Dark Journey: The Tragedy of the Donner Party

Of the hundreds of wagon trains which headed west during the 1800’s, only one - the Donner-Reed party - left an indelible imprint on our national imagination. This train’s fame was sealed by its terrible fate.

Allan Eckert’s compelling new book, Dark Journey, provides a rigorously accurate and comprehensive, yet poignant and dramatic presentation of the Donner-Reed Wagon Train’s grim, harrowing odyssey from Illinois westward to California, beginning in the spring of 1846 and finally - mercifully ending in the spring of the following year. Caught in the Sierra Nevada mountains by the icy grip of an early winter, the Donner party built crude shelters and struggled to survive. Soup made of boiled leather and powdered bones became a luxury. Of the 79 persons who started, 34 died before an expedition out of California rescued the survivors.

Dark Journey is fact, not fiction, The incidents described in this work actually occurred; the dates are historically accurate; the characters, regardless of how major or minor, actually lived the roles in which they are herein portrayed. It is the result of extended and intensive research through a multitude of original documents and contemporary accounts of this haunting chapter in American history.

Hardback, 2009, 334 pages, index, notes, biblio, $25.00