Customer Reviews

The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This history of the (in)famous Donner party alternately reads like a thriller, a horror story, a nature study and pure poetry. Author Daniel James Brown really did his homework, actually tracing the route taken by a young woman named Sarah Graves Fosdick as she trekked across the American West with her new husband, seeking a homestead in California.

Taken in by an opportunist named Lansford Hastings, who wanted to make a name for himself (not to mention some quick cash) by routing Westward-heading emigrants through what he called his "shortcut," the several families of the Donner party made a fateful decision to heed Hastings' advice and follow his unproven route through the Sierra Nevada mountains. This was, as history shows, their undoing, as they became stranded throughout the winter in 20+ feet of snow, with no food and minimal shelter.

After several failed attempts, Sarah Graves and some of her companions managed to escape through what is now called the Donner Pass, but not until many members of the party had died and the survivors had been reduced to cannibalizing the bodies of their relatives and friends.

Brown relates the whole story, beginning with the departure of Sarah and her family from their home in Illinois through her death at the age of 46 in what is now known as California's Napa Valley. In doing so, he writes with sensitivity and compassion, inviting readers to imagine both Sarah's joy during the first half of her journey and the deep grief she must have felt throughout the remainder of her life once she finally reached California. At no point does Brown stoop to judging the people whose story he relates, nor does he sugar-coat the events of their tragic situation. Thus, some portions of the book are difficult to read, but for me the revulsion I occasionally felt was worth the reward of coming to a better understanding of the grit and heroism displayed by our ancestors who crossed the continent at a time when life on the road often meant living the equivalent of a stone age existence.

I admire the fact that Brown himself visited places along Sarah's route, walking through chest-high prairie grass (loaded with ticks), climbing a "slope" in the Wasatch Mountains (7,500 feet above sea level) and slogging a mile across Utah's salt flats ("My God, I thought, those people were tough!")

Brown writes beautifully and portions of the book read like poetry. Take, for example, this passage -- "To really understand [Sarah's] story, I knew I would have to travel farther than just the sixteen hundred miles that lay between me and California. I would have to travel into the heart of a girl who was a product of a vanished world...a girl who encountered in her life challenges more daunting and tragedies more profound than I have ever begun to confront in my own."

And that is, for me, exactly what Brown has managed to do in The Indifferent Stars Above. Read this book.

I was taught in graduate school that the first criterion for reviewing a book is to measure the author's success in meeting his stated aim. On that basis, I have to give this book no more than three stars, and that high only because it is well-researched and detailed.

The stated premise is what should have separated this book from many others about the Donner expedition, an account of that tragedy through the eyes of one of the survivors. But it never achieves that. The voice and the viewpoint are entirely the author's. Sarah Graves is perhaps more prominently mentioned than some of the other characters, but when incidents occur through the course of the narrative, we learn of them through the author, not through Sarah Graves. We occasionally get an idea of what Sarah might have thought about an incident, but it's entirely the author's idea of what she might have thought.

There is no doubt that the author put a great deal of effort into researching the book, and he generally treats the subject matter with sensitivity, not sensation, as one might expect from the grand-nephew of one of the survivors. The writing is good, though it swings back and forth between straightforward reportage and attempts at lyrical imagery in setting the scenes in which the Donner Party tragedy took place.

The photos in the middle are a bonus and help to bring the characters to life. The absence of a map, however, is a bit disappointing. Books on topics involving journeys should always have maps!

This is a very well researched book on the Donner Party horror. While reading it, I kept remembering an old English teacher or two who taught that you should research all that you can about a topic so you can answer any question, but never put everything you learned into your paper. In this case, your book. So many scattered details take away from this account. The author has done so much research, I am sure he uncovered every detail about Sarah Graves there is to uncover. He used the extra facts he uncovered to fill out her story to make a 300 page plus book.

If you want a more detailed and moving story of the Donnor Party, I would recommend "Desperate Passage" by Ethan Rarick. If you are interested in learning about other topics connected to the Donner Part saga, you can find all the references you need in this well document book by Daniel James Brown.

In the author's note at the beginning of the book, Brown claims will book will focus on one particular member of the Donner party and her experiences. While he does mention Sarah slightly more often than the other people in the narrative for part of the book, she isn't even mentioned for a significant length. When we finally do hear more about her, it isn't for long and only snippets here and there.

