Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West

In the modern American lexicon, the Donner Party is synonymous with cannibalism. The average person knows next to nothing about these people or what drove them to do what they did, but everyone seems to know the one detail that matters: They ate each other. The actual truth is more nuanced than that, but there's no getting around that the story of the Donner Party is one of the most infamous examples of cannibalism in human history.

Ethan Rarick's Desperate Passage starts at the very beginning, at the head of the California Trail in Independence, Missouri. It was May 1846 and, as the pioneers of the time knew, that was an awfully late start date for a wagon party heading west. The risk of winter arriving before they did was too high. show more This was the first of series of unfortunate decisions that would, compounded over time, lead the emigrants towards historical notoriety.

Two points jumped out at me while I was reading. (1) To be trapped in the mountains during the early winter of 1846 under the circumstances that led to, not immediate death, but cannibalism was a result of an improbable confluence of timing. It's like the stars aligned in the worst way—geographic terrain, time of year, etc. Each factor had a small window that could lead to big problems and in each case the timing was disastrously perfect. (2) The Donner story is one of extraordinary actions under unimaginably desperate conditions, and yet the tale that people told for half a century afterwards painted the survivors as monsters. Why the lack of sympathy? Rarick supposes when sharing stories of westward expansion, of manifest destiny in other words, the storytellers preferred optimism over despair. The tragedy occurred just a few years ahead of the California Gold Rush and it's not hard to imagine that pioneers wanted reasons to push onward, not to stay away. show less

This is a remarkable tale of survival under the most extreme conditions. In October of 1846, the last westward wagon train of the year, stops before it's final ascent across the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Unaware of the impending storm and ignorant of the brutal winters here, 81 men, women, and children are caught with little food and meager shelter. As time slowly progresses, desperate decisions are made.

What an interesting read. We all know about the Donner party and basically what happened to them but the details chronicled in this book are amazing. Details are taken from diaries, interviews with survivors and rescuers, and other reliable sources. So many things I did not know. How they got in the position they were in. Bad choices, bad advice. Difficult Sophie's Choice type choices having to be made. Heroics, cowardice. Everything is in this true life tale from the pioneer days. Definitely worth reading.

This book starts off slowly, just as the wagon party forms and begins its journey from Independence, Mo. Rarick takes the reader through the prairie as the Donner Party endures the heat, the loss of livestock, the deaths along the way. Once the party became stuck in the Sierra Nevada mountains during the coldest winter on record, the many deaths occurred one after another, leaving many of the families with just one or two members alive.
This is a well-researched book that has the advantage over older versions of this tragedy because of recent testings of bones found at the campsite. Rarick also goes beyond the events that made the party famous and gives accounts of what happened to the survivors years and even decades after.

I found this to be a compelling read and very difficult to put down. It chronicles the Donner Party's infamous emigration from Missouri to California in the early 19th century, and how a series of bad decisions, bad luck and mistakes led to the incidents that they're famous for.

This proved to be quite a lively, detailed and sympathetic but honest account of the entire journey west of what came to be infamously known as The Donner Party. Granted, before reading this I had only been exposed to the sketchiest of details regarding the Donner Party, so I can't truly attest to its accuracy, but given the documents and sources he cites throughout the book, I think it's definitely safe to say the author did his research! At times it became a little difficult to keep track of all the individuals, but that didn't detract too much from the entirety of the story.

Well-researched, based mostly on primary and secondary sources, this book brings new archaelogical evidence to bear on the often sensationalized westward venture. The book presents a vivid picture of the tough decisions, not to mention the rugged country faced by the last group to head west over the Sierra Madres in 1846 without the lurid detail or moralizing. As the author says, "the members of the Donner Party did the best they could, which is a form of Everyman's valor."