Desperate Passage: The Donner
Partys Perilous Journey West by
Ethan Rarick
Caught The History Bug From My Kids...
In late October 1846, the last wagon train of that years westward migration
stopped overnight before resuming its arduous climb over the Sierra
Nevada Mountains, unaware that a fearsome storm was gathering force.
After months of grueling travel, the 81 men, women and children would be
trapped for a brutal winter with little food and only primitive shelter. The
conclusion is known: by spring of the next year, the Donner Party was
synonymous with the most harrowing extremes of human survival. But until
now, the full story of what happened--and what it tells us about human
nature and about Americas westward expansion--remained shrouded in
myth.
Drawing on fresh archeological evidence, recent research on topics
ranging from survival rates to snowfall totals, and heartbreaking letters and

diaries made public by descendants a century-and-a-half after the tragedy,
Ethan Rarick offers an intimate portrait of the Donner party and their
unimaginable ordeal: a mother who must divide her family, a little girl who
shines with courage, a devoted wife who refuses to abandon her husband,
a man who risks his life merely to keep his word. Rarick resists both the
gruesomely sensationalist accounts of the Donner party as well as later
attempts to turn the survivors into archetypal pioneer heroes. The Donner
Party, Rarick writes, is a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic
nor villainous. Often, the emigrants displayed a more realistic and typically
human mixture of generosity and selfishness, an alloy born of necessity.
A fast-paced, heart-wrenching, clear-eyed narrative history, Desperate
Passage casts new light on one of Americas most horrific encounters
between the dream of a better life and the harsh realities such dreams so
often must confront.
Personal Review: Desperate Passage: The Donner Partys
Perilous Journey West by Ethan Rarick
On May 12, 1846, George and Tamzene Donner, along with James and
Margaret Reed, left Independence, Missouri with a group of fifty wagons
and 150 adults for a better life in "the bay of Francisco." They left a little
late and brought up the rear of a snaking line of 500 wagons heading to
Oregon and California that spring. Loaded with children, livestock and
provisions, and lumbering along at two miles an hour, the two thousand
mile trip took about six months. After they crossed the Continental Divide,
and turned left to take the Hastings Cutoff ("an untried shortcut through
unknown wilderness"), instead of the tried and true path to the right, the
travelers coalesced into what became known as the Donner Party.
There was nothing remarkable about the Donner Party's sojourn to
California (which at the time still belonged to Mexico). The first wagon train
west left in 1841; they were merely part of an "expansionist fever" over the
next two decades that saw 250,000 people cross the continent. The
outcome of their trip, though, and the sensationalist reporting about it,
make them some of the most famous and carefully studied of the early
pioneers. Only a mile or two from summitting the Sierra Nevada mountain
range onto a downward slope just 100 miles from their destination, a
ferocious November snow storm buried them in a frigid prison.
Thanks to the diaries, journals, letters, and (conflicting) memories of
the survivors, and later work by historians and archaeologists, today we
have a good idea of exactly what happened. Eighty-one people were
trapped for four months in snows up to twenty feet deep, at an elevation of
6,000 feet. Forty-five people survived because of their decision to eat their
dogs, boiled rawhide, and even their own dead, and thanks to the bravery
of four separate rescue parties (the last of which found one man alive on
April 17). Initial reports caricatured the Donner Party as ghouls because of
their cannibalism, or dupes due to their poor choices and lack of
experience. Rarick rejects these interpretations; in his empathetic retelling,

the Donners were Everyman, "the drama of the mundane gone madly
wrong." Today a national historical landmark, state park, memorials, towns,
and a lake all commemorate this survival adventure with the Donner name.
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