biologists and asked them that. he did a great job with that. thank you, everybody. [applause] .. >> daniel james brown recounts the attempted passage of the sierra nevada mountains by a group of immigrants.

and during heavy snows and without food, 15 members of the party ventured away from camp on a 32-day trek to find aid. seven members reached the other side of the mountains but only after many of the group who died were cannibalized. powell's books in portland, oregon hosted this event. it's about an hour. [applause] >> thank you. thank you all for coming out. i think what i'd like to do this evening is to talk a little bit about how i came to write this book in the first place.:c walk through some of the principal plot points as it were. it's nonfiction but it's a narrative and talk a little bit about what i think the general significance of the donner party and after that we'll have times

time for some questions and answers. how i came to write this book. i have pretty much a lifelong interest in the donner party. i think fostered mostly by the fact that i have this sort of somewhat remote connection to the donner matter my great, great uncle read the first rescue edition up in the sierra nevada mountains in the spring of 1947. the first folks to reach the donner party, and they were able to bring some of the survivors out. there were subsequent rescue parties as well. but because of this a little bit of a personal connection, i grew up with the donner party stories and i as a boy, as a young man i read about the donner party pretty much whenever i could. and so when i finished my previous book and i was casting around for a subject, i decided i really wanted to try my hand at a donner party book.

but there'd been quite a few of them and i needed to find a different angle. and i found that -- i began to look at the graves family. the donner party was comprised largely of a number of very large families and a number of single people that went along with them. but one of the main families in the donner party was the family of franklin and elizabeth graves. and not a great deal has been written about them and i started to look into their story and i got particularly interested in the story of the eldest daughter of that family, sarah. and i began to correspond with a lady in southern oregon who is with us here this evening. i think i'm looking at her here, yes, we've corresponded but we've never actually met. cathy larson is a great granddaughter of sarah graves. and she was kind enough to send me this photograph of her great

grandmother. and we don't know when this picture was taken. i actually met another of sarah's great granddaughters in a reading in seattle recently and she thought it was when she was 17 but we don't really know when the picture was made. but when cathy sent me this picture, i took one look at it and i knew immediately that this was the person i wanted to write about. there's something about the expression in her face -- i already knew a fair amount about her. i knew some of the horrific things that she had gone through. and having a face attached to that really drew me in. so i began to focus on sarah as my subject. and that's pretty much how the book came to be in the first place. now, as i say there's been a lot of books written by the donner party and anyone who sets tout write bun at this point needs to

know pretty much what's going to distinguish his or her book from others about the donner party. so i sat down and i thought about it. and i decided there were several things i really wanted to accomplish. one was that i really wanted to humanize this story. when you mention the words donner party there's basically one thing that comes to most people's minds immediately and, of course, that is cannibalism. i mean, it's obviously the most compelling and arresting thing about this story. but it's become the only thing that most people know about the story, basically. and i think as a culture we reduced the people who were involved pretty much to a set of caricatures sitting around a campfire and lying around bones. because of my a little bit of a personal connection and because of sarah, i wanted to humanize this story to give real life to these people. and to do honor to them.

i also wanted to know within reason -- i wanted to know firsthand what they had experienced. when you read a lot of donner party books they read as if they were written by people who had never been out of a dry and dusty library someplace. they tend to be emotionally removed from the reality of what these people went through. and i wasn't willing to go through everything they went through by any means but i did want to experience something of what they had experienced in 1846 and 1847. so i took a series of trips across the country, and i managed to be in particular places along the donner party route on the same calendar date that sarah was there. and i began going to a little village in illinois which is where sarah grew up. and then made a series of trips west from there.

and one of the things i wanted to do was i wanted to gather sensory details so, for instance, i found a patch of prairie grass in nebraska. and it's not easy to find prairie in the midwest anymore. there's very little prairie left but there's these little remnants that have been preserved in various places and i found a place in the willa cather memorial prairie and i parked my car and i got out and i spent about an hour walking around in this beautiful, tall, lush prairie grass which is quite an experience. the grass was billowing in these blue-green waves. there were butterflies and dragonflies darting on top of the grass. there were meadow larks singing and it was very pleasant and a very enriching experience. but i also discovered when i got back to my motel that night that i had half a dozen to two dozen ticks on my body and i spent the rest of the evening pulling

ticks off myself. i gathered another kind of detail. that it wasn't entire pleasant traveling through grass. they had to do this all across the american prairie lands. maybe the stupidest thing i did was in utah, the donner party had to cross the salt flats in utah. they had a very hard time doing it. so i decided i'd take a hike out on the salt flats in august on the same date that they were there. and i got out of my car and i walked about, i don't know, half a mile to a mile out onto the salt flats and i got some insights. it was extremely hot. sweat was pouring down my face. of course, my lips tasted salty which i hadn't realized because there was this powdery salt blowing in the hot dry wind but the worst thing it was was the glare of the sunlight off the salt is just like snow. and it blinds you basically. and everything began to go black for me as i was out there.

