Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West by Ethan Rarick

Abstract

BO O K R E VIEW S 2 1 9 Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West. By Ethan Rarick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 288 pages, $28.00. Reviewed by Diane Bush U tah State University, Logan No other story embodies the yin and yang of westward migration like the Donner party’s. In Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West, Ethan Rarick untangles the facts and myths associated with “the last, lonely party” of emigrants on the trail to California in 1846 (2). A former journalist, Rarick supplements letters, diaries, and documents from four western collections with recent studies in archaeology, climatology, and physiology to offer new insights and fill in the gaps of earlier narratives. Rarick prefers to let characters speak for themselves, and when the record is silent, he bases his conclusions on thoughtful analysis. No one person is to blame for what happened, he writes, pointing fingers in all directions, from the emigrants themselves to mountain man Jim Bridger to the Native Americans who stole their livestock. Interestingly, Rarick looks more kindly on entrepreneur Lansford W. Hastings, whose unproven cutoff added weeks to the group’s timetable. He places every step of the journey in a larger context—from the challenges of wilderness travel to the pioneers’ relations with Native Americans—and anticipates readers’ questions at key moments. For example, why didn’t the emi­ grants make camp thirty-five miles east and 1,500 feet lower in elevation, and why were no human bones found at the camps? His musings allow new questions to emerge. Rarick is exceedingly thorough in his discussion of cannibalism, trac­ ing the practice in earlier disasters and the coverage of similar stories by journal­ ists and showing how the survivors were personally and publicly affected. Additionally, Rarick contrasts the larger themes of the story with details that are touching in their simplicity, as when James Reed stopped at a Nevada hot spring to make a cup of tea or when starving children walking out with a rescue party ate crisped pieces of one man’s buckskin pants. As winter drags on and the emigrants slide toward death, the story becomes purposely fragmented. Yet, there are moments of lyrical transcendence, for example, when a party of hopeful snowshoers leaves camp and sees that the snow “deepened invisibly beneath their feet ... until they were walking in the sky” (134). Or the heartbreaking instant when Tamzene Donner turns away from her children for the last time to stay with her dying husband: “Perhaps she had simply made a promise she could not break. None of her daughters ever described a hesitancy, a pause, a flicker of irresolution” (219). Everyone from the most dedicated Donner enthusiast to those new to the story will find Desperate Passage an absorbing read. Rarick’s words highlight his conclusion that “the most resonant moments of the Donner Party saga are often the quietest, ... when we can see glimpses of normalcy in lives tom asun­ der” (245-46). Rarick balances light and dark to craft a nanative that shines. ...