Back from California

In my last post, I described the new Graves family treasure I recently acquired, a collection of letters, photos, and other items from the family of Eleanor Graves McDonnell's daughter Mary Greene. Last weekend I made an all-too-brief visit to California to show some of the pictures to Graves family descendants in Sonoma County. Friday night we shared a great dinner, visiting and chatting, and then I hauled out the photos. Wish I'd had a tape recorder to capture all the stories and their variants ("Well, the way I heard it...") that were told that night!

The following afternoon, some of us made a pilgrimage to Knight's Valley, where Eleanor and William McDonnell homesteaded. It's on the eastern side of the county, near Mount St. Helena and southeast of the Geysers (now a geothermal plant). The ranch, sprawling over as many as 3,000 acres of rolling hills, passed down through the family for two generations, then was divided into several large parcels and sold. We visited the lot where the ranch house was located, with the owner's permission (it's on a private road). The original building is long gone, but the modern house occupies pretty much the same location. The well house, much modified, is still in the front yard, the garden where Uncle Will Graves grew vegetables he liked (but no one else did) is a bit further down, and a tiny private cemetery perches atop a steep hill behind the house.

After a hot tramp around part of the property and up to the cemetery, we looked at photos again. The owner is very interested in the history of the property and was eager to see what the 1870 ranch house -- the one so many people remembered so fondly -- had looked like. As it turned out, there'd been no known photos of it until the Mary McDonnell Greene collection showed up this spring, and I was delighted to be able to display three close up views of the house taken at different times, and a fourth, taken from the road, that shows it with the hills behind. After a pleasant visit, we set off again.

Calistoga is in the upper Napa Valley about ten miles southeast of the old McDonnell place. Many emigrants of 1846 settled in the area, including the Ritchies, Tuckers, Kelloggs, and some of the Graves family. Eleanor lived there before moving up to Knight's Valley and her sister Lovina lived all of her adult life there. Their sister and brother, Sarah and William, also lived there for some years. (Louis Keseberg was a short term resident, too -- he was a partner in Sam Brannan's distillery in the 1860s.) We stopped at the Pioneer Cemetery on Highway 128, where several of the family and their descendants are buried, and after poking around a bit, detoured past some other family sites. Then we headed back toward Santa Rosa via Kortum Canyon Road, which I'd never taken before, a marvelous narrow twisty road overhung with gnarled branches dripping Spanish moss... Ah, California!

New treasure

In March 1847 Mrs. Elizabeth Graves hid her family's wealth near Donner Lake. When the coins were rediscovered in May 1891, the story of the lost Graves treasure hit newspapers across the country. On Thursday I became the recipient of a new Graves treasure, a collection of photographs, letters, and other material from the family of Eleanor Graves McDonnell's daughter, Mary McDonnell Greene.

Mary grew up on her parents' ranch in Knight's Valley, Sonoma County. When she married Lester Downing Greene in 1878 she moved to his spread along the Sacramento River, but missed the hill country and spent her summers at her old home. Her children accompanied her and grew to love the area as well. Consequently the collection includes numerous pictures of the McDonnell place and Eleanor's side of the family. There are also many letters from various relatives to Mary. I haven't had a chance to read them, but there's at least one letter from Eleanor, one or two from her husband William McDonnell, several from Mary's siblings, and many, many more. At least half of the of the letters and photos are from Lester's family, the Greenes, Beals, Buckmans, and others, so it will take a while to sort everything out.

What does this have to do with the Donner Party? Well, nothing, really. I doubt I'll find out anything new about 1846-47! It is, however, fascinating to learn more about what happened to some of the survivors in later years, to see their faces and pieces of their lives, and I am grateful for the privilege. Thanks again, Ron!

Latest Donner book

Well, it's here! Daniel James Brown's The Indifferent Stars Above is now available. Mary Roach, in her favorable New York Times review, described it as "an ideal pairing of talent and material" and Brown as "a deft and ambitious storyteller, sifting through the copious and often conflicting details... to forge a trim, surging, minute by minute narrative." (Roach is no stranger to the Donner Party, having written about ghost hunting at Donner Memorial State Park in Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.)

FWIW, I'm delighted with the book. While I care about all the members of the Donner Party, I've always been partial to the Graves family, and this is the first major book centered on them -- the Reeds and the Donners get most of the press. Dan works in a great deal of interesting information about the Graves family and about starvation, hypothermia, and other scientific aspects of the story. He also revises the Forlorn Hope's itinerary and gives a explanation as to how the snowshoers went astray. (I wish he'd included a map, but can't fault him for not doing so: finding decent cartography is a big problem for trail writers.)

Various reviews of Indifferent Stars have already appeared on the Internet. Some writers don't like the discursions, others do. Donner Party buffs will, I think, welcome the new information, new approach, and new things to think about.

