New York Review of Books Review

THE word "party" suggests a manageable unit, something that fits in one or two cars and gets seated at the same restaurant table. The Donner Party consisted of 80-plus people - en route to California when they were trapped in the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846-47. For the writer, this presents a challenge. He or she must shift the narrative hither and yon between the original snow-bound emigrants, settled into two dismal camps near Truckee Lake, and the various rescue parties who head off into the mountains and become stranded themselves. The most successful tellings - this one, for instance, and last year's "Desperate Passage," by Ethan Rarick - hang the chronology and events on the framework of a single emigrant's experiences. In "The Indifferent Stars Above," Daniel James Brown has chosen the Illinois newlywed Sarah Graves, ostensibly because of a personal link. His great-uncle, George W. Tucker, also set out west from Illinois in 1846. Though there's no evidence that Sarah and George ever spoke, he "had traveled where she traveled, saw and felt much of what she saw and felt." Not too much, one hopes, for Uncle George's sake. By the end of the saga, Sarah Graves has seen her husband die and, the book suggests, felt her mouth water at the aroma of his heart roasting over the coals of a campfire. ("The smell of roasting meat is largely the same no matter what type of meat," Brown writes.) She has consumed the flesh and organs of a traveling companion, while some of the others, huddled a few feet away, have done the same with her father. She may very well have survived a plot to kill (and, need I mention, eat) her. After reaching safety, she learns that her younger sister survived, in part, by eating their mother and that the family's entire fortune was buried and lost. Because the narrative follows Sarah so closely, I expected the moment when she and the rest of the "snowshoe party" survivors reach civilization to be as emotional as that moment in "Endurance" - Alfred Lansing's incomparable telling of Shackleton's travails - when Sir Ernest appears like a ghost at the door of a whaling station manager on the island of South Georgia, from where he had set out more than a year before. When the man realizes who it is, he is overcome, and it's hard, as a reader, not to feel the same. But Sarah Graves's arrival at Johnson's Ranch is strangely unmoving. We know well the horrid details of her journey, but we don't really know her. We don't know any of them. I cared no more about Sarah Graves than I did about Levinah Murphy or William Eddy or Patrick Breen or George Donner or Margret Reed or her albino servant, Baylis Williams. (Though I maintained a puerile interest in Charles Burger and whether he'd be eaten.) Sarah Graves was 21 when she and her husband joined her family on its way west. It's not Brown's fault, I suspect. Donner Party journal entries are maddeningly terse. The same flinty reserve that kept the emigrants pushing west made their journals as stony and cold as the mountains that undid them. The day the first relief party finally arrives at Truckee Lake, Patrick Breen's diary entry begins with the weather: "Fine & pleasant froze hard last night." He gives brief mention to the 10 men who "arrived this morning from Bear Valley with provisions" - and then gets back to the weather ("Some . . . say the snow will be here until June"). Brown, a historian loath to take liberties with the facts of his narrative and characters, is pushed to conjecture: "And fine and pleasant as well, it must have seemed to Patrick Breen that last night, to be sitting in his cabin with the miracle of fresh-baked bread set before him." The members of the Donner Party were circumspect as well on the topic of cannibalism. When Breen takes note of a fellow emigrant's plans to "commence on Milt & eat him," Breen's reaction, in full, reads: "It is distressing." Whether the cannibals are mum from shame or from Brown's editing, I can't say. One of his goals is to restore dignity to the Donner emigrants, whose courage and decency have, over the years, taken a back seat to their menu. To those who would criticize certain of the party for considering cannibalism only a few days after their food ran out, Brown points out that the pioneers had no understanding of hypothermia and believed the dead had starved, not frozen, and that they were on the fast track to the same fate. Not that the text is wanting for lurid details. I kept interrupting my husband, Ed, to relay the latest Donner dinner horror. "They're toasting their moccasins," I'd say. Ed happened to be reading Calvin Trillin's "Feeding a Yen." "Calvin's eating fish tacos in Barbados," he'd answer. It went on this way for 100 pages. Boiled ox bones. Macaroni pie. Luis's organs! Pain baguette. "The Indifferent Stars Above" is an ideal pairing of talent and material. In "Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894," Brown showed himself to be a deft and ambitious storyteller, sifting through the copious and often conflicting details of dozens of survivor and eye-witness accounts to forge a trim, surging minute-by-minute narrative. He takes more side trips here with snow than he did with fire. In almost every chapter, he steps away from the events at hand to provide historical or medical context. With a few exceptions, it's engrossing stuff. Brown delves into the primitive morality of feral tribes and the psychology of extreme trauma. He covers birth control and hygiene on the pioneer trail, the latter surely contributing to the former: "They smelled not just of sweat but also of urine and excrement and menstrual blood and yeast infections and halitosis and tooth decay." The science of starvation and of hypothermia is well-traveled terrain, but Brown manages to bring new (to me, anyway) offerings to the table. I knew, for instance, that people throw off their clothes in the final minutes of hypothermia, but hadn't known there was a name for it ("paradoxical undressing") or why it happens (when the body gives up and stops hoarding blood for the vital organs, blood suddenly rushes back into the extremities and skin). Brown isn't a showy writer, and that's probably for the best. With tragedy of this scale, an unadorned telling of the events speaks loudest. Consider the phrase "they loaded their packs with their blankets and what remained of their former companions. . . ." The understatement of simple circumstance delivers the wallop all by itself. After reaching safety, Sarah Graves learns that her younger sister survived, in part, by eating their mother. Mary Roach's most recent book, "Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex," has just been released in paperback.