and i had started wondering if i was going to be able to find my way back to the car, which i did, of course, but it was scary. i got back in the car and i turned the air conditioner on and i put my lips down to the -- literally put my lips to the vent and sucked the air into myself and headed for nevada and got myself a double ice frappachino, which was a luxury which sarah didn't have, i'm afraid. anyway, i had a series of sort of little insights from this business of traveling across the country following sarah. i also had something i didn't expect at all, which was a kind of -- a growing sense of a shared experience as i did this. i remember one evening in particular in scottsbluff, nebraska, big beautiful rock formations and that sunset particularly i was sitting there and the done was lighting up these rocks in all kinds of shades of pink and tangerine and

purple and absolutely beautiful. and as i sat there, i realized sarah had been there on that exact same day of the year. i knew what the weather was like that day that year from journal entries and she had had exactly the same experience that i had had and so i began to have this sense of kinship with her that i don't think i could have had if i had simply read accounts of her travails in the library at berkeley or wherever i happened to be studying. so it was -- it was -- i don't want to overstate but it was an experience to for me and motivated me to tell the story well and to get it right. and i think that was particularly important to me. another thing i wanted to do to make this book a little different was i wanted to update this story. the donner party story is kind of a paradoxy in that the original accounts of the donner party are in many ways the least

accurate accounts. they were very sensational. they were written in a very cloudy 19th century sentimental style. there was a lot of contradictory information. and what's happened particularly in the last decade or two is there's been a lot of science. some of it directly applied to the donner party like archeological digs up in the sierra nevada, the donner party campsites and some of it indirect, just research that's been done into the physiology of starvation, for instance. what has to a human body when somebody starts to starve so i wanted to update the book with the story with these kinds of modern scientific insights. and so i did a lot of research into a lot of areas that come in to play in the story. and then the final thing that i wanted to do to set it aside a little bit was that i wanted to approach this as a survival

story rather than a story about people simply dying. roughly, half the people in the donner people survived which means that there was 40-some odd survival stories. and i think in some ways it's much more interesting to look at who survived and how they survived and why they survived and other people didn't. and so that's pretty much the way i approached the story. and really sarah was in many respects -- if you read the book i think you'll come away with the conclusion that she was a ultimate survivor. she went through things that were absolutely extraordinary and she did survive. so let me very quickly walk through some of the principal events in sarah's version of the donner party story. i'm going to leave a lot more than i include but i want -- for those of you who are not familiar with the basic chronology, i want to walk

through the main points. sarah was just 21 when she left illinois. she had married a young man by the name of jay just ten days they left. she and he had not intended to go with her parents' family to california. they decided at the last moment, actually, sarah just couldn't bear to see her parents go over the horizon so they decided at the last minute to join and to go along on this extremely hazardous venture to california. so on april 12th, 1846, they set out. they proceeded to st. joseph, missouri, where they laid in enough provisions, they thought, to carry them through to california. the wagon loads -- they had three ox-drawn wagons. they loaded them as heavily as they could with provisions and set out crossing the missouri river. in 1846, when you cross the missouri river, you left the

united states behind. and this was -- they were very aware of this. they were leaving the united states behind when they crossed the missouri. they crossed the missouri and they joined a party of immigrants bound for oregon as a matter of fact. it was called the smith party. and we don't know exactly who this smith was. there were quite a few smiths evidently who emigrated to oregon that particular year. and so nobody is quite sure who this particular smith was. but they joined this smith party and headed out across the plains full of very high hopes, a great deal of excitement, particularly, the young people were excited and particularly the unmarried young people were excited. many of them had never been thrown together in such a large group of people and never had been around so many people of the opposite sex before. so that was part of the thrill for them of this enormous journey was the social part of it. and i would like to read just a

