The Donner Party's shortcut cost them weeks, then nearly half the group

In 1846, American pioneers bound for California left the established trail for an unproven shortcut promoted by a man who had never traveled it himself. The detour cost weeks they didn't have and left them snowbound in the Sierra Nevada that winter with supplies gone. Of roughly 87 people in the party, about 40 died before rescue parties reached the survivors, some of whom had resorted to eating the dead.

— Ethan Rarick, Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West — Oxford University Press, 2008
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