection of inner microbes that really do function like an organ, maybe it will earn poop just a bit more respect.
Helen: Did you have to overcome any disgust while you were doing the reporting for this book? Or were you already over it before you started?
Bryn: It’s funny, poop doesn’t disgust me that much – except for maybe stepping in dog poop. I guess I’ve just gotten over it through my career in science and science writing and by having a dog that poops a lot. But I’m pretty disgusted by other things, like beets, cockroaches, dead slugs, runny eggs, and hair in the shower drain.
In my own gardens, I had to get comfortable with using composted biosolids, which are basically a combination of treated poop, bacteria, and other solid organic matter left over after the wastewater treatment process. I decided that I needed to use it myself if I was going to suggest that other people try it. Fortunately, I was able to overcome any hesitancy pretty quickly once I read about the science and testing requirements and then saw and smelled for myself that the compost was very soil-like; my plants loved it, of course, which also helped.
This produce from Bryn’s garden was brought to you in part by composted biosolids
The same thing for drinking recycled water and beer: seeing for myself how thoroughly it was treated, understanding how all water on Earth is recycled, and hearing about the testing made me much more comfortable trying it.
Helen: So when you say “recycled water” I’m guessing you mean…water that used to be pee? Also, I have a follow-up question: Ew?
Bryn: Haha. Yes, exactly! In fact, several researchers have suggested that everything we drink used to be dinosaur pee, among other things. But I think it’s way less gross if you consider that this is how nature works: everything we’re using now will be reused again too – it’s just a matter of whether you can take it all the way back to pure H2O. And we definitely can.
I think beer is an especially clever way to get people past disgust because it makes people really curious and open to hearing about the process of stripping everything down to those water molecules and then adding back minerals to create different brews. Plus, the beer I tried was super tasty!
Cameron: It was so fun to see the connection to (LWON alum) Michelle Nijhuis’ book Beloved Beastsand the importance of bison poop in shaping the prairie. (And also to LWONer Emma Marris’ book Wild Souls. LWON should sponsor you or something!) And you also wrote about how prehistoric poop affected the ecosystem. This made me wonder, are people using poop now to restore habitat?
Bryn: What I love about this is that it’s flipping the notion of poop as an environmental pollutant on its head. Giant animals have dispersed nutrients for millions of years through their dung! If we do it right, we can use the carbon and nutrients in our own regular output to heal degraded or sterile environments, like gravel pits, old mines, and some landscapes contaminated with things like lead and arsenic.
Unlike synthetic fertilizers, which focus mainly on phosphorus, potassium, and nitrogen, recycled biosolids provide a wider array of nutrients – because they’re coming from us – and help nurture the soil. That’s what you want if your goal is to literally help restore an ecosystem from the ground up. Among other applications, recycled biosolids can be applied to fire-scarred forests to help speed the healing, and to degraded prairies to help nurture native plants – especially since the bison population that used to provide that service is only a fraction of what it used to be. And because of their physical properties, clay-like biosolids can lock up some contaminants too and prevent them from being taken up by plants. It’s such a fascinating and underappreciated area of research.
Cameron: Also, I keep writing “poop,” but do you have a preferred poop word? Is poo better? Or crap? Or shit? Can we say shit here?
Bryn: Ha, I hope so! I do use several different words in the book. “Poo” is the preferred word for many British readers, but it’s a bit too cutesy for most of us in the U.S. I don’t use “feces” or “excrement” that often because they seem overly clinical to me. “Biosolids” is fine, but that term is generally tied to the wastewater treatment process and it can contain other things as well.
Some people may think “poop” is too juvenile, but it seems to be what most people use in their conversations, and I wanted this book to be approachable. So poop – and occasionally shit – is my go-to word.
Helen: I find the word “poop” endlessly amusing, but using the word “shit” in this context makes me so uncomfortable! I only use it as an occasional swear, not as an actual reference to feces. Anyway. Enough about me. What is your favorite poop fact? I assume you have a favorite poop fact now.
Bryn: Helen, you’re asking me to choose just one? I’m so fascinated by poop that it’s hard to pick a favorite here. One that comes to mind is related to the fecal transplants used to cure C. diff bacterial infections. Stool banks like OpenBiome collect and distribute the fecal samples used for these treatments, which save lives. Only about 3% of prospective donors pass the screening process – less than the acceptance rate at Harvard! Super donors, who donate several times a week can cure many hundreds of patients every year.
