The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of A Donner Party Bride

Like anyone who studied any American history in school, I knew the basic outlines of the story of the Donner Party, an ill-fated California-bound wagon train that got stuck in the Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1846-1847 and whose survivors resorted to cannibalism.  When I drove around the country back in 1992, I drove eastward through Donner Pass and remember being morbidly amused to find that there was no food whatsoever available at the rest stop there, not even a vending machine.  I drove in June, but that still seemed to me to be tempting fate.

In my stress-relief reading I've now ascended (or descended, perhaps) from new-style urban fantasy to vampire novels to humans-in-extremis nonfiction.  While I don't read the latter genre obsessively, I'm quite fond of two standouts: Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster (in which people die in the snow on Mount Everest) and Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (in which nineteenth-century whalers' ship is wrecked by a whale and they undertake a lengthy sea voyage in the lifeboats during which they resort to survival cannibalism; this was the event that inspired Moby Dick.)  Daniel James Brown's The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride (HarperCollins 2009) combines the best/worst aspects of both tales: nineteenth-century pioneers die in the snow in the mountains and resort to survival cannibalism.  There's nothing like reading this sort of thing to keep stress in perspective, and Brown writes a truly compelling tale which manages to sustain suspense in the details of who survives even when the broad outlines of the outcome are known.  I was up half the night reading it in one sitting.

Most accounts of the Donner Party focus on the two leading family groups, the Donners and the Reeds.  Brown choose instead to follow the less-known Graves family, specifically Sarah Graves (left), twenty-one at the time of the disaster.  Sarah almost didn't go along; she was torn between her love for Jay Fosdick, whose family did not want him to go west, and her affection for her parents and eight younger siblings.  At the last minute, she and Fosdick married and joined the emigration, hoping for a new life together in California.  The Graves family and their fellow travelers left later than recommended, and while the journey went well at first, they were directed by men with a vested commercial interest in redirecting emigrants to a new "short cut" that turned out to be anything but shorter.  The party persevered, getting wagons over terrain not remotely suitable for them, but the resultant delays stranded them high in the mountains on the wrong side of a pass which was closed by unseasonably early snow.  They were also dogged by minor misfortunes: an accidental death, a murder, and a brawl ending in a fatal stabbing that resulted in the banishment of the leader James Reed.

Around eighty people, including at least two dozen children, ended up stuck on the wrong side of the pass with almost no food, makeshift shelters (in some cases, brush and buffalo-hide tents) and a brutal winter closing in.  In mid-December, after six weeks of near-starvation, fifteen of the strongest members, a number which included Sarah along with her husband; father; and oldest sister, set out on homemade snowshoes to make their way across the mountains to fetch help.  Seven of the fifteen would finally stagger out of the mountains a month later, starving, barefoot, dressed in rags, and nearly deranged from their suffering, which had included butchering and eating the bodies of some of the eight dead.  Friendly Native Americans fed them and guided them to an American settlement to seek help.

By the time the first relief party reached the stranded settlers in mid-February and brought out some of the remaining adults and children, eleven of those who had remained behind had died.  Before the arrival of the second relief party a few weeks later, the survivors had begun to resort to cannibalism.  Of the four still alive after the third relief party departed with most of the remaining settlers, only one lived to finally be brought out of the mountains by the fourth relief party in mid-April, having survived by eating the bodies of the dead -- possibly after speeding up their demises.  Overall, nearly half of the party died.  It's amazing that the number wasn't higher.

It's a brutal story, and the accounts of the suffering of the snowshoe party as they staggered (and sometimes crawled) up and down the snowy canyons rival those of those slowly starving behind them.  Even the rescues seemed jinxed: a food cache destroyed by animals meant most of those brought over the pass by the second relief expedition were temporarily abandoned in a pit in the snow, while a few of the stronger forged ahead in search of food.  More deaths -- and more cannibalism -- followed before further help arrived for the re-stranded refugees.  I was in tears several times.

While the book is the story of Sarah, I've avoided saying anything about her and her family's fates, simply because the story is too good to be spoiled.  But Brown also includes quite a bit of information about the westward emigration in general, the American takeover of northern California, the medical details of hypothermia, emigrant hygiene (or its lack), and even the beginnings of the Gold Rush.  While Manifest Destiny is a more dubious concept nowadays than when I was taught it as a child, and its horrific impact on Native Americans should never be discounted, I, like the author, cannot help but be impressed by the settlers themselves.  Entire families picked themselves up and walked across a continent -- and despite the ox-drawn wagons, they mostly walked to lighten the load on their beasts.  Men, women, and children all the way down to infants made and survived the migration; even in the Donner Party, one of the six infants survived.  These people were tough.

This is the sort of book which sends me off to do a little extra research at the end.  I regard this as a good thing.  So for anyone interested in the Donner Party, I have to recommend librarian-historian Kristin Johnson's excellent site, New Light on the Donner Party, which is packed full of information and links to primary sources.  If you intend to read the book with suspense intact, however, avoid that site until afterwards, since it contains extensive details on all the individual outcomes.

