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Desperate Passage
The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West
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n 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." less
Oxford University Press, USA; February 2008
304 pages; ISBN 9780199756704
Download in EPUB or secure PDF format
304 pages; ISBN 9780199756704
Download in EPUB or secure PDF format
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ISBNs
0198041500
9780195305029
9780198041504
9780199756704