Another fun fact is that dogs have such a keen sense of smell that research suggests they can tell one individual human or animal from another by the distinctive smell of our poop!
Helen: Are you super fun at parties now?
Bryn: I suppose there are limits at dinner parties. But my friends are quite amused by my obsession at the moment.
It’s pretty funny how even people who are initially, “Ewwww! That’s gross!” are then like, “But tell me more!” Maybe that says something about my friends? Ha. Many of them are the kind of people who send me emails or DMs whenever they come across a poop story, with a “Thinking of you” note. Thoughtful, right? I guess I have my own Poop Patrol.
Cameron: I want to go to a party with Bryn! Yes, can you turn everything into a poop joke?
Bryn: Cameron, did you hear about the boy who ate four cans of alphabet soup? He had a very long vowel movement.
OK, OK! But when I try to suppress the puns and jokes, they seem to tumble out anyway. Poop’s funny! If I can make someone laugh and engage them long enough to surprise them and get them to see our natural output in a new light, that’s a win for me.
Helen: What was the most surprising thing you learned while doing the reporting for the book?
Bryn: One of the biggest surprises was how much we still have yet to learn, certainly about what many of the microbes in our microbiome actually do, but even about how the process of digestion works in detail and which chemicals are most responsible for poop’s distinctive eau de toilette. I love that researchers are still fighting over which chemicals are the main constituents of its odor. We’re also still learning about the physical and chemical properties of poop. For example, scientists think its consistency, how it’s sticky like clay, can act like Velcro to bind up metal contaminants. Also, biosolids can actually change the soil structure to retain more water, air, and nutrients. That’s so amazing to me.
Cameron: For someone who reads your book and is super inspired to learn even more about poop –where would you send them? What’s next in the poop world? And what’s next for you?
Bryn: NIH should have a National Institute of Poop! NIP? NIP!
This life ring at Oslo’s wastewater treatment plant really makes you think, huh?
In the meantime, my book includes an extensive bibliography and some specific suggestions for further reading.
One very cool trend in the poop world is that some wastewater treatment facilities are transforming themselves into resource recovery facilities that can reclaim everything from biogas and biosolids to drinking water, phosphorus, and even precious metals–while being carbon neutral! I hope to write more about this.
As to whether I have a book #2 in me (sorry), we’ll have to wait and see.
A couple of years ago, on this very site, I related the legend of the Egg Dog — basically, how my beloved companion, Kit, had an uncanny predilection for finding and delivering the eggs laid by our neighborhood chickens. Since then, I’ve resisted the temptation to document all of Kitty’s exploits, which, believe me, are numerous and thrilling. Last month, though, she displayed a behavior that was so odd and revelatory that I just have to abuse my precious platform to describe it here.
In late August, I caught COVID and ended up bed-bound for a few days, coughing my lungs out and generally feeling like I’d been beaten with a two-by-four. (I’m fine now, thanks for asking.) A few hours after I fell ill, Kit did, too. Normally a frisky little critter with an unquenchable joie de vivre, she was now incapable of jumping onto the couch, tucked her tail between her legs, declined her food, and hid beneath the bed for hours. She looked to be in agony; she’d behaved the same way both when she was stung by a bee, and after a Rottweiler half-mauled her at daycare (a fight Kit had picked, lest you feel too sorry for her.) When I stumbled out of bed to use the bathroom, I often glimpsed her curled in a corner, staring blankly into space with glassy, unfocused eyes, like the victim of some canine trauma. We were profoundly worried about Kit — had she gottenCOVID as well? — but, before we could take her to the vet, Elise had contracted the virus, too.
Our collective misery lasted for three days, until, one morning, I woke up feeling much improved (though it would take us two weeks to regain full health). I ventured from the guestroom where I’d been sequestered and went to the kitchen to forage. The moment I did, Kit burst into the room, tail raised and wagging, and pranced around with her usual deranged vigor. Then she wolfed down a bowl of food that had sat untouched for twenty-four hours and dashed outside to romp, instantly transformed back into her old self. She’s been fine ever since.