little passage to give you a sense of what it was like for them as they set out or actually a couple of weeks into the journey. let's see here. the daily routine had become monotonous and the novel of camping out had worn thin but for the most parts sarah and her siblings were still in high spirits. by day they rode in waist deep grass, meadow larks i think whiching to the tall blue strings of shrubs and birds perking. grasshoppers rattled away from under their feet flashing flame red or canary yellow under wings. original and white and yellow butterflies drifted above the grass metallic green dragonflies

went over the wagons. on warm evenings after the livestock were all taken care of and the aftermath of dinner had been cleared up and the guards had been posted, the young people gravitated toward one another congregating near one campfire or another. sometimes they just sat in the dark and listened to the night sounds, crickets out in the grass, prairie wolves howling and coyotes yapping off in the distance. usually they talked about the day's event and the novelty of the scenery and the wild animals they had seen that day or about what california was going to be like. they finally got there. they were by and large still getting to know one another and all of them were conscious of the fundamental fact that it was at once sobering and thrilling for those among them who were not yet married. they had entered into a very small world, a world where a substantial portion of the young men and women that they would encounter in the future even

after they reached oregon or california were sitting here by the campfire with them. many of them were likely to marry one another either by choice or by necessity and they knew it. so they would chat nervously, watching out of the corners of their eyes to see who was sitting close to whom that night, then jay or another of the young men would get out his fiddle and somebody else would get out a guitar or a banjo. they would begin to reel off some tunes, the arkansas traveller, money musk and the ever popular virginia reel. john snyder, big and handsome would drop the rear gates of one of the wagons, climb up onto it and dance a wild jig while the girls laughed at his antics and the guys clamped. two by two boys and girls would pull off their boots and begin to dance circle and wheeling around the fire bare feet kicking up dust and warm hands holding other warm hands or

pressing against the delicate hollow of the small of a slender back. tune after tune would fly off the fiddle's fast hot tunes that swirled through the night air and made you want to get up and stomp your feet. older folks clutching tin mugs of coffee would drift towards the fire to watch and sit down the coffee and join in, flinging out their arms and legs like drunken chickens as to the screeching of the fiddle and the twang of the banjo stole into their souls and rattled their bones. somebody would start singing and a chorus would join in all of them sharing in songs that had come down to them from their grandparents in scotland or ireland or the hills of virginia or new england. sweet love songs, uplifting spirituals, funny songs about foolish lovers or clueless dandies and many, many sad songs about the folks left back home. when they worn themselves out with singing and dancing the old people would -- the older people

would drift away toward their tents or wagons but the young would linger sitting around the fire again staring into it it enjoying the heat on their faces as the prairie night became chilly. throwing sticks onto it and listening to it pop and hiss. they would talk quietly. the boys joking and boasting, the girls laughing at them. hearts began to grow fond. and so as i say, they set off absolutely full of life and very, very high expectations. and a lot of the letters home from those first few weeks are gorgeous. they're beautifully written and they're full of this optimism about what they're setting forth on. things, however, begin to get hard quite quickly. pl

river further west in the platte river valley, the country drew out -- dried out, firewood became so scarce they had to use buffalo dung to fuel their camp fires. the water along the platte was so slow and stagnant they sometimes had to get mosquito larvae out of it. they began to go slow grades and their oxen began to fail them or to show signs of failure so they had to start throwing their possessions overboard from their wagons and these were people who many of them their parents or grandparents had fought in the revolution. they were almost all from new england. particularly, in the smith party. and the furniture they were carrying with them were colonial cherry wood -- the kinds of things that if you were on

antiques road show today would, you know, fetch enormous sums these people were throwing overboard right and left to lighten their wagons to ease the burden on their oxen. and tempers began to grow short. then they arrived at fort bridger in wyoming and they heard there was a group ahead of them called the donner party and i should mention that the smith party was the last party to leave that spring. they were quite late. they had crossed the missouri weeks later than was advised. and the donner party just ahead of them was only slightly less late than they were. they heard that the donner party was ahead of them and that the donner party had run into a sort of -- somewhat sleazy character who had carried with him a letter from lanceford warren hastings. lanceford hastings had written a book called "the immigrants guide to oregon and washington,"

