Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West
by Ethan Rarick
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ethan RarickEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-02-04
ISBN: 0195305027
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West
Book Review: Desperate Passage
Summary: 5 Stars
Rarick tells the story of the Donner Party aware that the reader already likely knows in outline the terrible trouble those emigrants will find, and so he does not write as if he's building a mystery and needs to withhold vital information. He says straight out, they were running behind and that this resulted in the tragedy that followed. (It's unlikely you don't know, but if you don't, the Donner Party took a "short-cut" on their way to California in 1846 and fell behind the coming winter. The snows fell heavily and they couldn't make it over the Sierra Mountains. They had to make camp and wait till the mountain pass opened in the spring. Meanwhile, they ran out of food, and some of them resorted to cannibalism to survive.)
The Donner Party wasn't known by that name until after their decision to split off from the train of emigrants taking the established route to California. Those who joined to follow the newly proposed Hastings Cut-Off, a route untried heretofore by emigrants, elected George Donner as leader of the group. The book has a convenient "Dramatis Personae" cataloging the names, ages, and family memberships of the Donner Party and of others important to the account. Thirty-nine members are listed as age twelve or under. The catalog of names does not indicate who survived and who died.
California emigrants took the Oregon Trail from Independence Missouri until after crossing the Continental Divide through the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains in what is now Wyoming, and so spent part of their journey with emigrants to Oregon. The established route took all of them over the South Pass to Fort Bridger (with an important exception I'll mention in a moment), then through Soda Springs to Fort Hall in what is now Idaho, where the emigrants to Oregon and California soon parted ways. Instead of traveling northwest from Fort Bridger towards Fort Hall, the Donner Party turned southwest, following the short-cut Lansford Hastings had described in his 1845 book The Emigrant's Guide to Oregon and California.
Rarick explains that Fort Bridger had opened in 1843 "as a trading post and way station for westward emigrants" but that the next year "a party of emigrants blazed what came to be known as the Greenwood Cut-Off, a shortcut that saved several days' travel [to Fort Hall] but went nowhere near Fort Bridger." (57) At the Greenwood Cut-Off the Donner Party had parted ways with the other California emigrants heading towards Fort Hall and had gone on to Fort Bridger.
They had expected to meet Lansford Hastings at Fort Bridger and for him to guide them along the unproven route he had described in his book, but by the time they arrived he had left with an earlier group. The Donner Party's delays along the way had cost them their guide. At this point they could have changed their minds and gone on towards Fort Hall (taking what before the discovery of the Greenwood Cut-Off had been the way there) and, from Fort Hall, the well proven route to California; but the seemingly more direct route of the Hastings Cut-Off was too alluring to the men who determined the route the Party would take. They were strongly advised against it by those whose advise they should have respected, but they turned southwest for the new route anyway, not knowing what lay ahead.
The delays mounted as difficulties with the terrain increased. Their travails through the Wasatch Mountains and across the Great Salt Lake Desert cost them the loss of livestock, wagons, supplies, and many days time. The distance of the Hastings Cut-Off may have been less than the established route through Fort Hall, but the time and effort required were far greater. The "short-cut" had put them four weeks behind (79).
Along the Humbolt River (now, via the Cut-Off, they were back on the established route to California), the Party lost more livestock, now to thieving Indians, forty head of cattle being stolen in the space of a few days (95). "The losses imperiled transportation - cattle pulled the wagons - but the real cost was far greater, and one the emigrants could not yet fully appreciate. A good portion of the Donner Party's potential food supply had vanished." (95)
The book is divided into three parts: Journey, Tribulation, Salvation. The summary I've given, leaving much out, is from part one only. Endnotes show that Desperate Passage was written with the use of primary sources. Rarick gives references for the content of his narrative and, where he has entered the thoughts of a person, he explains his reasoning for the literary device.
"As a general rule, I have relied most heavily on primary sources written at or near the time of the events, such as journals and letters. Second, I rely on memoirs and letters written years later by individuals who were directly involved. I have tried to place relatively little emphasis or reliance on third-hand accounts." (247)
"Indeed, by purchasing two anthologies - Dale Morgan's two-volume Overland in 1846 and Kristin Johnson's Unfortunate Emigrants - interested readers can gain access to most, though certainly not all, of the key primary documents." (248)
Summary of Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West
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, what it tells us about human nature and about America's westward expansion, remained shrouded in myth.Drawing on fresh archaeological 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. But 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, A Desperate Hope 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.
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