This raised a number of questions — most of all, had Kit suffered from something like sympathy COVID? I’d gotten sick, and so had she; then I’d gotten better, and she had too. (The fact that Kit seemed to respond more to my illness than my wife’s is, in my opinion, incontrovertible proof that she loves me more, and I’ll never let Elise forget it.) Kit, it seemed to me, had suffered a sort of psychosomatic illness linked to the illness of her favorite human.
Seeking an expert opinion, I sent a message describing the experience to Alexandra Horowitz, a dog cognition researcher and best-selling author who, on Twitter, goes by the delightful handle @DogUmwelt. Alexandra both sort of corroborated and sort of debunked my interpretation. “From what you say, it sounds like Kit was showing some quasi-empathetic behavior,” she wrote to me. True empathy, she added, “implies a complex understanding of what it’s like to be in the mind or body of another, and I don’t think we have a satisfying knowledge of if/how much dogs can do that” — hence the qualifying “quasi-.” Mostly, Alexandra observed, Kit’s behavior powerfully evinced dogs’ tendency to match and amplify the behaviors and emotional states of their human partners:
“Because you slowed down, took to your bed, and were very inactive, she slowed down, etc. Dogs do show a lot of contagious excitement, which you’ve seen if you try to excite a dog into a walk!, or if you try to get Kit to play by being playful yourself. Similarly, dogs can really slow down to match our slow-downs. If you’re not rallying to take her out, play with her, do the normal things you do, she accepts it and slows down too.”
This wasn’t surprising — Kit has always mirrored our own energy, and she can be coaxedinto a wrestling match or a rainy-day #NetflixAndChill sesh with equal ease. Still, matching didn’t seem to completely explain the situation. After all, Kit hadn’t just been downbeat; she’d seemed actively miserable. “I think she could also have been worried, frankly,” Alexandra added. “Illness smells, literally, and she surely noticed your radical change in smell plus behavior.” Indeed, dogs are so good at sniffing out disease that they’ve been trained to detect COVID, bladder cancer, imminent seizures, and a host of other maladies.
This olfactory explanation also made sense to me. Thanks to her powerful snoot, Kit knew that we weren’t merely sluggish — we were sick. To me, it seems conceivable that she thus quasi-empathetically matched not only general malaise, but the experience of illness. Sickness is a mental state as well as a physical one, and the mind/body connection is so strong that it may be improper to separate them; if Kit portrayed our illness, can we really say that she wasn’t ill herself? “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship,” Susan Sontag famously wrote, “in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Dogs are members of those dual kingdoms too, of course, but they may also be subjects in our kingdoms as well, their health dependent upon the health of their beloved humans.
This probably makes me sound like one of those annoying dog parents you get stuck talking to on airplanes and at parties: “She’s, like, so intuitive.” But I can’t help it. Living with a dog is just interesting — her mind is sufficiently like ours that it’s possible to interpret her behavior, or attempt to, and sufficiently different that her every action is something of a mystery. Kit isn’t that complicated; nine times out of ten, she wants food, walks, and, above all, cuddles. Still, to some extent, every dog-cohabitator (I hesitate to say owner) is like that guy in My Octopus Teacher, forever trying to fathom the mind of an intelligent, inscrutable Other.
Anyway, I’m probably not allowed to post about Kit on LWON for at least another year. But no promises.What if she catches a mouse using a particularly ingenious hunting strategy? (She cornered one in a recycling bin this spring.) Or nuzzles a small child in that tender way of hers? Or unnecessarily defends us from a pitbull with her typical suicidal bravado? Or just, like, wakes up on a Tuesday looking adorable? You should all be grateful I don’t yet have a human kid — then I’d really be insufferable.
We’re thinking about Queen Elizabeth these days, or at least I am. She just soldiered on, didn’t she — did her duty. That word, duty, isn’t as popular as it used to be and maybe that’s good, maybe not. The Queen certainly never stopped doing it, I’ll bet she died thinking about her duty.
Anyway, this post was first published October 1, 2018 and is slightly edited. It’s the Queen translated into Baltimore, and it’s less about duty than about the strength it takes to do it.
One morning in my usual small coffee shop with the usual people, a young woman walks in, long straight hair of varying colors, flannel shirt, ill-advised leggings, you know the look. An old guy at the table of regulars – the regulars tend to have been living in the neighborhood for generations – says to the young woman, “How ya doin’, hon. You look tired.”
