Download or read book History of the Donner Party written by Charles F. McGlashan and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1846, a band of California-bound pioneers took a fatefulshortcut that left them stranded in the frigid Sierras— horrifyingly, some resorted to cannibalism to survive.Newspaperman Charles F. McGlashan, who interviewed survivorsand studied the party members’ journals, declaredtheir story “more thrilling than romance, more terrible thanfiction.” His gripping account reveals not only a stark tale ofdesperation but also many inspiring acts of heroism.Reprint of the A. L. Bancroft, San Francisco, 1880 edition.
Download or read book The Best Land Under Heaven The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny written by Michael Wallis and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence Finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award A Publishers Weekly Holiday Guide History Pick “A book so gripping it can scarcely be put down.... Superb.” —New York Times Book Review "WESTWARD HO! FOR OREGON AND CALIFORNIA!" In the eerily warm spring of 1846, George Donner placed this advertisement in a local newspaper as he and a restless caravan prepared for what they hoped would be the most rewarding journey of a lifetime. But in eagerly pursuing what would a century later become known as the "American dream," this optimistic-yet-motley crew of emigrants was met with a chilling nightmare; in the following months, their jingoistic excitement would be replaced by desperate cries for help that would fall silent in the deadly snow-covered mountains of the Sierra Nevada. We know these early pioneers as the Donner Party, a name that has elicited horror since the late 1840s. With The Best Land Under Heaven, Wallis has penned what critics agree is “destined to become the standard account” (Washington Post) of the notorious saga. Cutting through 160 years of myth-making, the “expert storyteller” (True West) compellingly recounts how the unlikely band of early pioneers met their fate. Interweaving information from hundreds of newly uncovered documents, Wallis illuminates how a combination of greed and recklessness led to one of America’s most calamitous and sensationalized catastrophes. The result is a “fascinating, horrifying, and inspiring” (Oklahoman) examination of the darkest side of Manifest Destiny.
Download or read book The Emigrant s Guide to Oregon and California written by Lansford Warren Hastings and published by Applewood Books. This book was released on 1994 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in 1845, this guidebook for pioneers is a reproduction of one of the most collectible books about California and the Western movement. It was the guidebook used by the Donner Party on their fateful journey. In addition, because Hastings' shortcut route through the Rockies produced such tragedy, the War Department commissioned The Prairie Traveler.
Download or read book The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate written by Eliza Poor Donner Houghton and published by IndyPublish.com. This book was released on 1911 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eliza Houghton (b. 1843) was the youngest child of George Donner, one of two Springfield, Illinois, brothers who organized the ill-fated California-bound emigrant party that bore their name. Eliza and her older sisters were rescued by relief parties that made their way to the stranded travellers at Donner Lake, but their parents perished, and the girls were left to make their way alone in the West. The expedition of the Donner party and its tragic fate (1911) begins with Mrs. Houghton's account of her childhood and the family's tragic overland journey, and rescue. She continues with her life as an orphan, first at Fort Sutter, and then with a family in Sonoma and with her older half-sister in Sacramento. She describes the impact of the gold rush and new immigration on the area, farm work and domestic work, and her own education in public schools and St. Catherine's Convent in Benicia. She writes at length of the emotional scars caused by contemporary rumors of cannibalism among the Donner Party and offers full accounts of Donner family history as well as the background of her husband, Samuel Houghton. An appendix contains several documentary sources for the history of the Donner Party.
Download or read book What I Saw in California written by Edwin Bryant and published by IndyPublish.com. This book was released on 1849 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Donner Party Chronicles written by Frank Mullen and published by a Halycon. This book was released on 1997 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Reno Gazette-Journal and the Nevada Humanities Committee present Frank Mullen's account of the Donner Party, accompanied by hundreds of historical illustrations and Marilyn Newton's photographs of the trail today.
