Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West
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.
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9780199756704
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Grouping Information
Grouped Work ID | 6ef536f5-056e-5b5f-40d9-651e6b703aa1 |
---|---|
Grouping Title | desperate passage the donner partys perilous journey west |
Grouping Author | ethan rarick |
Grouping Category | book |
Grouping Language | English (eng) |
Last Grouping Update | 2024-12-05 02:08:45AM |
Last Indexed | 2024-12-04 02:19:32AM |
Solr Fields
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author
Rarick, Ethan
author_display
Rarick, Ethan
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Online OverDrive Collection
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Online OverDrive Collection
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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.
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eBook
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eBook
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6ef536f5-056e-5b5f-40d9-651e6b703aa1
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9780199756704
last_indexed
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lexile_score
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literary_form
Non Fiction
literary_form_full
Non Fiction
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Admin and Storage Online
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Severance Library Online
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Bookmobile Online
Clearview Library District Online
Severance Library Online
Windsor Library Online
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Online OverDrive Collection
primary_isbn
9780199756704
publishDate
2008
publisher
Oxford University Press
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grouped_work
title_display
Desperate Passage The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West
title_full
Desperate Passage The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West
title_short
Desperate Passage
title_sub
The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West
topic_facet
History
Nonfiction
Nonfiction
Solr Details Tables
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