Just before spring in 1846 an advertisement appeared in the Springfield, Illinois, Gazette. “Westward ho,” it declared. “Come, boys, you can have as much land as you want without costing you anything.”
The notice was paid for by George Donner, leader of what was to become the most famous of all the wagon trains to start for the far west, the ill-fated Donner Party. Mary-Ellen Jones, a former archivist at The Bancroft Library, will talk about the papers of Charles Fayette McGlashan which she cataloged. They consist primarily of correspondence and other documents that McGlashan obtained from survivors and used to write his classic book History of the Donner Party, A Tragedy of the Sierra.
Mary-Ellen Jones is editor of the California Historian, a periodical published by the Conference of California Historical Societies. She conducts research on pioneer California tombstone carvers and photographs their work, primarily in the California Mother Lode. She has resided in the Bay Area since 1950.
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