The Donner Party, Ill-Fated Settlers Turned to Cannibalism

The Donner Party was a group of American settlers heading to California who became stranded in heavy snows in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1846. Isolated in horrific conditions, about half of the original group of nearly 90 people died of starvation or exposure. Some of the survivors turned to cannibalism in order to survive. After those who managed to stay alive were rescued in early 1847, the story of horror in the mountains appeared in a California newspaper. The tale made its way east, circulated through newspaper articles, and became part of western lore. Fast Facts: The Donner Party About half of a group of nearly 90 settlers heading to California in 1846 starved when snowbound.Disaster was caused by taking an untested route which added weeks to the journey.Survivors eventually resorted to cannibalism.Story circulated widely through newspaper stories and books. Origin of the Donner Party The Donner Party was named for two families, George Donner and his wife and children, and George’s brother Jacob and his wife and children. They were from Springfield, Illinois, as was another family traveling with them, James Reed and his wife and children. Also from Springfield were various individuals associated with the Donner and Reed families. That original group left Illinois in April 1846 and arrived in Independence, Missouri, the following month. After securing provisions for the long trip westward, the group, along with other travelers from a variety of places, left Independence on May 12, 1846. (People would typically meet in Independence and decide to stick together for the journey westward, which is how some members of the Donner Party joined the group essentially by chance.) The group made good progress along the trail westward, and in about a week had met up with another wagon train, which they joined. The early part of the journey passed with no major problems. The George Donners wife had written a letter describing the early weeks of the trip which appeared in the newspaper back in Springfield. The letter also appeared in papers in the East, including the New York Herald, which published it on the front page. After passing Fort Laramie, a major landmark on the way west, they met up with a rider who gave them a letter which claimed that troops from Mexico (which was at war with the United States) might interfere with their passage ahead. The letter advised taking a shortcut called the Hastings Cutoff. Shortcut to Disaster After arriving at Fort Bridger (in present day Wyoming), the Donners, the Reeds, and others debated whether to take the shortcut. They were assured, falsely it turned out, that the traveling would be easy. Through a series of miscommunications, they did not receive warnings from those who knew otherwise. The Donner Party decided to take the shortcut, which led them into many hardships. The route, which took them on a southerly path about Great Salt Lake, was not clearly marked. And it was often very difficult passage for the groups wagon. The shortcut required passing over the Great Salt Lake Desert. The conditions were like nothing any of the travelers had seen before, with blistering heat by day and frigid winds at night. It took five days to cross the desert, leaving the 87 members of the party, including many children, exhausted. Some of the party’s oxen had died in the brutal conditions, and it became obvious that taking the shortcut had been a colossal blunder. Taking the promised shortcut had backfired, and put the group about three weeks behind schedule. Had they taken the more established route, they would have gotten across the final mountains before any chance of snowfall and arrived in California safely. Tensions in the Group With the travelers seriously behind schedule, anger flared in the group. In October the Donner families broke off to go ahead, hoping to make better time. In the main group, an argument broke out between a man named John Snyder and James Reed. Snyder struck Reed with an ox whip, and Reed responded by stabbing Snyder and killing him. The killing of Snyder happened beyond U.S. laws, as it was then Mexican territory. In such a circumstance, it would be up to the members of a wagon train to decide how to dispense justice. With the groups leader, George Donner, at least a day’s travel ahead, the others decided to banish Reed from the group. With high mountains still to cross, the party of settlers was in disarray and deeply distrustful of each other. They had already endured