which was a sort of promotional piece trying to lure american settlers to california. it spoke about the glories of both oregon and california. and since he had written it in the meantime, he and john sutter, who owned a good deal of the sacramento valley at the time, had gone into sort of partnership and had planned a town around where current day sacramento is to be called suttersville and they had divided the property into lots. and they needed americans to show up in california to buy these lots. and also to help run the mexicans out of california, which was part of what was unfolding then. so lanceford hastings had sent this note to the donner party saying turn southwest at fort

bridger, come down from the mountains. i have discovered a shortcut through to california. and the donner party had taken that advice. had turned southwest and when the graves family got to fort bridger, they took the same advice and headed southwest toward the mountains to catch up with the donner party and take the shortcut through to california. most of the smith party stayed on the established road and i believe sarah's family was the only member of it that went southwest. on august 10th, they overtook the donner party in the mountains where the donner party had discovered that lanceford hastings had gone to the other side of the mountains. he did not, in fact, have any passage through the mountains. there was no shortcut through the mountains. he had imagined that there would be one but the reality showed that there was not.

and so it left the donner party and now sarah graves' family stuck on one side of the mountains pretty much enable to get to the other side. they spent days trying to cut a road in the bridge in the mountains. i don't know if any of you are familiar with it, the eastern face of the mountains in utah is just a tangle of canyon lands and the land is covered with brush and by brush i don't mean knee-high weeds and things. i mean up over your head kinds of tangles of scrub oak and hardwood maple and very dense vegetation, very hard to get through. so they spent days and days cutting a road through the mountains trying to get to the other side. and they finally did. they emerged into the salt lake valley where they set off across the salt flats. and that precipitated another crisis. they lost many of their oxen

crossing the salt flats. but they survived that. and they set off across western nevada or eastern nevada actually. by now they were beginning to disintegrate as a group. there were a number, as i say, large families. the families tended to stick together. there were a variety of different ethnic groups. and they tended not to like each one another very much even at the outset. but tempers really began to flare now and a series of incidents unfolded as they worked their way across nevada. on october 5th, james reed, the head of one of the larger families killed john snyder, the graves' family teamsters in basically a knife fight. three days later there was an elderly man who couldn't keep up and for a number of days have

been begging rides in other people's wagons. they left him behind to die in the desert. nobody wanted to bother with him. on october 15th, two young teamsters augustus spitzer and joseph reinhart killed another immigrant. so there were these series of violent events as tempers flared and nerves unraveled. and then in the last few days of october, they finally arrived at the sierra nevada mountains and they entered the sierra. and as it did it began to snow. just a few flakes at first but as they worked their way up into the mountains, the snow got heavier and heavier. and it was pretty soon it evolved into a full scale blizzard. the two donner families, jacob and george donner's families got bogged down at a family called alder creek and could go no further. george donner injured his hand and couldn't repair his wagon. sarah and her family and the

rest of the party made it through to what we now called donner lake. just short of what we call donner pass in the high sierra and there they got bogged down. they tried to make it over the pass that first day but they made very little progress. they decided to sleep on it and to try it again the next day and i'm going to read you a passage of what that was like here. by the next morning, they had decided to try again. the donner brothers and their retinue had no come up to the lake but the rest of the company set up to organizing themselves for a fresh assault on the pass nonetheless. with george donner the captain of the party absent, no one here had any real authority over the others. they argued about what should and should not be brought about who could and could not ride the horses and mules and who would lead and who would follow.

some of the men wanted to bring containers of tobacco, some of the women wanted to bring bolts of calico. franklin graves had to figure out whatxxr to do with the heav hoard of silver coins he had squirrelled away in his wagon. some opted to bring their wagons and others opted to bring them behind. the latter protected their oxens but the beasts bucked and bellowed and rubbed themselves on the trees. lewis who had injured his foot when he stepped on a sharp stick earlier in the trip mounted a horse and tied his foot into a sling attached to the saddle. finally, disjointed and out of sorts they set out. by midday they were on the approaches to the pass and the snow was up to the axles on the wagons. they sent two men out in the felon with some of the mules to break a trail but over and over again, the mules stumbled and pitched head first in the snow and kicking and braying loudly

each time. the oxen's iron shod feet clanged against the ice and granite. the iron rimmed wagon wheels could get little purchase on the covered rocking and the wagons began to slide backward. jay and sarah leaned back with is their shoulders. they edged their obben back again with fresh shouts and curses and whips but the oxen could move only a few feet. they struggled forward like this for hours fighting their way yard by yard up the mountain. by now almost all the women were carrying children. mothers carrying their sons and daughters, sisters carrying their younger siblings. it had not snowed for some hours but black storm clouds had begun to pile up in the peaks immediately ahead. still short of the summit, they came to a steep granite wall rising out of the snow. lewis and salvador reported that they had lost track of the wagon