Additionally, the author goes into frequent, sometimes lengthy, and often irrelevant tangents in the middle of the storytelling. It's a shame that a topic as interesting as the Donner party received such a poor treatment. The storytelling itself is fairly interesting and engaging, if only we could do away with the endless tangents (including the life expectancy of castrated men - none of the Donner party were castrated) that seemed more like filler to make the book longer than anything. By the end of the book I'd said to myself multiple times, "Isn't this book finished YET?"

"I think I'd rather die than resort to what the Donner Party members did to survive their 'death march' across the California Sierra Nevada mountains!" I exclaimed as I finished reading, The Indifferent Stars Above, by Daniel James Brown. My reaction shows, that given these pioneers' circumstances, nobody knows what they would actually do in a similar situation. It's a wonder any of the survivers kept their sanity!

Author Brown shows his deep interest throughout the narrative by his very careful research, and his actual trek over the same route the Donner Party followed. No doubt his distant ancestor, Sarah, provided high motivation for him.

This version of the epic-making experience of the Donner Porty interested me greatly, because I had lived in some of the places Brown mentioned in his narrative.

If you enjoy history, because it is his-story, her-story, their-story, this book is an excellent read. Brace yourself, though, it is not a good bedtime story!

Before I read this book, I knew the fact of the Donner party and that it involved cannibalism, but not much else. In reading this book, you'll get some American history, some information about how the body and mind react to starvation and something of what was going through the people's minds.

Two things frustrated me about the book:

1. There should have been a map somewhere in the book.

2. There is a list of everyone in the Party at the end of the book. This should have been at the beginning. By my count, there were three or four Williams, three James's, three Sarahs, three or four Harriets, two Marys and three Elizabeths in the party of about eighty people. It made for confusing reading at times.

I liked that the author put a "What Happened to Them" chapter at the end of the book.

Daniel James Brown's account of the Donner party disaster is a riveting retelling of this ill-fated journey. He has done copious research, not only on the Donner party itself, but on the physical, emotional and psychological effects of prolonged starvation and exposure, and manages to weave it all into a fascinating narrative. He presents his material so vividly I almost felt as if I were there seeing it all firsthand. His choice to follow Sarah Foster's journey, both through his book and actually physically in taking a driving trip overland, was a wise one. The sympathetic portrait he paints of this young woman, scarcely out of her teens yet faced with more horrific, agonizing decisions than most people experience in a lifetime, gives the book a center and an immediacy that it otherwise might have lacked. Definitely this is going to become must-reading for all those interested in the fate of the Donner Party.

This is a very easy to read and informative book on one of the distrubing and heroic episodes of American history. I would recommend this work as a "first" read to anyone interestd in the subject. I especially enjoyed when the author digressed a bit and wrote a few pages every chapter or two about what life was like in the 1840's, the sexual mores, personal hygene etc.

Having toured the country twice (albeit in a motorhome)attempting to follow as closely as possible the Oregon trail, it is almost inconceiveable that so many people made the journey 160 years ago. The hardships described in the book really hit home when you are able to actually see the obstacles.

I would have given the work 5 stars but for two glaring (at least to me) ommissions. First and foremost there are no maps which for a book such as this is inexcuseable. Secondly there is no index which is especially annoying. There are so many people named in the book it becomes confusing as to who is who...Is the person named the husband? Son? Brother?

All in all though this is an excellent book that I (and you) will be unable to put down.

Brown does an overall super job of making the Graves family the focus of his story as they related to the Donner Party incident. I especially liked his tangents that described everyday life in the 1840s, integration of modern sciences, and his conjectural fill-ins that make his book more interesting in the long run. Even though there just isn't that much factual information about Sarah Graves Fosdick who rolls in and out of his story, the reader will come to tragically appreciate what she went through and in the end, when Brown attempts to find the location of her grave site, a sadness and striking metaphor for the title of his book that affects the reader in a profound way--at least it did for this reader; the average Americanism of Sarah prevailed.

