It's an ironic picnic ground because it marks the last camping place and the last resting place for some members of the ill-fated Donner Party, some of whom reputedly stayed alive in the harrowing winter of 1845-46 by eating one another.

Or, at least so say some. Like a lot of things about the Donner Party, the evidence is equivocal.

If you turn off the highway there, first you come to a parking lot and some picnic tables and beyond that a short trail that makes a circle through the park. At the far end of the circle once two large Ponderosa pines marked the camping sites of George and Jacob Donner, the leaders of the party. Although a lot of folks don't know it, the Donners camped here and not at Donner Lake. Or maybe. Some historians think the camp site is under nearby Prosser Lake.

The trees, alas, are gone, felled by time and natural forces, but there are historic plaques to mark the sites. If you walk the trail, you'll come to a place where you can look eastward toward Prosser and Boca Reservoirs, neither of which, of course, were there when the Donners were.

Then if you walk the rest of the trail, you'll come to a kind of wooden catwalk. It bridges a bog, wet in the spring and early summer, dry in the fall and covered with snow in much of the winter.

This is supposedly where the Donners camped. If you stand there for a moment, you'll realize that if they did they came to rest in probably the worst of all possible places—in the middle of a swamp.

In the Donners' day there would have been plenty of firewood but not much food. They cut down a good many of the trees for just that purpose, but at the level of the existing snow—somewhere around six or eight feet from the ground. These stumps also have disappeared.

The Donners ended up here because they couldn't go any farther. By the time they got this far it was November. They had crossed the Truckee River at least 11 times, the hooves of their oxen were soft from wading the river and they were mentally, emotionally and physically exhausted.

Other members of the party moved on to what is now called Donner Lake and camped there in a drier place, but the Donners lived and died where today's visitors stop for a picnic.

We know all this history partly from the Donner Party itself, but also from the devoted efforts of a San Jose school teacher, the late Peter M. Waddell.

Mr. Waddell spent many of his summers tracing the remaining signs of the pioneers' tracks through the pinyon pines. He also mapped the route the Donners took once they left the Truckee River and headed for the pass that bears their name.

Waddell even fashioned wooden signs to nail to the appropriate trees, trees where today bronze plaques are located. I interviewed him once while he was still active in the 1950s.

He did much of his exploration before George Stewart wrote the book that made the Donners even more famous, Ordeal by Hunger.

And Waddell and Stewart owed a lot to another man, C.F. McGlashen, who lived in Truckee and who first brought the story of the Donner Party to the world's attention with his own book.

All these efforts gave the story of the Donners a life of its own. It's a story that has been made into an heroic tale. Undoubtedly the purported cannibalism, probably entirely in the Donner part of the camp, had much to do with the world's fascination with what happened—or didn't. The principal "cannibal," a Mr. Keseberg, always denied to his dying day that he ate anybody. (He survived). The evidence as to who ate who and how many is still considered equivocal by some historians.

Bernard DeVoto, who debunked a lot of Western historical mythology, points out the Donners might have done better if they had heeded the advice of the Washoe Indians they met and had spent the winter in Nevada, not California. Snow was much lighter there, although food wasn't any more plentiful.

And he also points out the Donners started too late, were hoodwinked into using the Hasting cut-off by a boomer named Hastings and lost much valuable time in the summer, had wagons far too heavy and too fully loaded and were generally ill equipped for the journey.

But it's too late to set aside the heroic record now. It's embedded in our mythology and in the place names the Donners left as a legacy. And it illustrates just how determined the human spirit can be when it wants to be.

Some of the Donner children survived and went on to live long lives in California. And so did many of the adult members of the party, a lot of them in and around San Jose. So the picnic ground remains a monument to survival and perhaps to bravery.

Still, I can never eat lunch there without some qualms or without feeling the ghosts of those valiant, but poor folks who once lived and died (and maybe were eaten) in the bog.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.