road. charles stanton and one of the indians went forward skirting to see signs of road farther ahead. the two men made itpx to the pa and surveyed the valley and frozen lakes to the west. encouraged, they headed back downhill for the others eager to show them the way. but by the time they returned, the company had grind to a halt. the women who had been carrying children in their armed and dangerous were too exhausted to continue and sat down in the snow. some of the men set fire to a pitch pine and the flames went into the branches of the tree popping and hissing. everyone began to gather around the blazing tree for warmth. stanton exhorted them to press on to the summit but no one would move. darkness was coming on quickly. people spread buffalo robes on the snow, lay down and pulled

blankets over themselves. like everyone else sarah and jay exhausted by what they had just endured lay down too. they drifted toward fitful sleep in the eerily light of the pine snag. a few hours later a new storm n peaks jut to the west of them snow began to spiral silently down from an utterly black skyless fly. flakes began to fly, on soft cheeks, each flake delicate and slight but each flake had the horror of what was about to happen. and it snowed for the next eight days, in fact. the snows that year were a little bit early. earlier than usual, though, not enormously so.

now, in many ways that's where the story begins when the donner party gets snowbound at what they call chuckie lake, what we call donner lake. i don't really want to spoil heart of the story for you but i want to tell you very quickly they built makeshift cabins and they tried to hunker down for the winter. at that point, most of their oxen had died along the way. they still had some oxen left but the oxen that they had were very, very lean and worn out and did not have much meat on them. they slaughtered the oxen. they tried to dry and the rest put in snow banks to preserve in the snow. and they clearly did not have and they knew they did not have enough food to last 87 people through the winter. but they hunkered down to see what would happen next.

but by early december, they were beginning to starve. and then something really interesting happened. this is really the heart of sarah's story.z9 on december 16th, sarah and her father, franklin ward graves, her husband, jay, her sister mary ann, and 11 other reasonably healthy reasonably young people set out on homemad snow shoes determined to hike over the sierra nevada and summon help in california for the rest of the party. this was essentially a suicide mission. they had no shelter they could take with ohñthem. they had only the clothes on their backs and the homemade snow shoes. they didn't know it but it was 75 miles to the nearest american settlement and it was becoming midwinter in the sierra nevada and they set off. franklin, sarah's father in

particular absolutely determined that he would not watch his children and his wife starve to death in the mountains. set out to do this. they made good time for the first few days. the weather was sunny, cold and clear. made for relatively good walking there was a crust on the snow. but because it was sunny, they began to experience snow blindness, which afflicted them terribly. i don't know if you ever had snow blindnesss in but it's not fun. again, it's like walking on the salt. things go black for you. you get terrible headaches. you get nauseous. they were terribly afflicted by this snow, snow blindnesss in. they had six days worth of what they considered six days worth of rations, a little bit of dried beef basically. and they made good time for the first few days. but then they made a catastrophic mistake. they came to a juncture where if

they had simply go over a low ridge they would have remained on the established immigrant trail and they would have been able to gradually descend into bear valley and johnson's ranch which was the american settlement. they didn't see that because of the ridge in their way and so they veered to the left and they veered down into the canyon of the north fork of the american river. i don't know if any of you are familiar with the american river canyon, but it is a beautiful but very steep-sighted deep fissure in the western planks of the sierras. i flaw over it in going to southern california and from 40,000 feet it looks like somebody took a meat cleaver to the side of the sierra. it's just this enormous gash in the side of the range. they wandered down into the canyon of the american river and just about the time it happened another monstrous snowstorm closed in on them and they began to die.

