Candi's Reviews > The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party

4.5 stars

"Like all people in all times, the emigrant men and women, as well as the Native American men and women, of the 1840s were complex bundles of fear and hope, greed and generosity, nobility and savagery. And in the end, each of them was, of course, an individual, as unique and vital and finely nuanced as you or me." – from the Author’s Note by Daniel James Brown

Before I talk about this remarkable true story, I have to subject you to a small rant. I finished this book a couple of weeks ago, and as is my usual habit, I highlighted the heck out of it. There were so many interesting facts and a myriad of people in this story, and I wanted to make sure I kept track of everything so I could write a decent review as well as simply refer back to it in future. I sat down last night to take a look at my notes and synch them from my kindle paperwhite to my computer. To my complete dismay, not only did the synch fail, but ALL of my notes except for one disappeared from the paperwhite!!! Argh!!! I immediately hollered for my husband, who has been known to fix just about anything computer or electronic-related. No such luck. But this kind and sympathetic guy spent a good half hour or more on the phone with Amazon (with party noises going on in the background) only to end up where we started – exactly nowhere and with my notes lost… gone forever apparently. Has this ever happened to any of my device-using friends? So frustrating! I just hope in future this doesn’t occur again.

Okay, back to the book… I think most have some knowledge of the Donner Party and their attempt to reach California with the promise of increased prosperity. This is their journey as told through the painstaking and thorough research of Daniel James Brown. Some of you may recognize his name as the author of the bestselling book The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics – a book which I have sadly neglected to read yet. To the best of his ability, Brown attempted to follow the route of the Donner Party, granted not all on foot or with teams of oxen and covered wagons as these pioneers would have done. The party was a rather large one and it was sometimes difficult to keep straight all of the players, but Brown focuses primarily on the Graves family from Illinois. Specifically, we see the doomed expedition on the heels of Sarah Graves who has been newly married just prior to setting out to the land of her dreams. Likely, I don’t have to tell you that all goes wrong when the party reaches the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the dead of winter – not to mention that 1846 has seen more severe weather than is even typical for this part of the country. We are quite spoiled in this day and age with our advanced maps, cell phones, and our GPS systems, all at the tips of our fingers. The Donner Party did not have these luxuries of course, and much of their trek was dependent on very crude maps and the hearsay of those who had travelled before them. There are some at the tail end of the journey that would benefit from the party arriving in California rather than detouring to Oregon. Add in a dose of greed, dishonesty and ineptitude and you have a recipe for a disaster of mammoth proportions. When confronted with starvation, hypothermia, fear, desperation and even snow blindness, what will one resort to in order to survive? This account, necessarily, was rather grisly at times, but I could not help but take pity on these poor souls. We see the whole spectrum of humanity, as is true when any catastrophe strikes – from extraordinary courage to overwhelming despair, as well as extreme feats of unselfishness to alarming acts of greed and savagery.

I highly recommend this book to anyone that enjoys true adventure stories. It is extremely well-researched and all of the information is presented in a narrative that is never dry but always quite compelling. If I had any criticism, it would mainly be the large cast of characters, which eventually sort themselves out.

"And they had nailed the boards above her
face,
The peasants of that land,
Wondering to lay her in that solitude,
And raised above her mound
A cross they had made out of two bits of
wood,
And planted cypress round;
And left her to the indifferent stars above."

- W.B. Yeats, “A Dream of Death”