The life of a young bride in the nineteenth century was far from today’s extravagant weddings and cushy, exotic honeymoons. In the 1840s, honeymoon referred to a period of presumed marital bliss following the nuptials. Privileged brides often embarked on a wedding journey or bridal tour with friends and family, but it was unlikely that Sarah Graves, the young bride from Steuben Township, Illinois, would have been able to afford a celebratory tour. Instead, after her marriage to Jay Fosdick, she found herself among family and friends who had sold their farms and businesses in order to cross the Missouri River and make an epic cross-country journey to California.
What most people know of the Donner Party is filtered through a single lens: cannibalism, a loaded word that trumps everything else related to this remarkable trip. But in The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride, Daniel James Brown presents a much broader picture of the Donner Party, humanizing the pioneers and in some cases heroes and scoundrels who would otherwise be trapped in a restricted mythological view.
Carrying only what would fit in the covered wagons, the group set out with optimism and anticipation. What starts as a seemingly benign journey women gossiping and sharing folk remedies and recipes, kids frolicking around the campfire begins to unravel amidst poor decisions, misfortune and the ill-fated decision to join the Donner Party.
The hardships and the doubts were beginning to accumulate like the dust on the backs of their plodding oxen, writes Brown. With grass (the gasoline of the era) slowly disappearing across the plains, worry quickly turned to keeping the oxen strong and fed. The families varying levels of food supply, money and health also took an emotional and physical toll on the travelers. In the early part of the century, between a fifth and a third of all children died before they reached 10 years old, and life on the California Trail was no more promising.
Brown’s writing and descriptions make it easy to build a connection with Sarah and her family. When the party follows a stranger over an unknown route into the Wasatch, across the salt flats, and regroups in a fateful decision to camp in Truckee Meadows before they tackle the Sierra Nevadas (ultimately, in layers of wool, relying on unwieldy snowshoes measuring one foot by two feet), I found myself rooting for Sarah’s survival.
To the credit of the author, what could have been a voyeuristic disaster tale is transformed into a well-researched, gripping account of the pioneering lifestyle: hope and dreams and loss and disappointment. Brown straddles history and modern times with a storyteller’s genius, complementing suspense with science (basal metabolic rate, or BMR: how many calories a person needs to consume to maintain weight), psychology (were the men willing to give up more quickly than the women?), and current day perspective.
He writes: It is difficult for us, with our 21st century view of the earth replete with satellite imagery, the internet, 24-hour news broadcasts, GPS systems, and high-resolution topographical maps to comprehend just how potentially terrifying it was for the snowshoe party to come to any fork in what they imagined to be their route to salvation.
Even without that eyewitness view, Brown succeeds at retracing the steps and capturing the pain and emotion, leaving the reader questioning whether the Donner Party is a group of heroes, or simply ordinary people doing what they need to do to survive in the face of extreme conditions.
Reviewed by Tara Kusumoto