Author news

James D. Houston, whose 2001 novel Snow Mountain Passage focused on the Reeds of the Donner Party, died in on Thursday, April 16, 2009. The house in Santa Cruz where he lived for many years had once been the home of Patty Reed Lewis. Read his obituary here.

On a cheerier note, Gabrielle Burton's Searching for Tamsen Donner has received some great reviews. I found it a delightful read, myself, and am glad the press has been positive. You can find out more about Gabrielle and her book at her new website.

I also heard from Daniel James Brown. His The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride -- the bride in question being Sarah Graves Fosdick -- will be out soon. I met Dan at the symposium at the end of the Donner Party tour in 2006 and know how much work he's put into this book, so I'm really looking forward to reading it. If you visit his website at HarperCollins you can pre-order a copy.

Good news!

Gabrielle Burton's new book, Searching for Tamsen Donner, is available ahead of schedule from the University of Nebraska Press. I haven't had a chance to read much of the published version, but can tell you that it's quite a story. In the summer of 1977, bitten by the Tamsen bug, Gabrielle, her husband, and five daughters piled into their station wagon and set out from their home in Buffalo, New York, on the trail of Tamsen Donner, a two-month oddyssey that took them to Springfield, Illinois, Independence, Missouri, and across the country to Donner Lake.  Gabrielle weaves Tamsen's story into her own, and a fine tale it is. As a bonus, she publishes all of Tamzene's known letters at the end.

Today's anniversaries

One hundred sixty-two years ago today, on February 19, 1847, the first relief party reached Donner Lake, a factoid which appears in several "on this day in history" features, including Chase's Calendar of Events, History.com, and in a number of blogs. It's gratifying to see so much recognition of this event, and amusing to read some of the comments

By an interesting coincidence, today is also the anniversary of the death of Eliza Donner Houghton, who died in 1921 at the age of 78 (a fact noted by at least one other blogger). She's buried in the Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.

"The Forlorn" trailer

Today I got an e-mail from John E. Moore, producer of The Forlorn, Anacapa Entertainment's forthcoming movie based on the band of snowshoers (later known as the Forlorn Hope) who set out from the camp at Donner Lake in December 1846 to get help from Sutter's Fort. Anacapa's in the process of scoring/mixing the film; no release date has been set yet. You can view a trailer here. It's kinda hard to get a feel for the movie, but I must say I was surprised at how well groomed these "desperate" snowshoers look. Naval officer Joseph T. Downey had to say about other 1846 emigrants after they crossed the mountains:

"... such a mass was never seen before by mortal man. They were literally the rag tag and bobtail of all Creation. Here they came, some with coats and some no coats--some with deer skin trowsers and some with awful looking things in the shape of trowsers, some with moccasins, some with Boots, some with shoes and a great majority with no covering to their feet. In one thing however they were uniform: they had good rifles and shocking Bad Hats."

The Forlorn's Donner Party members, however, are clean, well-fed, and well-dressed. Musta spruced themselves up before they set out...

"Necrosis" trailer

Last year I blogged about a forthcoming horror movie with a Donner Party theme, and now it looks like Necrosis is nearing release. From what I can tell, it has the usual plot: a group of young people goes off to have fun at some location or other that turns out to have a dark history; they are terrorized by a specter from the past that stalks them and strikes them down one by one. In this case, of course, the location is a cabin in the Sierra Nevada, haunted by some sort of horror left over from the Donner Party. Here's the trailer from YouTube. Ya know, the tall guy with with the axe does look rather like Louis Keseberg...

2009 looks promising for Donner Party buffs

With two, hopefully three major books about the Donner Party coming out, 2009 will be a banner year for followers of the saga.

First there's Gabrielle Burton's Searching for Tamsen Donner, published by the University of Nebraska Press and due out on March 1. Gabrielle describes her personal quest for the elusive heroine and ends with the first publication of all of Tamzene's known letters.

And you won't have long to wait for the next one: Daniel James Brown's book focusing on Sarah Graves Fosdick, The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride, is coming out on May 19. It's published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. Dan has done a great job on his research and contributes a lot of interesting new perspectives.

As for the Alder Creek archaeology book, it's still in the works with no word yet on a publication date, but may well be out before the end of the year.

Other news: Using new software, I've been working on the New Light on the Donner Party website and am hoping to get the revised version up in the not too far distant future. (There are a lot of technical details to master and fuss with, so don't hold your breath!) I'm editing typos, correcting other errors, adding details. I've turned up a lot of biographical info: added two new individuals to the "Rescuers" page, info about Charles L. Cady, the Donners, the Reeds, Noah James, Walter Herron, and others. I've also turned up a lot of info about peripheral issues, like Walter Herron's and Tamzene Donner's families, which is interesting but not exactly relevant to the Donner story so probably won't make it to the website.

