Ive known about the Donner Party story since I was a little kid. My history teachers would tell us about how a big group of people traveled west for the gold rush in California because there was money to be made. Teachers told us how they got stuck in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, somewhere near Lake Tahoe California. They were trapped due to a big snowstorm, ran out of food so had to eat each other in order to survive. Such a horrific story when you hear it when your 8 but as I got older I began to wonder more about their journey so when I got the chance to read a book about it I took it.
In this book the author Ethan Rarick discusses their journey, how the Donners, Reeds, and other parties ended up in this situation, what they did to survive, and how lucky they were for some of them to survive..
The book begins with a brief history of the families and why many of them were eager to head west. Like most, they were in search of a better life that would bring them better times. Starting off from Independence Missouri, Rarick details not only how boring this journey must have been, but how unbearably slow. He estimates that the families with all their buggies and oxen probably moved at …show more content…
Not the type of terrain that an Ox and a buggy can exactly have a good time. While reading this, it is easy for one to become aggravated by how often they avoided the signs and warnings that pointed to Hasting’s “short cut” as a bad idea. Yet, despite the trip itself being very, very slow, the saddest part was the fact that these were families overrun with children, many of them infants and toddlers—certainly not the type of party meant to “experiment” through terrain one has never crossed or knows nothing