Download or read book Donner Dinner Party Nathan Hale s Hazardous Tales 3 written by Nathan Hale and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In author-illustrator Nathan Hale’s Donner Dinner Party, discover the shocking and true story of the ill-fated expedition in this Hazardous Tale from the New York Times bestselling graphic novel series. “These books are, quite simply, brilliant. . . . Thrilling, bloody, action-packed stories from American history.” —New York Times In the spring of 1846, a group of families left Illinois and began the long journey toward a new life in California. To save time, they took an ill-advised shortcut—with disastrous consequences. Their story would not take them to California but into history. Bad weather, bad choices, and just plain bad luck forced the pioneers to spend a long, cold winter in the mountains, slowly starving. What they did to stay alive and the lengths that others went to in order to rescue them make this one of the most tragic and infamous stories of the American frontier. Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales take young readers into American history with graphic novels that bring the dangerous, bloody, exciting history of America to life. The Revolutionary War and the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the Donner Party, the Marquis de Lafayette, Harriet Tubman, the Alamo, and more all come to life in a way that will excite young readers of history. Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales! Read them all—if you dare! One Dead Spy: A Revolutionary War Tale (#1) Big Bad Ironclad!: A Civil War Tale (#2) Donner Dinner Party: A Pioneer Tale (#3) Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood: A World War I Tale (#4) The Underground Abductor: An Abolitionist Tale about Harriet Tubman (#5) Alamo All-Stars: A Texas Tale (#6) Raid of No Return: A World War II Tale of the Doolittle Raid (#7) Lafayette!: A Revolutionary War Tale (#8) Major Impossible: A Grand Canyon Tale (#9) Blades of Freedom: A Tale of Haiti, Napoleon, and the Louisiana Purchase (#10) Cold War Correspondent: A Korean War Tale (#11) Above the Trenches: A WWI Flying Ace Tale (#12)
Download or read book The Hunger written by Alma Katsu and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Supernatural suspense at its finest . . . It will scare the pants off you." —The New York Times Book Review Evil is invisible, and it is everywhere. That is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. Depleted rations, bitter quarrels, and the mysterious death of a little boy have driven the isolated travelers to the brink of madness. Though they dream of what awaits them in the West, long-buried secrets begin to emerge, and dissent among them escalates to the point of murder and chaos. As members of the group begin to disappear, the survivors start to wonder if there really is something disturbing, and hungry, waiting for them in the mountains...and whether the evil that has unfolded around them may have in fact been growing within them all along.
Download or read book Desperate Passage written by Ethan Rarick and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-02-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Ordeal by Hunger written by George R. Stewart and published by HMH. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Compulsive reading—a wonderful account, both scholarly and gripping, of a horrifying episode in the history of the west.” —Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The tragedy of the Donner party constitutes one of the most amazing stories of the American West. In 1846 eighty-seven people—men, women, and children—set out for California, persuaded to attempt a new overland route. After struggling across the desert, losing many oxen, and nearly dying of thirst, they reached the very summit of the Sierras, only to be trapped by blinding snow and bitter storms. Many perished; some survived by resorting to cannibalism; all were subjected to unbearable suffering. Incorporating the diaries of the survivors and other contemporary documents, George Stewart wrote the definitive history of that ill-fated band of pioneers; an astonishing account of what human beings may endure and achieve in the final press of circumstance.
Download or read book Death in the Donner Party written by Emily Rose Oachs and published by Lerner Publications (Tm). This book was released on 2016-08 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explore the tragedy of the Donner party, a group of American pioneers trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains during the harsh winter of 1846-1847. Cause-and-effect analysis reveals how the decisions made by leaders of the expedition ended in disaster.
