Sutter's Fort houses several artefacts directly connected to the Donner Party disaster of 1846-47 — the emigrant wagon train that became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada and resorted to cannibalism to survive the winter. Among them is Patty Reed's doll, a small wooden toy that Patty Reed smuggled through the ordeal and kept for the rest of her long life (she died in 1923, aged 84).
The fort dispatched multiple rescue parties to the stranded emigrants across February and March 1847, organised by Sutter's employees working under conditions nearly as difficult as those faced by the survivors. The artefacts in the fort's collection represent one of the few cases where the artefacts, the rescue base, and the geographical context are all visible within the same historic site.