The book may disappoint some readers as Brown certainly makes his politics known; unnecessary and a very weak link in an otherwise well-written book. With all of the quality research he did, he certainly lacked an understanding of U. S. politics during the 1830s and 40s. I would suggest that he should have read H. W. Brands books Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times and Lone Star Nation: The Epic Story of the Battle for Texas Independence before he began to write so that he could have made realistic connections for the time period he was writing about--he clearly did not fully comprehend that aspect of his book.

On the other hand, his strongest writing takes place with his factual and conjectural interpretation of the snowshoe party's attempt and eventual success in crossing the Sierras in the winter of 1847 to deliver in no uncertain terms their call for help. One can tell he watched the PBS American Experience documentary on the Donner Party several times as he makes multiple use of nearly the exact words from that source throughout the book, but I do not fault him for that. The documentary, with errors in its own right here and there, was excellent--I would use key words and phrases from it as well as a writer.

As usual Lansford Hastings is the bad guy leading a "deception" that the Donners take his "shortcut" blah, blah, blah (never was it called a shortcut by Hastings, and the Donner Party knew wagons had not been over Hastings new route and took it anyway!). But Brown is only slightly less harsh than any other author who has been bashing Hastings for the last fifty years. I must admit; however, that he wasn't as lambasting of Hastings as he could have been compared to such authors as Rarick in his Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West--with that exception, I might add, a very good book unto itself.

Most of his sources are clearly listed, but some are missing. For example, the reference that Louis Keseberg put the body of one-year-old George Foster on a hook on the cabin wall after he died in the night while sleeping with Keseberg seems just a bit over the top. I'm not sure historians agree that Keseberg actually did that (reminisces written after the fact are rife), but it makes for classic Donner Party reading!

Other odds and ends include a seemingly unrelated reference to Mariano Vallejo in the beginning of the book who was the ever so generous Californio. Brown seems to think he netted 90K a year--doubtful at best; he was simply land rich, cash poor like everyone else before the Americans changed it all. Brown also makes reference to Vallejo's home he named "Casa Grande." That was actually a home Vallejo had assembled in 1853 long after the Donner Party incident was over and was one of forty prefabricated houses built in Switzerland and shipped around the horn to California. But I would not fault Brown for that misstatement; he took on a huge project and tried to work in the Californios somehow, but it just didn't work.

I like the idea that Brown did, in fact, cover the trail that Sarah Graves Fosdick traveled on her journey west. Brown also took a couple of short hikes of less than an hour to see specific places near the original trail more clearly. I had to chuckle a little while reading his exploits--it appears he isn't much of an outdoors type of person as he seemed pretty wiped out after his respectively short jaunts, but by gosh he gets credit for trying! To get a fuller understanding of someone who spent hours and days seamlessly walking and exploring the same trail to California see A Guide to the California Gold Rush.

Last but not least the book did not include an index. I have no idea why. Six extra pages created easily with modern technology would have saved me from using a myriad of sticky notes and writing all over the book as I like to go back and check items from time to time. Four definite stars and one indifferent; I could elaborate more on the good, but that is why you will purchase and read Brown's work.

I think almost every child in school learns about the Donner Party to a greater or lesser extent. I had learned a little bit about them in school, but the details remained rather clouded over. It was as if the teachers wanted us to know about it, but not know too much about what really happened.

I became much more interested in the history of the group after I moved to California. I have visited the memorial park a number of times, and seen the remainders of the horrendous conditions that these people endured. And, although there is an excellent museum in the park, I learned more about this ill fated party in this one book than I have from numerous other sources.

While I will admit that the book is a little gruesome, I think that may be a necessary tool to truly portray how badly off the people of this group were. In fact, had I not visited the park previously, I would have found some of the material hard to believe. (It is hard to imagine 20 foot deep snow unless you have seen the sawed off tree stumps with your own eyes.)

This book, more than others I have read, portrayed the misery, suffering and desperation of the group in detail. It also provided an interesting window into the mind and reminded me of how much people are capable of if the need arises. And, as I read, I kept wondering how many people today would have survived the first few nights. Not too many, I imagine.

The book is well written and reads like a novel. It captures the interest and keeps the story moving well. My only complaint, if it could be called that, is the lack of maps of the region where the group stayed. It is hard to imagine in your mind exactly where the different cabins were and where the group was in relation to the lake and mountains. Otherwise, a superb treatment of this tragic story.