Download or read book Saving the Donner Party written by Richard F. Kaufman and published by Archway Publishing. This book was released on 2014-07-28 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Books, articles, and commentaries have told the story of how the storm of the century in the fall of 1846 trapped eighty-one innocent men, women, and children in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and how brave men risked their lives to save them. In Saving the Donner Party, author Dr. Richard F. Kaufman tells the story of the rescuers of the Donner Party. During the last two decades, Dr. Kaufman has compiled a record of historical documents and letters from Sutters Fort State Park and the California State Library. He reviews the older literature with a more modern approach, introducing orbital satellite studies with panoramic descriptions of travel routes not seen before. Using historical weather statistics and tree ring technology, he presents a more thorough understanding of the so-called storm of the century that enveloped the Donner Party. His account focuses on the massive effort and expenditure of resources by the rescue parties, involving the progress of the Mexican War going on at that time. Saving the Donner Party presents an in-depth interpretation of the event with surprising revelations that changed the historical setting and legacy of California, adding richly to the literature of this topic and updating the knowledge of the Donner Party episode.
Download or read book An Archaeology of Desperation written by Kelly J. Dixon and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2014-10-20 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Donner Party is almost inextricably linked with cannibalism. In truth, we know remarkably little about what actually happened to the starving travelers stranded in the Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1846–47. Combining the approaches of history, ethnohistory, archaeology, bioarchaeology, and social anthropology, this innovative look at the Donner Party’s experience at the Alder Creek Camp offers insights into many long-unsolved mysteries. Centered on archaeological investigations in the summers of 2003 and 2004 near Truckee, California, the book includes detailed analyses of artifacts and bones that suggest what life was like in this survival camp. Microscopic investigations of tiny bone fragments reveal butchery scars and microstructure that illuminate what the Donner families may have eaten before the final days of desperation, how they prepared what served as food, and whether they actually butchered and ate their deceased companions. The contributors reassess old data with new analytic techniques and, by examining both physical evidence and oral testimony from observers and survivors, add new dimensions to the historical narrative. The authors’ integration of a variety of approaches—including narratives of the Washoe Indians who observed the Donner Party—destroys some myths, deconstructs much of the folklore about the stranded party, and demonstrates that novel approaches can shed new light on events we thought we understood.
Download or read book Patty Reed s Doll written by Rachel K. Laurgaard and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 1989-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For use in schools and libraries only. A wooden doll recalls the hope with which a group of pioneers begins their journey and the ordeals they face as they travel from Springfield, Illinois, to California.
Download or read book The Indifferent Stars Above written by Daniel James Brown and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-04-28 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the #1 bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat comes an unforgettable epic of family, tragedy, and survival on the American frontier “An ideal pairing of talent and material.… Engrossing.… A deft and ambitious storyteller.” – Mary Roach, New York Times Book Review In April of 1846, twenty-one-year-old Sarah Graves, intent on a better future, set out west from Illinois with her new husband, her parents, and eight siblings. Seven months later, after joining a party of pioneers led by George Donner, they reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains as the first heavy snows of the season closed the pass ahead of them. In early December, starving and desperate, Sarah and fourteen others set out for California on snowshoes, and, over the next thirty-two days, endured almost unfathomable hardships and horrors. In this gripping narrative, New York Times bestselling author Daniel James Brown sheds new light on one of the most legendary events in American history. Following every painful footstep of Sarah’s journey with the Donner Party, Brown produces a tale both spellbinding and richly informative.
Download or read book The Opening of the California Trail written by George R. Stewart and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-09-23 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1953.
Download or read book The Archaeology Of The Donner Party written by Donald L Hardesty and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tragic saga of the Donner Party has inspired both legend and scholarship ever since the survivors were rescued from the High Sierra snows in the spring of 1847. When archaeologist Donald L. Hardesty and four colleagues—a historian and three other archaeologists—turned their collective attention to the ordeal of the Donner Party, the result was an original and sometimes surprising new study of this pioneer group and their place in the history of overland migration. Now available for the first time in paperback, The Archaeology of the Donner Party combines the fruits of meticulous investigation of the Sierra Nevada sites with scientific analysis of artifacts discovered there and interpretation of the documents of the party and the memoirs of survivors. Through this interdisciplinary approach, Hardesty and his colleagues offer new insight into the ordeal of these ill-fated emigrants and demonstrate the vital role that archaeology can play in illuminating and expanding our understanding of historical events. Contributions by Michael Brodhead, Donald K. Grayson, Susan Lindstrom, and George L. Miller.
