Truckee

The pass over Donner Peak in Northern California is known as Donner Summit and has been a critical route across the Sierra Nevada Mountains for centuries. First it was used by Native Americans, then early settlers, and then emigrant wagon trains such as those used by the ill-fated Donner Party, in whose honor the region is named. The first transcontinental railroad in the United States and the first transcontinental highway in America both made use of the Donner Summit route to gain access to California; even early aviators used a beacon at the Summit for guidance across the Sierras. Most of the communities and points of interest along the railroad and highway route up and over Donner Summit are covered in this book.

It is difficult to account for the enduring reputation of a book, in the face of changing taste and fashions of thought, when its subject is one of minor appeal and demands a rather special interest in the reading public. In the book here freshly presented, the problem is complicated by an extensive body of material on its subject from other hands.

In late October 1846, the last wagon train of that year's 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 America's 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 America's most horrific encounters between the dream of a better life and the harsh realities such dreams so often must confront.