01Biography
Lansford Hastings was a young Ohio lawyer when he joined Dr. Elijah White's emigrant company in 1842, and at the end of the first month he was elected its captain. In Oregon he worked for a time as John McLoughlin's agent at Oregon City, then in 1843 led a party south to California.
His Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California (1845) praised California and suggested a shorter way there by the Great Salt Lake, though he had never been that way. In the spring of 1846 he rode east over the route on horseback, and that July he and James Hudspeth led two wagon trains from Fort Bridger along his cutoff. The Donner Party followed their tracks eleven days later and was trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada.
02Why they matter
Promoted the Hastings Cutoff, the untried shortcut that cost the Donner Party weeks on the way to California in 1846.
03How they died
In the war with Mexico he served as a captain in Frémont's California Battalion, and in 1849 he helped write California's first constitution. He later moved to Arizona, and during the Civil War he was a major in the Confederate army. Afterward he worked to found a colony in Brazil for Southerners and published a guide to Brazil in 1867. He died in 1870, aged about 51, while taking a second group of settlers there.
04Legacy
The Hastings Cutoff is a historic site on the California, Mormon Pioneer and Pony Express national historic trails. Some 70,000 Mormon pioneers later used the part of his route that led into the Salt Lake Valley, and wagon tracks from those years can still be seen on the salt flats west of the Great Salt Lake.