Redigerer Donnerfølget (avsnitt)

=== Påstander om kannibalisme ===
[[Fil:JeanBaptisteTrudeau.JPG|alt=Fotografi av Jean Baptiste Trudeau som voksen.|miniatyr|254x254pk|Jean Baptiste Trudeau, her avbildet som voksen. Han ga motstridende informasjon om kannibalisme ved Alder Creek.]]
Although some survivors disputed the accounts of cannibalism, Charles McGlashan, who corresponded with many of the survivors over a 40-year period, documented many recollections that it occurred. Some correspondents were not forthcoming, approaching their participation with shame, but others eventually spoke about it freely. McGlashan in his 1879 book ''History of the Donner Party'' declined to include some of the more morbid details—such as the suffering of the children and infants before death—or how Mrs. Murphy, according to Georgia Donner, gave up, lay down on her bed and faced the wall when the last of the children left in the third relief. He also neglected to mention any cannibalism at Alder Creek. The same year McGlashan's book was published, Georgia Donner wrote to him to clarify some points, saying that human flesh was prepared for people in both tents at Alder Creek, but to her recollection (she was four years old during the winter of 1846–1847) it was given only to the youngest children: "Father was crying and did not look at us the entire time, and we little ones felt we could not help it. There was nothing else." She also remembered that Elizabeth Donner, Jacob's wife, announced one morning that she had cooked the arm of Samuel Shoemaker, a 25-year-old teamster. Eliza Donner Houghton, in her 1911 account of the ordeal, did not mention any cannibalism at Alder Creek.

Archaeological findings at the Alder Creek camp proved inconclusive for evidence of cannibalism. None of the bones tested at the Alder Creek cooking hearth could be identified with certainty as human. According to Rarick, only cooked bones would be preserved, and it is unlikely that the Donner Party members would have needed to cook human bones.

Eliza Farnham's 1856 account of the Donner Party was based largely on an interview with Margaret Breen. Her version details the ordeals of the Graves and Breen families after James Reed and the second relief left them in the snow pit. According to Farnham, seven-year-old Mary Donner suggested to the others that they should eat Isaac Donner, Franklin Graves Jr., and Elizabeth Graves, because the Donners had already begun eating the others at Alder Creek, including Mary's father Jacob. Margaret Breen insisted that she and her family did not cannibalize the dead, but Kristin Johnson, Ethan Rarick, and Joseph King—whose account is sympathetic to the Breen family—do not consider it credible that the Breens, who had been without food for nine days, would have been able to survive without eating human flesh. King suggests Farnham included this in her account independently of Margaret Breen.

According to an account published by H. A. Wise in 1847, Jean Baptiste Trudeau boasted of his own heroism, but also spoke in lurid detail of eating Jacob Donner, and said he had eaten a baby raw. Many years later, Trudeau met Eliza Donner Houghton and denied cannibalizing anyone. He reiterated this in an interview with a St. Louis newspaper in 1891, when he was 60 years old. Houghton and the other Donner children were fond of Trudeau, and he of them, despite their circumstances and the fact that he eventually left Tamsen Donner alone. Author George Stewart considers Trudeau's accounting to Wise more accurate than what he told Houghton in 1884, and asserted that he deserted the Donners. Kristin Johnson, on the other hand, attributes Trudeau's interview with Wise to be a result of "common adolescent desires to be the center of attention and to shock one's elders"; when older, he reconsidered his story, so as not to upset Houghton. Historians Joseph King and Jack Steed call Stewart's characterization of Trudeau's actions as desertion "extravagant moralism", particularly because all members of the party were forced to make difficult choices. Ethan Rarick echoed this by writing, "more than the gleaming heroism or sullied villainy, the Donner Party is a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic nor villainous".
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