Hon flips back her hair and says, “I am. I don’t want to go to work.”
The old regular says, “But ya gotta. Ya gotta go to work.”
“I don’t want to, says Hon.
A woman, back-combed maroon/pink hair and heavy on the eye liner, coeval with the old regular, says “I know, hon. But it don’t get easier.”
The old regular agrees, “No, it don’t.”
“It gets harder,” says the older woman.
Hon looks disbelieving. I, coeval with the regulars, can’t keep my mouth shut: “You’ve gotta be strong,” I yell across the room, “you’ve gotta build your strength up.”
The older woman nods her head at Hon, says, “You’re gonna need your strength.”
I think I should start keeping my mouth shut. I want to tell Hon about about the old Anglo-Saxon king, dying at the Battle of Maldon: “Mind must be the stronger, heart the bolder, courage must be the greater, as our strength lessens.”
I want to tell her — my, but I want to tell her — how many times I did what I didn’t want to or didn’t think I could; how I know exactly where my weaknesses are, how they have and have not changed with time; how fast my strength and faith can disappear, how easily I can cave in and fall down; how I can find nothing to hold on to, nothing to say I’m not nothing. Crack, boom, that’s it, I’m gone.
Then I want to tell her, never mind. Because us old regulars (those of us without clinical depression) have decades of practice at building up our strength, keeping the faith, going to work regardless.
I don’t say any of this because I figured the regulars already had it covered. Hon sighs and says, “Guess I gotta pull myself together.” Yes indeedy, Hon.
And after a few decades of pulling yourself together and going to work the best way you know how, in spite of lessened or lessening strength, you’ll find that your mind and heart and courage are strong and bold and great.
⌘
Note from the present: the Battle of Maldon is real but my use of the quote is misleading. The Anglo-Saxon was not exactly a king, he was whatever an ealdorman was. And he didn’t say that line — which is famous in spite of being over 1,000 years old — because he’d just been hacked to death. His followers said it, giving each other courage to keep fighting. But this quote was written by a poet and you know what poets are like: they make shit up. So who knows who actually said what, and anyway I think that the quote works regardless of who says it.
That is, let’s be purist and say the king wasn’t telling his followers how to live; let’s say his followers were telling each other to hold themselves together against being outnumbered and frightened and ready to die. And how better to hold together unfrightened than to see your king, ealdorman, your queen, someone public, with a strong mind, bold heart, and great courage, regardless of strength.
One of the comments on this original post was from Jessa:
“I was at the funeral of a relative, Diana, who had lived to 100 and led a remarkable life. The vicar always opens with ‘If you are able, please stand.’ This time, he then remarked, ‘Just as I said that, I thought of Diana, who stood whether she was able or not.’”
_________
replica of an Anglo-Saxon helmut found at Sutton Hoo, by Ziko-C via Wikimedia Commons
This essay originally appeared on LWON in 2012 as part of a series on the seven deadly sins. Since then, sociopathy hasn’t gone away, so we’re reposting it here.
I wuz robbed.
A few months ago a scientific discovery that I had covered in depth in my most recent book became the subject of a major news story. The same morning that the story broke, I got an email from a member of one of the discovery teams suggesting that I write an op-ed column on the subject for a certain influential publication. I emailed back immediately to say that I had just gotten off the phone with an editor at that influential publication and that a column by me was already in progress. The following day this scientist submitted his own op-ed to the same publication.
Let’s call him Dick, and not because his name is Richard. (It’s not.)
It was such a nice night. September in the low mountains is lovely — hot by mid-afternoon, cool enough for a sweater by sundown — and it’s the best time of year to sit outside after dinner. We were enjoying the peace of the late-summer forest. And then the skunk came.
The dog was in the woods, as usual, and we were hearing mild rustling sounds, as usual. Nothing big enough to be a bear, so I assumed it was a bunny. And then we heard Sunshine run.
I called her name, but she just shook her collar. I figured whatever she’d just chased off was keeping her attention, but I was a little worried it was a bear, or worse, a cub. We stood up and called her more forcefully and she came this time, panting and stinking, oh my word she was stinking.