and they went through all kinds of bad situation. they were the first member who began to consume the dead. it didn't happen at the lake for several weeks after that. and a number of things that happened but i will not tell you bow january 18th, 32 days after they set out, sarah and six other survivors staggered nearly naked with bleeding feet into johnson's ranch in the foothills of the sierra nevada. all five of the women who had set off survived, but of the ten men who had set off, only two were still alive. one of the first people they encountered actually was my great, great uncle, and this was the first that people in california, the american settlers in california, had heard what had become of the donner party. they knew the donner party hadn't made it over the

mountains but they pretty much assumed that they had camped in chuckie meadows which is current day reno is and they were winter there and come over in the disciplining. they did not know until sarah and these few other survivors made it through that all these people were trapped up in the mountains. so recent tucker and a number of other men organized this first relief party that headed up in the mountains at great risk to themselves to try to rescue folks. there were a series of rescue expeditions and just skipping forward in time a little bit in mid-april of 1847, the last of those four rescue expeditions reached what we now call donner lake expecting to find george and hampson donner and lawrence alive. instead they only found lewis sitting next to a pan of fresh brains and livers with the

donner party -- with the donner's gold hidden in his clothing. he had apparently murdered tampson or george donner for their money and also in order to cannibalize their bodies. in the end of the 87 people who came out of the mountains as official members of the donner party, 47 had died. a few had been cannibalized. fewer than a dozen actually. and that's basically the outline of the story. there are a couple of interesting side notes i wanted to mention. one this business about how women outsurvived men. as i say the book is full of these sides into various scientific topics. and why outsurvived men so much and why i looked into that. there's a fellow at the university of washington in seattle named donald grayson who wrote a paper specifically on gender mortality in the donner party.

and he found some interesting things. women have smaller bodies than men, generally, and so, therefore, be harder for them to maintain core body temperature in very severe climates. but he found that women also tended to carry a higher proportion of body fat which insulates the body and also provides reserves of energy. so some of the survival may have been that body fat ratio thing. although, by the time these women arrived at the sierra nevada, most of them -- all of them had walked from illinois or from missouri all the way to california or to -- the california/nevada line basically. i don't think many of them were carrying a lot of extra body fat. they had to have been fairly lean. he also looked at gender roles and he concluded that the men

had simply burned themselves out by performing the manly duties that went with the wagon train particularly cutting that road through the mountains. they expended so much energy in trying to make their way through those mountains and through that brush that by the time they arrived in the sierra nevada, they had depleted physiologically they had depleted their reserves of energy before the first snowflake even fell. he pointed out that males also died way earlier than females -- in fact, 14 males died before the first female died. two-thirds of the women survived, two-thirds the men died. he found that mortality was particularly high amongst the unattached males. there were a number of males along with the group, mostly teamsters who were there for the group.

virtually all of them died. the men who survived were men who had families that they could connect into. so he found that social isolation contributed greatly to the mortality of the men. he also found some evidence that -- there's some recent evidence that socially isolated peoples' immune systems are not as robust as the immune systems who are tied to families or social groups so that may have played a role too. men also disintegrated psychologically particularly on the snowshoe should you party, particularly the party sarah was with. virtually all the men gave up or wigged out relatively early in the ordeal. it was those five young women that actually stayed clear-headed, stayed motivated, and that's why they got through and so few of the men did.

there's a very interesting book if you're&ú interested in survil issues particularly in the psychology of the issue where lawrence gonzalez examines the survival -- the firsthand survival accounts of a number of different people and he comes to various conclusions but his overarching conclusion that people who tend to survive are those people who in a life-threatening situation maintain a laser-like focus on reality. the people that don't survive are the people who spend a lot of energy!m@ wishing they were somewhere else or imagining that they're somewhere else. the people who do survive oftentimes they remember particular blades of grass and minute details of the environment they were in because they are people who are taking everything in with this clear -- i don't know how you achieve this. i don't know. but they tend to have enormous awareness of the reality of their situation.

and that seems to go along with the fact that the men, as i say in the donner party, disintegrated psychologically. they went through all kinds of weird contortions mentally. decided to kill the women and eat them and various sorts of awful things that were not mentally healthy. [laughter] >> the whole psychological part of the story is actually pretty interesting. i did a little research -- virtually -- i mean, there's a little bit of speculation here, but i'm pretty confident that everybody that survived the donner party experience had some level of post-traumatic stress syndrome and we know a lot of individuals did because what they did afterwards. sarah's older sister wrote many years later -- she said i wish i could cry if i could forget the tragedy perhaps i would know how

to cry again. she was extremely distraught for the rest of her life. she could not even cry. she couldn't think about it. she couldn't cry about it. she couldn't get it out. sarah's little sister, nancy, who was only 12 at the time had the opposite reaction. from the time she got down from the mountains she had for the rest of her life -- she had frequent bouts of uncontrollable crying so she dealt with it by crying but she was also very damaged psychologically. so that's pretty much the story. i just want to conclude by saying in the end, i'm kind of a contrarian about the donner party. despite a lot of devastating events and depressing episodes, in the end it's a heartening story because of the -- some of the things that certain individuals did, people who

