The New Yorker:

On their westward journey across the United States, the ill-fated travellers got snowed in and began to starve. Now archeologists are investigating the most gruesome part of their legend.

By Dana Goodyear

Kelly Dixon, a thirty-five-year-old professor at the University of Montana in Missoula, describes herself as an archeologist of the West. A wooden plaque with six styles of nineteenth-century barbed wire nailed to it hangs on her office wall; her shelves are crammed with books like “Antique Western Bitters Bottles,” “The Glass Glossary,” and the 1897 Sears, Roebuck catalogue, and treatises on windmills, barns, and human bones. She works exclusively on sites in the historical period—in the United States, that means the past five hundred years—and has spent a lot of time in ghost towns. In Virginia City, Nevada, a gold-and-silver boomtown on the Comstock lode, she dug the buried remains of the Boston Saloon, the first African-American bar in the Old West to be excavated. Contrary to popular notions of Western saloons as raucous places for brawls and shootouts—and of black establishments as dives—the Boston Saloon, she discovered, served the finest cuts of meat, used crystal stemware, and offered live music and games. The fragments she uncovered, she wrote in a book on the subject, helped tell “a more complex and vivid Western story.”

In Virginia City, Dixon, who is tall and patient, with a husky voice and hair that is the white-blond color of corn silk, encountered another young archeologist, Julie Schablitsky, whom she had met some years earlier. Schablit­sky—excitable, dark-eyed, quick—was conducting her own dig, a few blocks away, and had managed to extract four distinct strands of DNA from the copper needles of a hundred-and-thirty-five-year-old syringe, which she thinks was used, perhaps in a brothel-like setting, for the recreational injection of mor­phine. Her finding, which, she says, was the first example of DNA being recovered from an inanimate object in an archeological context, inspired Dixon to try to do the same. Dixon retrieved DNA from a clench mark on a pipe stem found in the Boston Saloon; it turned out to belong to a woman. The two archeologists decided to team up on their next dig. Schablitsky had been considering the O.K. Corral. Then someone suggested a site that engaged even more directly with the high drama of Western settlement: the Donner Family Camp, in the Sierra Nevada, near Truckee, California.

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