I’ve never smelled a skunk in the act of spraying. Of course I’ve smelled the aftermath of a spritz, sometimes driving through skunk essence on a road at night or even while walking in my neighborhood. (This skunk is a resident.) But smelling fresh spray before the oils are dry, inhaling it within 45 seconds of my dog getting a faceful, was different. More ripe. More acrid. An abominable fume, eau de toilette at a National Forest Service campground, redolent of smoldering hatred, a malodorous tang of almost indescribable terribility. I had to know more.
A skunk’s spray spews forth from its anal glands, which are organs dogs have as well and that I wish I didn’t know existed. The secretion itself is composed of thiols and thioacetates, organic compounds that contain sulfur. The smell of Hades. The skunk that sprayed Sunshine was probably a common striped skunk, judging from my trailcam footage. Its Latin name is Mephitis mephitis, after Mefitis, a pre-Roman goddess of the center of the Earth and its associated hellish smells. I thought immediately of Mephistopheles. Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris.* At least my dog’s misery was shared by her parents?
I also learned that you must not get your dog wet after she’s sprayed — oil and water don’t mix — but instead first neutralize the oil using dish soap and hydrogen peroxide. I tried to imagine my dog as a baby duck suffering from an oil spill.
The smell was otherworldly. I tried to put it into words. None of them was quite right, but this list was a start.
What Skunk Spray Smells Like
Nuclear waste ashes
A bear suffering from dysentery
Rancid diapers
Expired turkey eggs moldering next to a July-ripened watermelon, but it’s September
Rancid diapers doused in pickle juice, then lit on fire
Rancid diapers doused in pickle juice, lit on fire, and extinguished using the Churchill Court house’s rotting meat
Hades
A corpse flower
A toddler’s sippy cup filled with milk and forgotten in a diaper bag for three days, then sprinkled with Tajin, then ignited in the same fire ring as the diapers and scary-house meat
Methane exhaust from a landfill experiencing a heat wave
Expired Costco-sized wheel of brimstone
The Humane Society’s front entrance (just kidding, Sunshine)
Bonus: The Parts of Speech Most Useful in Conveying the Experience of Your Dog Being Skunked
Verbs Sniff Smell Go (as in “go potty”) Rustle Run
Nouns Dog Rock Woods Night Meadow Skunk Boundary Stink
Interjections My second grader is learning about interjections in school, and added, helpfully, the following: Ahh! Eek! Whoa! Eww! Oh s-word!
Indeed.
*I apologize to the ghost of Christopher Marlowe for linking this phrase to Urban Dictionary
Image:
L. Prang & Co., 1861-1897, Boston Public Library Chromolithographs, via Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-2.0
“The English Riviera”. A phrase that sounds like a classic example of British acerbic humour, and I had already emotionally prepared myself to laugh despondently at the sight of some especially bleak industrial waterfront. But when I drove down to the South Coast of England, through hours of the most glorious “sunlit uplands” countryside you ever saw, and the low hills parted to reveal a glimpse of the jewel tone shoreline and palm trees? (Palm trees! in England!) The whole scene has been surprising and delighting Americans since at least 1986 if you go by this article in the Los Angeles Times:
“Exotic plants and palms unexpectedly thrive in this mild southwesterly climate. The palm-lined waterfront walk leads along a green park with fountains, flowers and a pavilion built in the wonderful British Raj architecture of Queen Victoria’s time.”
A closer inspection of the beach, however, revealed some blemishes on this ritzy scene. As we made our way across the wet sand toward the water at low tide, we found the whole expanse pocked with a regular pattern of little wet gasping holes. Each hole was accompanied by a small pyramid of what looked like thin, brown, squiggly sausage. You cannot look at this and think anything but ‘poop’.
Gingerly and with great distaste, I picked my way through this minefield, taking great care to miss them and wincing elaborately when my children exhibited no such self-preserving instincts. Splat splat splat went their little bare feet smashing through the poop pyramids.
Despite the ick factor, however, I had to grudgingly admit that the regular spacing did look cool so I took a picture. Then the friend I was visiting there explained that the little piles were not poops at all but sand sculptures; the stuff that had been displaced to excavate the little holes. Construction rubble, basically.
New question. What was responsible for all this excavation?
