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Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West | 
| Author: Ethan Rarick
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $28.00
Buy New: $15.77
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Avg. Customer Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 10926
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.2
ISBN: 0195305027
Dewey Decimal Number: 979.437
EAN: 9780195305029
ASIN: 0195305027
Publication Date: February 4, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20080725212931T
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Product Description
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.
Praise for Desperate Passage:
"His is the first significant book, written, like Stewart's, in a novelistic mode and likely to gain popular readership, to incorporate this new data.... Rarick's account is not really about science; it's about humanity.... Rarick has done his homework."--New York Times Book Review
"Rarick takes an evenhanded and thorough approach to the story of the Donners' covered-wagon migration across the country and their winter entrapment in the Sierras. His telling is evocative and easy to read."--Seattle Times
"With a reporter's doggedness and a scholar's thoroughness, Rarick has clarified the historical details. ... Rarick makes this compelling frontier drama all the more so."--National Geographic Adventure Magazine
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Time and Hastings July 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Rarick writes a very nice narrative of the Donner Party that includes references of the Hardesty and Dixon excavations of recent years. I liked the book and his generally neutral positions with a couple of exceptions. He is a bit too harsh on Lansford Hastings who is all but vilified as a main cause of the Donner Party's demise. Rarick seems to imply that Hastings should have waited indefinitely at Fort Bridger for straggling companies no matter what the consequences for all involved; he led nearly eighty wagons into California himself. Rarick includes but fails to elaborate that the chief, unmistakable cause of the Donners' entrapment was their slow pace. Putting aside the time they spent on the route they cut through Big Mountain via Hasting's advice and the number of children and adolescents the company possessed, they only missed crossing Donner Pass by one day. And that one day could have been made up at any of a number of "rest days" the party so foolishly wasted knowing full well the Sierras were not to be viewed lightly. The bottom line... The Donner Party turned out to be their own worst enemy, not Hastings, and Rarick fails to remain neutral in that respect.
Best Donner Party account to date June 7, 2008
As an Overland Trail history lover, I've read several books on the Donner Party ordeal. This one, in my opinion, is the best. Although it's impossible to recount every single detail of a story more than a century and a half old, this book presents an extremely easy to read (but hard to put down) linear account of the story. Rarick uses diary passages and quotes in between extremely well researched story-telling to recount the Donner Party story once again. No sensationalism, but no sugar coating either. Just a very well written tale that uses the character of each individual, their background, and even a physical description when available to bring them to life for this important historical tale. Everyone should read it, as it handles the cannibalism issue with great empathy. I've read books that seem to try to encourage the reader to be horrified; this book makes the reader feel the pangs of hunger, the isolation, the desolation, and the hopelessness the pioneers felt, and, without injecting his own opinion, helps us see the logic in the cannibalism that occurred.
The book is loaded with citations and explanations at the end, where the facts came from, explanations of words, spellings, etc, essentially ironing out and confusions a reader may have. But the books is so well written there IS no confusion, but the citations and explanations are interesting anyway. They also show that Rarick took the time to heavily research the facts and documents before and during the writing of the book.
There is also a slim section with photographs of several of the people mentioned in the book, and a very touching photo of a few of the survivors in their elderly years.
I'll be passing this book on to friends and family, as it's the best account I've read of this particular piece of history.
Desparate Passage April 9, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Couldn't put this one down. The situation written about in this book has been written about several times in the past, but this book was so well written that it seemed like I was reading about it for the first time. Anybody who loves early western American history should read this book!
A saga of true courage April 6, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a book that gets your attention from the first page and is extremely well-written. It has historical facts that it works from, but also the author is able to "flesh out" (sorry!) the saga with enough personal knowledge of the areas traveled, to give the reader a real picture of what happened. This tragedy is a story that should never be foregotten, as the people who lived it embody true courage.
Wrong choices with sad consequences. April 5, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I've read many accounts of the Donner Party over the years. This is the first well-documented account I have found. The tragedy is told in a straight forward way and the writing makes for a fast read. The only thing I wish the author had included is a more detailed map (or maps) of the Donner party's path.
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