Fact vs. Fiction

If you’re like many readers, historical fiction can raise more questions than it answers. Since The Hunger is based on a real event, you may be wondering how true to life the novel really is. I’m going to try to answer some of the questions you may have, but there are spoilers ahead. I urge you not to read these notes until after you’ve finished reading The Hunger.

How many of the characters in The Hunger are based on real people? Nearly all can be traced back to the actual Donner Party. However, this is a work of fiction and so, in order to create a dramatic story that modern readers would find satisfying, we used the idea of these people as a jumping off point to create the characters in the book. They bear little resemblance to the real people who made that terrible journey in 1846.

We imagined that Elitha Donner could hear the dead, that Tamsen Donner was unhappy in her marriage, and that Charles Stanton and Mary Graves fell in love. A few of the traits we gave the characters are authentic. For instance, Lewis Keseberg was accused of resorting to cannibalism while trapped at Truckee Lake. Some accounts say he admitted that he’d done it but later recanted. There was supposedly evidence of cannibalism when he, the last survivor, was finally rescued.

One of the real-life members of the Donner Party who doesn’t appear in The Hunger is Jean-Baptiste Trudeau. Trudeau was a young man, half-Native American, who was hired by George Donner at Fort Bridger. However, the story line called for the character to do things that were inconsistent with history, and we decided not to use Trudeau’s name for a character whose actions and timeline would diverge significantly from Trudeau’s real life, so we created the character of Thomas to fill that role.

Remember the custom-made wagon mentioned in the opening chapters? It really did exist, but it was built by James Reed, not George Donner. We made the switch to be in keeping with the characters. The actual wagon was lampooned by the press as the “pioneer palace car,” oversized in every way. Reed had it built so his sick mother-in-law could travel inside the wagon (it didn’t help; she was one of the first to die on the trail). And to dispel another popular myth: Pioneers didn’t normally travel inside the wagon. They walked beside wagons to spare the oxen and slept in tents at night. The wagons were less like RVs than moving vans, meant to transport furniture and goods.

Speaking of cannibalism. You will note that we downplayed it in The Hunger. Since everyone knows what supposedly happened at Truckee Lake that fateful winter, we thought it would be more suspenseful to make readers wait for it. That’s why the first mention comes so late in the book—and also why we incorporated the element of cannibalism into the plot in a new way. Hopefully it worked—and we’re dying to know what you think! Were you surprised? Disappointed? Feel free to use the email tool, or to post your thoughts on my Facebook page.

Cannibalism was not as rare during the time of the Donner Party as it is today. That’s because with so much long-distance travel done by ship, being stranded at sea with little or no food was common. Agreed cannibalism was actually an acknowledged “custom of the sea” (as opposed to maritime law). The general population would have read accounts of cannibalism at sea in the newspaper, such as the case of the Essex, the real-life inspiration for Moby Dick, which occurred in 1820. This is probably why the story of the Donner Party so captured the public’ imagination at the time.

Ash Hollow, the abandoned shack where Elitha Donner finds warnings from the dead, is a real place where settlers left letters for travelers heading East to deliver to the nearest post office. You can visit Ash Hollow State Historical Park in Lewellen, Nebraska, although it’s not clear if the original shack remains.

And by the way, we did not make this practice up! Strangely, leaving letters in the wild, stuck in trees or pinned under a rock, was not uncommon among the pioneers, even though the odds of being found and delivered to their intended recipient were pretty slim.

Sadly, John Snyder really was murdered by James Reed. He was buried at the scene of the incident which is believed to have taken place around Emigrant Pass in Nevada, his body never found. The killing resulted from an altercation between Snyder and Reed when the Reeds’ wagons got stuck. Snyder is generally characterized as a well-liked teamster for the Graves family, and some link his name romantically to Mary Graves. While people are known to be killed during heated arguments, it seemed a tragic waste to leave Snyder’s death at this and so we decided to make more of it for the purposes of our book, hence the embellishment and the created relationship between Snyder and Reed.

Opinions about Lansford Hasting, the man behind the Hastings Cut-Off, are not divided: he is regarded as a charlatan, duping unsuspecting pioneers into taking his proposed “shortcut” to California with his book, Emigrant’s Guide to Oregon and California. The consensus is that Hastings was trying to lure Americans to settle in California, which belonged to Mexico at the time, in the hope that the U.S. would eventually challenge Mexico for the territory.

Charles Stanton did die while trying to escape on foot from the camp at Truckee Lake. His actual end was a little more peaceful than what we created for him. One day, Stanton—weakened by starvation and snow blind—told the Forlorn Hope snowshoe party to go on, assuring them that he would catch up with them. But he didn’t: he remained by the campfire, smoking the last of his tobacco, choosing to die alone. He made the solo trip to Sutter’s Fort for provisions and returned, true to his word, a hero.