it's a little embarrassing. You can sense that when you visit Donner Memorial State Park on Donner Lake in Truckee, CA. The park is named for the Donner party, the emigrant group for whom the passage across the Sierras went horribly, cannibalistically wrong in the winter of 1846-7.
While the Donner party gives the park its name, the museum within its grounds is pointedly the 'Emigrant Trail Museum,' favoring the stories of the many who trekked successfully through the beautiful Truckee meadows on their way to crossing that last great granite-strewn pass before their descent into their promised land. And, of course, when you see how they were traveling and what they were surmounting, even the stories of the ones who made it through unscathed are harrowing enough.
The Donner Party does get mentioned here, but the tone is uncertain -- appropriate perhaps because they both endured the most spectacularly awful hardships of all, and yet didn't come through them in the approved way.
The ambiguity extends to the massive Pioneer Monument outside the museum which is pointedly not of any Donner party members. And yet its plinth is set at 22 ft high, the height of the snow in that spot in the winter of 1846-7, so it is about them too.
The memorial's inscription is also ambiguous, weighted with the discomfort of the knowing what this land did to the most famous of its emigrants, the ones who died, and in some cases were eaten, pretty much right where the memorial stands today.
It's pretty shocking that today -- only a few generations later, really -- you can simply drive up the road beyond the lake for eight or so minutes and park exactly on the divide that marks the beginning of the end of the emigrant trail.
Here's the view looking back down to Donner Lake, at the far end of which the Donner Party were stuck for that terrible winter. In the summer the area is now full of people climbing the rocks for fun. And even in the deepest winter, the point at which the pioneers finally crossed the Sierra divide is an 'athletic-oriented boarding school' -- the Sugar Bowl Academy -- where parents voluntarily send their children to live.