Lansford W Hastings was born in 1819 in Mount Vernon, Ohio. He became a lawyer. In his book he states that in his first trip to the West, they left Independence, Missouri on 16 May 1842, he was elected Captain of the group. He later brought immigrants to Oregon in Nov 1842 in a party co-led by Elijah White. He was the land agent for McLoughlin of the Hudson Bay Company. Lansford came to California in 1843, co-leading (with Clyman), a party of immigrants including Nathan Coombs. Lansford was the author of the widely read book "The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California", first published in 1845. He brought a group to California starting from Independence, Missouri Aug 1845 and arriving at Sutter's Fort on the 24th or 25th of December 1845, which included John H Nash, William Loker, Ira Stebbins, Helms Downing, Robert Semple, Henry Clay Smith, his brother Napoleon Bonaparte Smith and their friend William Mendenhall.
John H Nash, an Alabama attorney, later became Alcalde at Sonoma; William Loker, hired as a clerk by Sutter had been a St Louis merchant; Robert Semple who worked for Sutter as a carpenter, co-founded the first newspaper in California with Walter Colton and was later President of the first constitutional convention.
Lansford returned to Fort Bridger in present-day Wyoming "for the sole purpose" of meeting the overland wagon trains on the Oregon Trail in the Spring/Summer of 1846, to try to divert them to Mexican California. ("Pioneer Sonoma" p7, Parmelee) Hastings had never actually seen the trail about which he had written, but took the immigrants over the Wasatch Mountains. This trail took them across the Utah and Nevada deserts where no wagon trains had ever gone before. This group was led by the ill-fated George Donner, made forever famous by their starvation in the snow-bound mountains.
He was a Captain of Company F in the California Battalion, and a member of the First Constitutional Convention. Barbara Warner states that he had a dream of becoming the first President of a liberated California.