The similarities and situations between the Donner Party and the colonial Pilgrims is both appalling, frightening, and incomplete. In both cases you'll find, one, a fairly large group of ill-prepared greenhorns pitting themselves against nature and each other, two, an insufficient willingness to endure the very real hardships of frontiering and, three, coinsidential misfortune at every turn. Number three, coinsidential misfortune at every turn. Disasters at both camps were initially brought about by departure, delay, and desert inertia; which caused our heroes to begin their journeys at absolu