more than their share of hardships on the trails, and seemingly endless problems, including bands of Native Americans raiding at night and stealing oxen, continued to plague them. Trapped by Snow Arriving at the Sierra Nevada mountain range at the end of October, early snows were already making the journey difficult. When they reached the vicinity of Truckee Lake (now called Donner Lake), they discovered the mountain passes they needed to cross were already blocked by snowdrifts. Attempts to get over the passes failed. A group of 60 travelers settled into crude cabins which had been built and abandoned two years earlier by other settlers passing by. A smaller group, including the Donners, set up a camp a few miles away. Stranded by impassable snow, the supplies quickly dwindled. The travelers had never seen such snow conditions before, and attempts by small parties to walk onward to California to get help were thwarted by the deep snowdrifts. Facing starvation, people ate the carcasses of their oxen. When the meat ran out, they were reduced to boiling ox hide and eating it. At times people caught mice in the cabins and ate them. In December, a party of 17, consisting of men, women, and children, set out with snowshoes they had fashioned. The party found the traveling nearly impossible, but kept moving westward. Facing starvation, some of the party resorted to cannibalism, eating the flesh of those who had died. At one point, two Nevada Indians who had joined the group before they headed into the mountains were shot and killed so their flesh could be eaten. (That was the only instance in the story of the Donner Party where people were killed to be eaten. The other instances of cannibalism occurred after people had died of exposure or starvation.) One member of the party, Charles Eddy, eventually managed to wander into a village of the Miwok tribe. The Native Americans gave him food, and after he reached white settlers at a ranch, he managed to get a rescue party together. They found the six survivors of the snowshoe group. Back at the camp by the lake, one of the travelers, Patrick Breen, had started keeping a diary. His entries were brief, at first just descriptions of the weather. But over time he began noting the increasingly desperate conditions as more and more of those stranded succumbed to starvation. Breen survived the ordeal and his diary was eventually published. Rescue Efforts One of the travelers who had gone ahead in October became increasingly alarmed when the Donner Party never showed up at Sutter’s Fort in California. He tried to raise the alarm and eventually was able to inspire what eventually amounted to four separate rescue missions. What the rescuers discovered was disturbing. The survivors were emaciated. And in some of the cabins rescuers discovered bodies which had been butchered. A member of a rescue party described finding a body with the head sawed open so the brains could be extracted. The various mutilated bodies were gathered together and buried in one of the cabins, which was then burned to the ground. Of the 87 travelers who entered the mountains on the final phase of the journey, 48 survived. Most of them stayed in California. Legacy of the Donner Party Stories about the Donner Party began to circulate immediately. By the summer of 1847 the story had reached the newspaper in the East. The New York Tribune published a story on August 14, 1847, which gave some grim details. The Weekly National Intelligencer, a Washington, D.C. newspaper, published a story on October 30, 1847, which described the terrible suffering of the Donner Party. An editor of a local newspaper in Truckee, California, Charles McGlashan, became something of an expert on the story of the Donner Party. In the 1870s he talked to survivors and pieced together a comprehensive account of the tragedy. His book, History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra, was published in 1879 and went through many editions. The story of the Donner Party has lived on, through a number of books and films based on the tragedy. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, many settlers heading to California took what happened as a serious warning not to lose time on the trail and not to take unreliable shortcuts. Sources: Distressing News. American Eras: Primary Sources, edited by Sara Constantakis, et al., vol. 3: Westward Expansion, 1800-1860, Gale, 2014, pp. 95-99. Gale Virtual Reference Library.Brown, Daniel James.  The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party. William Morrow Company, 2015.