stood up and did really remarkable things. one of those people in particular being sarah. but a number of people did absolutely heroic things for the benefit of other people. and if you look closely at the story, there's enough of that going on there that it at least counter-balances some of the tragedy. so let me read one final passage to conclude here. it sort of sums up what i feel about it.cé÷ when i think about the nights when jay, and sarah played his fiddle and about the night she knelt beside him as he lay dying in the muddy snow of the california that they had dreamed

about together, i think about the moment when she walked away from her mother for the last time on snow shoes and about the christmas eve she sat shivering with her father as he begged her to use his body for food. i think of every step she took trying to bring relief to her mother and her siblings. what to make of her story? i'm not sure the language even has language that is adequate to the task but i think what sarah's story tell us is that there were, in fact, heroes in the donner party and heroes are sometimes the most ordering-seeming people. it reminds us as ordinary as we might be, we can if we choose take the harder road, walk forth bravelya@ under the indifferent stars. we can hazard the ravages of chance. we can choose to endure what seems unendurable and thereby open up the possibility of prevailing. we can awaken to the world as it is and seeing it with eyes wide

open. we can nevertheless embrace hope rather than despair. when all is said and done i think the story tell us that hope is the hero's domain not the fools because we dare to hope even when doing so might undo us, we leave the worlds we create behind us swirling in our wakes, eternal and effervescent with the beauty of our aspirations. so as i say, when i look at sarah and i think about what she did and walking across those 75 miles of ice and snow basically barefoot most of it, half naked most of it, i think it's a pretty remarkable story of survival and hope. with that i would be delighted to take your questions about the donner party or about this book in particular or about the3( process of writing a book like this or pretty much anything

that might occur to you. yes. >> well, i noticed -- oh, sorry. i noticed that with your previous book and this book they both have family connections. so i was wondering what's coming next. is there some other skeleton in the closet you're writing about next? >> well, my family -- yeah, my family does have a proclivity to natural disasters. my grandmother and great grandparents on my other side lived through the san francisco earthquake of 1906, actually. they owned a saloon in san francisco that collapsed and they ended up in a refuge camp. there's quite a story there, actually. that's not what i'm going to write about next actually. i'm tired of writing about death and disaster. so i'm actually writing a book about -- i don't want to talk about it exactly but it's a

convergence of an important athletic event and world war ii. so i'll just leave it at that. yes. [inaudible] >> whoops, we have a microphone coming for you here. >> i just recently visited donner pass about a month ago. and stood next to the memorial for the pioneers, the people who died, of course, and who survived. could you talk about that memorial a little bit because the imagery is very beautiful of the people but what is outstanding is kind of the setting itself and then the realization of how deep the snow was, how horrible the winter must have been. >> the monument -- i don't remember the year it was dedicated. some of the donner party survivors as old ladies attended the unveiling of that. i don't remember what year it was. but the monument is beautiful. it's a statue of some pioneers

atop a stone pedestal that's 19 feet high at the top of it, the part that the statue is standing on is 19 feet off the ground level. that's the height at which the snow was that year. they know that for decades after the disaster, there were tall stumps all around the donner lake area where the donner party had cut trees off basically at the snow level. and so based on those they calculated that the depth of the snow was about 19 feet. and you don't really get a sense of how deep that is until you see the stumps which are no longer there or the monument which makes it very apparent. it was extraordinarily deep snow and that's actually an interesting facet of the story. there's been a lot of debate in the last few years about whether there was actually more -- more storms that year than other years. they did some tree ring studies and they discovered that in fact

in the winter of 1846 and '47 there was not more precipitation that year. it was a fairly normal year in terms of storms and precipitation, but they also discovered it was much colder than usual, not only the donner pass but all across the northern hemisphere. and it turns out when snow falls through very, very cold air, it falls as light fluffy powder and so they think the tremendous snow depths were a result of the cold and the particularly powdery snow of that year which made it difficult to get through. they tried and tried. there were several other attempts that sarah's father made between the initial attempt and the final attempt on the snow shoes. they tried before he finally thought of making snow shoes, they tried three or four times to hike out and they never got more than a couple of miles because they simply found themselves up to their arm pits literally in the snow. it was so loose and so deep.