Interestingly, a horror movie with a Donner Party connection, Necrosis, is set to be released sometime this year, though I'm not sure whether it will be in theaters or go straight to DVD.  Six young people try to get away from it all in a cabin in the Sierra Nevada, which just happens to be located near the Donner Party campsite, and they get snowed in.  You just know this is going to end badly, right?  Either the area is haunted by spirits or they start going crazy from cabin fever, but blood in the snow results.  It looks like an independent production; apparently they had so little budget for special effects like snowmaking that they went out and filmed in the winter in blizzard conditions.  I don't think I'll be seeing it, since horror movies have unfortunate effects on my imagination, but it's an interesting coincidence.

Shopping link for the book, which I highly recommend:

Comments

[Marilee J. Layman]

Probably not something I'll read, since I prefer SF, but it does sound interesting.

[Serge]

I, like the author, cannot help but be impressed by the settlers themselves. Entire families picked themselves up and walked across a continent...

That reminds me of something my wife came across when she was doing some research about southern Arizona for a novel. If one wonders why someone would have wanted to settle in some of those places, apparently it was a case of their having had it with trekking across the harsh landscape and they weren't going to take one more step west.

[Mary Aileen]

Serge: I would (and do) emphasize that phrase differently: "...having had it...."

[Serge]

Mary Aileen... I blame English not being my native language. At least, that's my story and I'm sticking with it. Heheheh...

(Goodness, I'm tired. That Project of mine may be done, but I'm still recovering. Oh, and I have to monitor its deployment tonight AND monitor some unrelated database changes... Midnight oil, prepare to be burned. I guess I'll multitask and watch a Doctor Who DVD while this is going on... Exterminate! Ex-ter-mi-nate!!!)

[AJ]

Every time I drive across Southern AZ (which is pretty often, since I live here) in my air-conditioned car, I marvel at the fact that anyone ever crossed it on wagon, horseback, or foot. Even a car without AC is a brutal way to travel in the Summer.

[Serge]

AJ... Speaking of driving across southern Arizona, I think I showed you this photo before, but here it is anyway.

[AJ]

Serge, I actually hadn't seen that picture, and now I have this vision of Jesus bustin' out of the silver screen and rushing into the other auditorium to help the BPRD fight Lovecraftian demons.

[Serge]

AJ... A movie with that premise would not go over well with certain people, the same folks who clamored for the cancellation of 2006's TV series "The Book of Daniel".

[Neil Willcox]

I approve of that movie theatre.

[Susan de Guardiola]

I've driven across AZ and NM in the summer in a car with minimal to no AC. I survived. :) (This was the outbound leg of the trip that included driving through the Donner Pass on the return leg. I made a sort of weird, asymmetrical loop of the U.S.)

[Clifton]

The Heart of the Sea is right here, visible in the bookshelf to my left as I write this; I really liked that book, and I don't think I'd ever seen anyone else mention it.

The one time I drove across Arizona on a trip from Las Vegas (where I was performing a wedding) down to Phoenix to visit a friend, I passed by a little roadside store which was labelled 'Nothing, Arizona'; sole population was the family running the store. I thought they missed an opportunity - they could have sold bumper stickers reading "I Stop At Nothing!"

[Susan de Guardiola]

Clifton,
I liked Indifferent Stars for exactly the same reasons I liked Heart of the Sea: the combination of horrific survival tale with loads of neat information about 19thc life. I suspect you likely would as well.

Somewhere in, I think, southern Utah is a highway labeled "The Loneliest Road in America." The billing was accurate; I don't think I saw another vehicle the whole time I was on it. Sitting sadly by the side of the highway was a single pay phone with a sign calling it "The Loneliest Phone in America." I didn't stop to see whether it worked. I wonder if they have cell phone coverage out there now.

[Serge]

When my wife and I moved from Canada to the US in January 1989, we drove all the way from Toronto to the Bay Area. That wasn't boring, what with all the different landscapes, some of which made me think of Mars in the early stages of terraformation. Still, there were long stretches of road with little in them, but not without some entertainment. I remember how, for 500 miles, I'd drive past billboards advertising the town of Winnemucca. When we finally drove thru that little town, I didn't quite understand what that all been about. A few years later, I read Armistead Maupin's More Tales of the City and went "Ahah!"

[Marilee J. Layman]

Susan, it doesn't have cannibalism, but you might like the book I just read.

[Velma]

"...since horror movies have unfortunate effects on my imagination..."

Nice to know I'm not the only person who feels that way. I can read almost anything, but visual images in movies will take over my dreams for weeks, in the worst possible ways.

[Susan de Guardiola]

Velma:
I had nightmares as a child after seeing a rather cheesy B-movie about giant ants eating people and again after seeing the first Nightmare on Elm Street movie. And I had a LOT of trouble with Alien for years. I don't need further experiments to tell me what a bad idea scary movies are.

Nice to see you posting here!

[Serge]

Watching Forbidden Planet as a kid scared the crap out of me, especially the scene near the end in Morbius's house. They're looking outside into the night, and they know that something is going to come inside the house to kill them.