Daniel Weintraub: 'Desperate Passage' superbly tells Donner Party story

By Daniel Weintraub , dweintraub@sacbee.com

last updated: July 08, 2008 05:59:42 PM

TRUCKEE – A hot and smoky Independence Day weekend might not have been the best time to imagine what it was like for the ill-fated Donner Party, whose snowbound horror story will forever dominate the history of this Sierra town and the summit that looms ominously above it.

But a new book by Ethan Rarick is so good that it transported me to that frigid winter scene, even on the warmest of summer days, from the comfort of a cabin deck and a perch on a sunny granite ledge 1,000 feet above the valley floor.

The outlines of the Donner Party story are well known to most people who grew up in Northern California: A party of Midwesterners gets a late start on their cross-country trek, loses more time after foolishly taking what they are told will be a short-cut, and finally arrives at the foot of the Sierra just as the first heavy snows are falling.

The ordeal that follows eventually leads many of them to resort to cannibalism, eating their dead to survive the winter.

I don't remember when I first heard the story, but as an adult, I have always considered "Ordeal by Hunger," a 1936 book by George R. Stewart, to be the definitive history of the tragedy. Now Rarick, taking advantage of some new material and a fresh perspective, has bettered Stewart and written what should become the new go-to book on a story that anyone interested in the roots of California culture needs to know.

"Desperate Passage" (2008, Oxford University Press), picks up the Donner journey from the beginning, in Illinois and Missouri, as the pioneers were deciding to make the trek west and packing for their trip. It includes fresh details from letters that Tamzene Donner wrote to her sister, and from a sparse diary kept by Hiram Miller and James Reed.

Rarick's book also includes some new context from other survival stories. Drawing on research into the effects of starvation on the human mind and body, and on the demographics of survival rates, he shows how the pattern of the Donner Party – the youngest and the oldest were the first to die, more women than men survived, and single men with no families in the group were especially susceptible to death – was fairly typical. It may be, Rarick writes, that men whose families were with them lived through the challenge because, literally, they had more to live for.

The book is also enriched by geographic and scientific details that Rarick drops in like morsels within the narrative. He traveled the entire route, and his descriptions of the plains, the deserts and the mountains the pioneers crossed are first-hand. He also writes briefly about the geology of the Sierra and why it was important to the story, and gives the reader an appreciation for the origins and ferocity of the storms that pummel the crest every winter and were especially strong the year the Donners were stranded.

But the heart of the book is the story of the people involved, their character, the hardships they faced and the decisions they made. Here Rarick spins the tale like a novel, using detail and description to move the narrative along. At one point, he tells how James Reed – who had been banished from the wagon train, made it to California, then returned to the mountains to rescue his family – saved a speck of food he hoped would get him or his daughter through to the end.

"At camp," Rarick writes, "Reed had taken a frozen empty sack that once contained dried meat and held it over the fire. When it softened, he carefully scraped the inside seam, where a few tiny crumbs had clung to the fabric. He produced a teaspoonful, perhaps less, but even this was a treasure to be prized. Like a miser hiding a nugget of gold, he placed the tiny serving in the end of the thumb of one of his mittens, literally the last bite of food they possessed.

"Now it was needed, so Reed carefully peeled off the mitten, plucked the frozen speck from its unorthodox storage bin, and placed it in his mouth to thaw. When it seemed edible, he took it from his lips and gently fed it to Patty by hand. She revived, and they went on, without even the smallest morsel in reserve."

It's odd that the pass that stopped the Donner Party is now named for their leader, even though another wagon train had traversed it without incident two years earlier. But in some ways it is appropriate that this gateway to California is named for immigrants who uprooted themselves from their homes and traveled a great distance to reach a place that lured them in magical ways they did not fully understand, at great cost and, ultimately, hardship. It is, in that sense, the story of so many Californians over the past 150 years, of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

In "Desperate Passage," Rarick tells the Donner story as well as anyone ever has. His work is destined to become a fixture in any complete collection of California history books.

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