I lay down in the sand and peered down into one of the holes, getting my eyeball as close to the edge as I could.
A couple weeks ago, we were driving through Wyoming when I saw a sign for the Oregon Trail Cutoff. At this point we’d been in the car for something like four hours, and blessedly we were on some stretch of highway with reception, so I googled it. The cutoff, I learned, was the Lander Trail, a wagon road built with funds from the U.S. government in the late 1850s. My search brought up other deviations from the Oregon Trail: the Mormon Trail, the Bozeman Trail, the Sublette-Greenwood Cutoff, Hudspeth’s Cutoff. The one that caught my eye was called the Hastings Cutoff, “used by the ill-fated Donner Party,” according to Wikipedia.
If you already happen to know anything beyond the basics of either historical topic, you might skip this post. But as someone woefully ignorant about both — my knowledge of the Oregon Trail is limited to the landmarks and demands of the computer game, and I knew only that the Donner Party became cannibals — I was surprised about how much of the story I’d never heard before.
You can, of course, read the wikipedia entries yourselves, but here’s a cliff’s notes from memory: the Donner Party was made up of several families traveling to California. The two major families traveling were the the Reeds and the Donners; James Reed, the patriarch of the Reed family, was an Irish immigrant, and he was not popular with the group. George Donner, on the other hand, was “American-born,” and generally liked. (Wikipedia says nothing about the political context here, but one can’t help but wonder whether these men’s backgrounds might have played a role in shaping what others thought of them.)
The path to California began on the Oregon Trail; in Idaho, the California Trail veered south while the Oregon Trail continued north. The Donner Party began their journey west from Independence, Kansas on May 12. Exactly two months later, they received a letter from a man named Lansford Hastings. He claimed he’d found a more direct path to California; whereas the Oregon trail doglegged between what’s now Wyoming and Idaho, Hastings’ Cutoff (which he of course named after himself) cut through the Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake. The letter was one of many Hastings had sent to travelers along the Oregon trail; he’d hired riders to travel on horseback to intercept emigrants and encourage them to take the Hastings route. The letter Reed and Donner received said that Hastings would be waiting for them at Fort Bridger, Wyoming, where he’d lead them along his great new trail.
But when they arrived at Fort Bridger, Hastings had already left. A man named Jim Bridger encouraged them to take the cutoff anyway, saying it’d be a “smooth trip” with plenty of water. At least two other people tried to warn the group NOT to take the shortcut: Reed ran into a friend who told him not to take the cutoff, and a journalist, who was a few weeks ahead of the Donner party on cutoff, sent a letter to them telling them to avoid the path, but the group never received his warning.
Reed was all for taking the “shortcut,” so the group went. It turned out to be a longcut, miles longer than the more established trail to California, and required traveling through the steep eastern edge of the Wasatch range as well as a long slog through the Great Salt Lake. The group moved extremely slowly through the punishing terrain, some of their cattle and oxen escaped or died, and James Reed even killed a guy and was banished from the group. Eventually, the group got stranded at Donner Pass over the winter. You’ve probably know the basic outline of the result: as their food stores dwindled and people died, some of the survivors began to eat the corpses. What I didn’t know was that there were multiple rescue missions, and one survivor, after returning to civilization, died by breaking into food stores and eating himself to death. Absolutely brutal.
I’ve always known their story was tragic, but what I didn’t realize was how much of their plight was the result of being swindled by self-interested con-men. Hastings hadn’t actually traveled his own cutoff before he started hyping it up; he was just eager to make a name for himself. Bridgers, the guy who encouraged the group to take the Hastings cutoff, had a trading post along that route and wanted more people to take the cutoff so he could get more business. Dozens of people died in large part because of the cutoff, and yet this part of the story is rarely talked about! While I’ve heard plenty of Donner party-related cannibalism quips, never once had I learned about the greed for money and fame underlying their fate.
I’ll leave you with another wormhole to fall into: Lansford Hastings went on to join the Confederate Army, and he was promoted to Major when he pitched Jefferson Davis a half-baked plan to make California leave the union and join the confederacy. Obviously, that didn’t happen, so Hastings moved to Brazil; he and fellow confederate expats, now known as the Confederados, moved there to colonize Brazil and set up a cotton industry to rival the U.S.’s.