Also, Ric Burns' 1992 documentary The Donner Party, is available for download at various websites, including Blockbuster, LimeWire, The Movie Downloads, and others.

That's all for now -- Happy New Year, folks!

"Unsolved History" episode available

Five years ago, Termite Arts produced an episode about the Donner Party for the Discovery Channel program "Unsolved History" which aired on October 8, 2003. As I wrote at the time, it was "not a resounding success. Most correspondents thought it had a jarringly split personality. The first part featured reenactment experiments, the second the archaeological discoveries at Alder Creek. Both parts were interesting, but there was little continuity between the two and many found the emphasis on cannibalism in the second section sensationalistic and offensive."

Despite its flaws, however, the episode is a must-see for dedicated Donner buffs and several people have written me hoping to find a copy. It was briefly available for purchase at the Discovery Channel website, but hasn't been listed there for the last several years. Now you can buy a copy at Amazon.com for $14.95. Not a bad price, and just in time for your Christmas gift-giving... (Obligatory disclaimer: No, I have no financial interest in the sale of this item.)

The slate from Alder Creek

When I got to Alder Creek in July 2004 I was eager to learn if anything had turned up at the dig yet, so I stopped a likely looking woman in the parking lot. Yes, she said, she was with the dig, they had indeed been finding things, and mentioned pieces of broken writing slate. When I heard that, I got chills -- Tamzene Donner had been a school teacher and took school supplies to California! That was leaping to a conclusion, of course, and I knew that it didn't necessarily have anything to do with Tamzene, so I talked myself down.

After the dig, however, some of the team rhapsodized about the slate, envisioning how Tamzene tried to "normalize" the situation by teaching the children. This is a heckuva lot of assumptions. For one thing, it isn't at all certain which camp was excavated. The evidence, to me, suggests that it was more likely Jacob Donner's than George's; if so, Tamzene Donner is much less likely to have been involved with any artifacts found there. In addition, there was no proof that the slate had been used at all, let alone by whom, and there are many other ways the slate could have been used besides as a writing surface. As a flat, smooth, heatproof, waterproof object, a "writing" slate would make a dandy tray, trivet, spoon rest, cutting board, platter, plate, etc.; the fact that the fragments of slate were found near the hearth might suggest some of these uses. (Then again, if it had been used for writing, the fire would have been a source of light.)

At any rate, Molly Swords, one of Dr. Kelly Dixon's students, has completed the results of her study of the Alder Creek slate in the form of her master's thesis, A Clean Slate: The Archaeology of the Donner Party's Writing Slate Fragments. She was unable to bring up any traces of writing on the fragments, but has written an extensive history on the uses and types of school slates which is interesting in its own right. The thesis is available at the University of Montana's website as a PDF file.

Archaeology book

My frequent long silences don't mean that nothing is going on on the Donner front -- au contraire! I've been so busy, I don't know where to start.

I've sent in the first draft of my contribution to the Donner Party archaeology book, which was quite a relief, but now I'm working on revisions. Some interesting things have come up that I need to shoehorn in somehow.

Also, I worked with Will Bagley on his contribution to the book, and some prolonged digging revealed patterns in how the news of the Donner disaster reached the rest of the world. Ships carried files of the California Star and The Californian to Oregon and Hawaii, then to Boston, whence the story fanned out along the eastern seaboard. In the meanwhile, eastbound travelers had brought copies of the California newspapers overland to St. Louis, which became another vector. The first garbled hints reached the States in May 1847, but it wasn't until summer that the horrid truth became known. Between July and October 1847, paper after paper reprinted various articles from the Star and elsewhere.

The other contributors have been sending in their work, too, but the publication date is still up in the air, as far as I know.

Politics and the Donner Party

I hate politics, so it's a relief to get the election over with. What's really interesting is how the Donner Party kept popping up in the commentary.

This is nothing new; for instance, in 1998, one commentator wrote, "... even the staunchest defenders of the GOP are wondering how much progress there is in moving from the Republican to the 'Donner' party," and in 2005 another wrote, "Howard Dean is taking over the bloody reins from Terry McAuliffe, who had a hand in turning the Democrats into politics' answer to the Donner-party crossing." The 2008 election, however, has sprouted a bumper crop.

In February 2007, Barack Obama announced his candidacy at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, a building with several ties to an earlier president from the same state. Chicago Tribune writer Patrick T. Reardon described the senator as "wrapping himself in the mystique of Abraham Lincoln," and noted that the site has "less attractive" associations. Among other examples, he cited a nearby plaque honoring the departure of the ill-fated Donner Party in April 1846.

