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The term “historical fiction” can seem like an oxymoron. History is comprised of actual events, after all. Events are made of facts. Fiction, on the other hand, involves the creation of fancies. Fiction is fact’s stepsister; it is fabulation, something that looks and sounds like a fact but is wholly imaginary. You can marry fact and fiction, of course, and this generally results in something pleasing, a cocktail that’s partly familiar and comforting, to accompany the other part, which is spicy and sparkly and unknown. The familiar helps the unfamiliar go down smoothly, like Mary Poppins’ spoonful of sugar.
One of the biggest problems with writing historical fiction is not knowing how familiar your readers are with the historical event in question. This poses a quandary for the writer: how much do you assume? You don’t want to bore your readers by including all sorts of facts they already know. At the same time, you don’t want to assume too much knowledge and risk making the reader an outsider at an inside joke.
So it was with The Hunger. Americans these days are no longer taught the story of the Donner Party, and the few who do recognize the name are usually spotty on the details. For readers outside the USA, I imagine it must be even more unfamiliar. These are the basic facts: two families set out from Springfield, Illinois on April 15, 1846, heading to Independence, Missouri, the “jumping off” point for the trip west. The families—headed by George and Jacob Donner and James Reed, accompanied by a few family friends and other individuals—are the nucleus of what will be known as the Donner Party. They join up with a much larger party, the Russell Party, and travel with them until the split in the trail known as the “parting of the ways.” The Donners and Reeds have heard of a new cut-off that promises to shave 300 miles off the trip. They have no way of knowing that the cut-off is little more than a notion in the mind of Lansford Hastings, or that Hastings is a bit of a charlatan, trying to lure settlers to California in order to wrestle the territory away from Mexico, to which California belongs.
The Donner Party decides to try their luck. They would not have made this choice if they knew there are over a thousand inhospitable miles ahead of desiccated salt lake, scrub prairie, and the nearly impenetrable forests of the Wasatch Mountains. Hacking 30 miles through the Wasatch takes 18 days, time they can ill afford. They know the mountain passes will close off once the snow starts, and snow comes early at the higher elevations.
Which is how they come to find themselves stranded on the wrong side of the mountain pass on November 1st, when the snow starts falling and refuses to stop. They try to make it up to the pass but by November 8th, they are immobilized. Snow is piled over their heads, over the roofs of their makeshift cabins. They have almost no supplies. Only a few head of livestock survived the punishing trip. There will be no escape until the spring thaw but no one knows when that will be.
There were ninety pioneers at Truckee Lake and Alder Creek when the snow started falling; only 50 will survive.
But the story is more than what happened to those 90 people. The biggest challenge of the Donner Party’s story – and the thing that ultimately made working on it so satisfying – is that in many ways, the story of the pioneers is the story of America. The pioneer spirit is what most Americans think of when we think of America. The Donner Party’s story is one of immigrants, of people looking for a better life. But it’s also the story of America’s restless expansionist spirit, the country’s willingness to leave homes and kin, uproot themselves, load their possessions into a wagon, and head into the unknown.
Americans had been migrating to the west since the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and by the time the Donner Party struck out in 1846, about 40 percent of the population lived west of the Appalachian Mountains. But travel to California was not yet at the epic levels of the Gold Rush and the West was largely uncharted territory. At the time, most settlers headed to California stayed with the Oregon Trail as it began to climb north-northwest and didn’t break off until Fort Hall. But settlers were anxious to shorten the trip with a more efficient passage. A few wagon parties tried to find a viable cutoff prior to the Donners, including the Bidwell-Bartleson Party (1841) and the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party (1844, generally believed to have constructed the cabins at Truckee Lake in which the Donner Party ended up sheltering) but for the most part travel through this territory had been done by mountain men or parties on horseback, not families weighed down with wagons.
At the time the Donner Party took to the trail, the area south and west of the Great Salt Lake still was not well known. There may have been a handful of trails cutting through the deserts and ranges, but there was no support system travelers could fall back on. Between Fort Hall (in present-day Idaho) and Sutter’s Fort (in what is now California), there were few trading posts, farms, or settlers to lend a helping hand or sell a sack of oats if you ran out of food along the way. Today, we can only marvel at their confidence, traveling under these conditions with babies and children, the elderly and the sick. They let nothing stop them: Sarah Keyes – James Reed’s mother-in-law – was 70 years old and in poor health, and ended up being the wagon party’s first casualty. Others traveled without wagon or oxen. Some had nothing more than a mule, a few even expected to make the two thousand-mile journey completely on foot.
Americans made the perilous journey because they believed in Manifest Destiny, the idea that Americans were an exceptional people who were ordained by God to occupy the territory clear to the Pacific Ocean. Americans had held romantic notions about the unknown and unexplored Western part of the country since Colonial times. By settling the West, Americans felt they were fulfilling a long-promised destiny.
But Manifest Destiny is problematic: it’s not as though this territory was unoccupied, free for the taking. That’s the darker side of America’s expansionist aspirations. Texas’ war for independence emboldened some Americans to think that California, too, could be prized away from Mexico. Some have said this was the real reason Lansford Hastings zealously promoted his cut-off: to lure more American settlers to the Mexican-owned territory and, eventually, force America to defend the interests of its citizens. And the darkness doesn’t stop there: trails cut through the middle of Indian Territory. You can’t discuss the Westward Migration without looking at the devastating effect it had on the Native American tribes residing in the Indian Territory. And lastly, it’s also the story of religious freedom. Mormons were starting to look West to build a community after violence had driven them out of Missouri and Illinois.
Dark stories indeed.
Ultimately, the Donner Party’s story is meant to be cautionary. There are reasons nearly half the wagon party died, and we would be doing a disservice to the dead to ignore those lessons. Not all of these reasons were within their control – the horrendous weather that winter, for one – but many were. The group let themselves be divided by pettiness and class differences. They let themselves be fooled by businessmen who valued personal profit over human lives. They selected the wrong man to be their leader and refused to listen to the people among them who knew better. They paid for their hubris, yes, but you only need to look around to realize that things haven’t changed that much today, 170 years later.
And this is the true lesson of the Donner Party.
My podcast DAMNED HISTORY, which I talk about the history behind my books, is now available on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, and Soundcloud.