Daniel James Brown · 2009 · survival

Daniel James Brown's 2009 history of the Donner Party, following young Sarah Graves and her family on the emigrant trail of 1846 into the disaster that has haunted American memory ever since. Trapped by snow in the high Sierra Nevada through a desperate winter, the survivors endured cold, starvation and, at the last, cannibalism. Brown tells it with unusual tenderness and a clear eye for what hunger and cold do to the body. The route follows the trail and its fatal shortcut.

1. 1
   Independence

   The Donner Party sets out from the Missouri frontier in the spring of 1846, bound for California along the emigrant trail.

2. 2
   Fort Laramie

   West along the Platte to Fort Laramie, in good spirits and good time, with the whole continent ahead.

3. 3
   Fort Bridger

   At Fort Bridger they make the fatal choice to follow the untested Hastings Cutoff, promised a shorter road west.

4. 4
   Great Salt Lake Desert

   The cutoff leads them into the brutal salt desert beyond the Great Salt Lake, where days are lost and oxen die, and the season turns against them.

5. 5
   Humboldt River

   Rejoining the main trail along the Humboldt, exhausted, quarrelling and dangerously late as the first snows gather on the mountains.

6. 6
   Donner Lake

   Trapped by deep early snow at the lake below the Sierra pass, the families build crude camps and begin a winter of starvation, death and, in the end, cannibalism.

7. 7
   Sutters Fort

   Relief parties struggle up from Sutter's Fort to carry out the survivors; of the eighty-seven who entered the mountains, forty-eight come down alive.