Where to Kayak

Ethics, Fraud, and Internal Audit at Ut Southwestern Free Essays

There are many taxpayer supported medical schools in this country, most receiving their fees for services through Medicare and Medicaid. The Department of Health and Human Services requires that medical students who have graduated to the resident status have a teaching physician physically present when performing key portions of patient service to be able to bill those services to Medicare. In fact, the patient chart must be legibly signed by the attending physician that they were present and supervising the specific service in order to bill Medicare (â€Å"Guidenlines for teaching,† 2011). We will write a custom essay sample on Ethics, Fraud, and Internal Audit at Ut Southwestern or any similar topic only for you Order Now According to an article in the Dallas News, a former employee by the name of Jack Mooney was hired in 1991 by the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center as a reimbursement manager to make sure that all medical billings submitted to Medicare and Medicaid were properly documented and billed (Dunklin Moffeit, 2010). For example, that the teaching physicians were physically present when residents were performing services to meeting the required mandates for Medicare billing. He discovered that was not the case and took the information to his supervisors. Stricter policies were put into place for the departments to follow to make sure that all employees were following the necessary guidelines. In 1997, when Mr. Mooney was the director of UT Southwestern’s billing compliance office, he was still seeing and documenting the same problems. Mooney left the college in 1998 shortly after filing a federal whistle-blower lawsuit. The earliest documentation that can be found of UT Southwestern’s Internal Audit departments involvement comes in a 2003 when they approve of some of the college’s compliance policies, but noted that they do not have a policy in place to review reimbursement claim documents. Dallas News notes that six faculty meetings were held during 2007 and 2008 in which billing concerns were discussed. The Internal Audit Annual Reports for those years do not report any ongoing audits, but do report that they provide the billing compliance committee â€Å"independent consultation and guidance to help billing compliance activities address institution risks† (Rubel, 2008). In 2010 we finally see an internal audit performed of UT Southwestern’s billing compliance programs. The report stated that â€Å"the audit identified a significant finding in the Hospital Billing Compliance program†. As of 2010, the program had not yet implemented the 2005 Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Inspector General (OIG) Supplemental Compliance Program Guidance for Hospitals. Although this guidance is voluntary, it is highly recommended by the OIG to help hospitals in â€Å"preventing the submission of erroneous claims and in combating fraud and abuse in the Federal health care programs (â€Å"OIG supplemental compliance†). The guidance specifically states that â€Å"hospitals should have in place procedures regarding resident rotation and monitoring†. The audit report recommends that the compliance program implement the OIG guidance, consolidation of the billing compliance groups (there are currently four), development of a single risk assessment plan with a corresponding audit plan, a monitoring system for both the risk assessment audit plan and the billing compliance audit report. Also of note in the audit report are repeated failures by the same department to meet billing practices. It is noted that these â€Å"recurring systematic failures increase the risk of exposure to potential civil damages and penalties, criminal sanctions, and administrative remedies, such as program exclusion†. The audit recommends that the failures be addressed at the department level and to develop a formal training plan to improve billing compliance. According to the report, all significant findings are tracked by the University of Texas System Audit Office to make sure that all agreed upon recommendations have been implemented. These reports are unavailable for review and there has been no further comment on the billing compliance audit in the 2011 Internal Audit Annual Report. This issue was first brought to light 20 years ago by someone that was hired to review billing compliance. We know that 7 years ago the internal audit department was aware of the issue, but as far as we can tell, no significant audit of the hospitals billing department, in relation to Medicare billing requirements, was completed until 2010. Was the hospital fraudulently obtaining money from the government? Not in so far as anyone has determined. Was the audit department aware of the issue? Yes, as far as we can tell. Did the internal auditors follow the IIA’s mandatory guidance? Yes in the completion of the audit in 2010 but it is my personal opinion, given the facts provided, that the audit should have been ompleted years earlier. ? References Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare Medicaid Services. (2011). Guidenlines for teaching physicians, interns, and residents. Retrieved from website: http://www. cms. gov/Outreach-and-Education/Medicare-Learning-Network-MLN/MLNProducts/downloads/gdelinesteachgresfctsht. pdf Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General. (n. d. ). OIG supplemental compliance program guidance for hospitals (Vol. 70, No. 19). Retrieved from website: http://oig. hhs. gov/fraud/docs/complianceguidance/012705HospSupplementalGuidance. df Dunklin, R. , Moffeit, M. (2010, May 30). Feds probe alleged fraud at ut southwestern, parkland. Dallas News. Retrieved from http://www. dallasnews. com/news/community-news/dallas/headlines/20100530-feds-probe-alleged-fraud-at-ut-southwestern-parkland-. ece Rubel, R. (2008, November 03). Internal audit annual report fiscal year 2008. Retrieved from http://www. utsouthwestern. edu/media/footer_required_documents/aud it-2008. pdf Rubel, R. (2010, February 24). Billing compliance audit report. Retrieved from http://res. dallasnews. com/localnews/responsivedocs_audit_2010. pdf How to cite Ethics, Fraud, and Internal Audit at Ut Southwestern, Papers