Jean Baptiste Trudeau (1830 - 1910)

Born 1830 in Utah Territory, United States

Died 9 Oct 1910 at about age 80 in Marshall, California, United States

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Jean Trudeau was involved in the westward expansion of the USA. Westward Ho! Join: Trails and Wagon Trains Project Discuss: wagon_trains_and_trails

Jean Baptiste Trudeau was one of 81 pioneers in the Donner Party wagon train to California that became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada in 1846.

Biography

Jean Trudeau was a member of the Donner Party. See Donner Party.

Jean Baptiste Trudeau was part of the infamous Donner Party in 1846. They were trapped in the Sierra Nevada Mountains by snow for 111 days,Jean Baptiste Trudeau was hired by the Donner Family en route.

Jean Baptiste Trudeau, 18, was rescued by the Third Relief. He stayed with the Donner girls after their rescue. In 1847 he was quoted by a US Navy Lt. Wise recounting some very lurid tales of cannibalism. It is not known if the quotations are accurate or fabricated. Trudeau visited the Donner girls periodically over the next forty years, and continued to assure them and newspapers that cannibalism had not occurred at Alder Creek. He married and had three sons. He died in 1910 at Marshall in Tomales Bay, Marin County.

Sources

• Donner Party Teamsters
• Donner Party - Baptiste Who? by Kristin Johnson
• Dixon, Kelly, Shannon Novak, Gwen Robbins, Julie Schablitsky, Richard Scott , and Guy Tasa (2010), "Men, Women, and Children are Starving: Archaeology of the Donner Family Camp". American Antiquity 75(3):627-656
• McGlashan, Charles (1879). History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra Nevada: 11th edition (1918), A Carlisle & Company, San Francisco
• McNeese, Tim (2009). The Donner Party: A Doomed Journey, Chelsea House Publications. ISBN 978-1-60413-025-6
• Rarick, Ethan (2008). Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-530502-7
• Rehart, Catherine Morison (2000), The Valley's Legends & Legacies III, Word Dancer Press, ISBN 978-1-884995-18-7
• Stewart, George R. (1936). Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party: supplemented edition (1988), Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-61159-8
• Unruh, John (1993). The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60, University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06360-0
• Geni profile