but, yeah, it's quite a sight and something very dramatic. >> i like this book because it pulls me into so many themes and topics even after i put it down and that to me is a mark of a good book. i'm not taking issue with the way you end with wanting to be hopeful and heartening, but when i close this book, all i can think about are the words, thin veneer. that maybe our concepts of leadership are kind of a thin veneer that we need to understand that leadership is something deep and you have -- it's more encompassing than giving a order because they were so leaderless. i also look at the decisions that they made as to cannibalism became an issue and how easy during that era it was to -- well, if someone an indian or a

mexican or someone not of my tribe and so the thin -- so i -- we supposedly have evolved since then, but it left me wondering whether so many of the things we have gained in our culture is a thin veneer in times of trouble we have to be aware of that thin veneer. >> absolutely. the donner party looked in a slightly different way as you say, the veneer comes off pretty quickly when you get very, very hungry. people do things that they don't think that they would do. and i think it's pretty much a human universal. i mean, none of us knows for sure, i think, whether we would or would not consume somebody else. you can't know that till you get to it. but, you know, in terms of, yeah, how you -- what you feel about the story at the end, it's definitely a choice. you see all facets of human nature in the donner party tragedy, i would say.

you see, as i say -- i think you see some people that are absolutely inspiring in terms of the things they did. you also see people that were despicable and i didn't really treat any of those tonight but they are in the book.s÷qi squ)j. he quite quickly not just killed one person but possibly other people long before anybody had to kill anybody for food. he was not a particularly nice guy. he was known as a wife-beater. as they were crossing the plains. he's the one person who emerged absolutely as a villain from the story. and he paid a price. he was vilified unlike the rest of them, he was vilified the rest of his life. he died a broken man. called a cannibal to his face. and sarah was a cannibal too but i don't have a sense anybody ever made an issue of it in her life. people got past it, i think.

yes. >> so actually i was less troubled by the breaching of the taboo of cannibalism with regards to people who had died already. and more troubled -- there seemed to be -- once you breach that, then it might be okay to murder somebody. >> right. >> and not simply because for the sake of nutrition, but because they were possibly a person of a different background than them or perhaps because they were this particular couple who chose not to join in with

eating their fellow human beings, perhaps the people who were considering killing this pair was kind of -- the pair had a moral high ground that they wouldn't breach and so it was okay to kill them -- i don't know. this is what i got out of it was that it was okay to kill them -- >> i think you're talking about lewis and salvador, the two indians? >> yes. >> a you been in of things happened on the snowshoe party and one of the -- one of the horrific things was that towards the end, two of the 15 people went on the party was indian guides. they had actually been over the sierra before and so they at least theoretically knew the way. they were there as guides. as things started getting really

tough, as things got very bad, they got down to the foothills, lewis and salvador noticed the white people were looking at them strangely and they decided they better take off. so they did. they got out of there. but, unfortunately, everybody's feet were bleeding at this point and so the whites followed them, tracked them down basically and killed them. and they killed them for food. i mean, there's just no way around it. they killed them to eat them. and i think the fact that they were native americans made it in their minds easier to do than if they hadn't been. so, yeah, that's what i mean. there's all kinds of facets of human nature in this story and that's part of what i think makes it so compelling to people. anybody else? yes.

>> so i just finished reading about the whale ship books, i wonder if there's any books you read in your research that maybe helped you even more with the context that you were setting your story in. >> yeah, well, i did a great deal of research. i mean, the most valuable thing that i read was at the university of california berkeley had the papers -- there was a newspaper editor years after the donner party in the 1870s, this is 30 years after the event, he realized the donner party survivors were going to be dying out. so he started corresponding with all the survivors and he collected an enormous mass of firsthand accounts and a lot of them conflict with one another

but those are all housed at the university of california berkeley bancroft library so in terms of just sources that i read, that was the most valuable things. but i read all kinds of -- actually phil brick's book was a book i read in preparation because there's a cannibalism issue in that, too. on cannibalism, i was surprised to find that cannibalism is something that has been practiced on a very wide scale in surprisingly recent times. during world war ii, during the siege of lennen grad hundreds and hundreds of corpses were left in the street and many were cannibalized and in the '50s and '60s in china, there was enormous of amounts of starvation and thousands of people were cannibalized because the starvation was very great.