Donner Party
George Yount recounted that, in early Spring of 1847, around the time the first relief party for the Donner Party was being organized, he had a repeated dream in which he saw a struggling group of pioneers in deep snow and other striking details of their appearance and difficulties. He may have heard of the plight of the Donner Party, which had been widely-publicized by James Reed in San Francisco that winter. In Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s 1869 'Twenty-Four Years Later', Dana writes that Yount's dream was responsible for at least part of the rescue of the Donner Party. Dana refers to it as "[Yount's] celebrated dream, thrice repeated." Rev. Horace Bushnell's 1858 report of Yount's first-hand account places the location Yount saw in the dream in the wrong place from the Donner Party; however, Dana's 'Journal of a Voyage Round the World, 1859-1860' (published in 1968) makes it clear that Yount considered the dream as a helpful spiritual communication which led to relief to the Donner Party. Yount's dream and its connection to the Donner Party are now accepted as part of George Yount's legacy.