In March 2008, columnist Timothy Egan's Op-Ed article in the New York Times, "Donner Party Democrats," presented an extended analogy of the political process, ending, "These modern Dems press on, tearing into each other, crawling to get to the summit, still five months away... They are now ravenous with hunger, and it is starting to show. "

And then there was Jay Leno's quip on October 31: "It was on this day in 1846 that the Donner Party left for California. You know what happened there. Everything went wrong. They wound up eating each other.
Kind of like what's going on in the McCain campaign right now." (Ooops, Jay-- it was the same day in 1846 that the Donner Party got bogged down in the snow -- which, under the circumstances, is an even more apt analogy.)

Obviously, this is an equal opportunity analogy -- it can describe Democrats and Republicans -- but the people at this site have come up with the most unusual, if not tasteful, spin on the Donner Party and politics.

Modern poetry

A good friend and Donner Party buff was inspired by the last blog entry to compose a poem of his own:

There once was a boy name of Donner
Who feared he would soon be a goner.
So he munched on his Pa
And made lunch of his Ma
But kept mum as a grim point of honor.

Needless to say, he wants to remain anonymous.

Another verse version

Shana Youngdahl's Donner: A Passing has just become available from Finishing Line Press -- I haven't read it myself yet, but Cynthia Reeser and blogger Amy think it's great. I'll take their word for it because I'm not into modern poetry. Youngdahl isn't the first to write a verse interpretation of the Donner Party story -- Julia Altrocchi took it on in 1936 with Snow Covered Wagons, George Keithley in 1972 with The Donner Party, and Ruth Whitman in 1977 with Tamsen Donner: A Woman's Journey -- so it will be interesting to see how Youngdahl compares.

And another thing...

Remember a few posts ago I mentioned Rush Spedden's Overland Journal article about the Donner Party's route across the Salt Lake Valley? Well, as I expected, the latest issue has a response in a letter to the editor by Roy Tea, arguing that the Korns-Morgan hypothesis is correct and Rush is mistaken. I don't have an opinion myself, but if you're interested, check out Overland Journal 26:2.

New museum delayed

Dedicated in September 1962, the Emigrant Trail Museum at Donner Memorial State Park is now aging and inadequate, and is scheduled for replacement. However, the construction of the new High Sierra Crossing Museum, slated to begin last month, has been pushed back a year due to a delay in matching federal transportation grants. The new museum is now expected to open in 2010.

In the meantime, the old museum will continue to operate. It presents the history of the Donner Pass area, including natural history, Native Americans, overland emigration, the Donner Party, the transcontinental railroad, and more.

Goings on

Lots going on on the Donner Party front, mostly writing: two articles in the last issue of Overland Journal, a review of Ethan Rarick's Desperate Passage for the next issue of OJ, co-authoring a chapter for the upcoming Donner Party archaeology book with Will Bagley, an article about the remains of a man found in 1847 and 1849 above Donner Lake for Crossroads, reviewing two manuscripts of Donner Party books, correspondence with Donner buffs, and oh, yeah, trying to finish my own chapter for the archaeology book. None of this would be particularly onerous in itself, but with the concomittant research, and coming all at once, it eats up an astonishing amount of time.

Other people have been busy, too. For instance somebody just posted these photos of the historical marker commemorating Johnson Crossing, near the site of Johnson's Ranch. The ranch was a landmark on the old emigrant trail, being the first American settlement on the western side of the Sierra Nevada; it was the staging area for the Donner relief parties. Johnson's Ranch is also commemorated by another marker in a Wheatland park, but this monument is some distance away from the actual ranch site.

By the way...

Those who're interested can purchase Overland Journal 26:1 (Spring 2008), which contains three Donner Party articles, from the Oregon-California Trails Association. Phone (888) 811-6282, toll-free, to make a credit card purchase. $5.00 per copy, plus postage. (Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in sales of the issue.)

Donner, Donner everywhere (updated)

So much has been happening on the Donner Party front this spring that it's hard to know where to start.

Yesterday I was surprised and pleased to hear of another book in the works, this one with a very different approach. In 1973 Gabrielle Burton was bitten by the Tamzene Donner bug. Over the years she's pursued Tamzene, traveling to Newburyport, Mass., Elizabeth City, N.C., Springfield, Ill., and of course, the Donner Lake area, in her search, often with her family in tow. Next year the University of Nebraska Press will publish Searching for Tamsen Donner, which chronicles Gabrielle's quest, tells Tamzene's story, and includes the texts of Tamzene's letters. Sounds great!

Over the years, we've heard so much about the Donners and the Reeds (and more recently the Breens) that other Donner Party members have been slighted. I've tried to remedy this in my own research by concentrating more on the other families and single men, and am therefore pleased to report on projects involving the Murphy and Graves families.

Marysville, Calif., was named for Donner Party survivor Mary Murphy Covillaud; her sisters Sarah and Frances also lived there for several years, and their brother William was a prominent citizen of the town. I've been working with three Marysville ladies, all active in local history circles, who have developed a novel approach to presenting the story of the Murphy family: Sarah Murphy Foster (Kathy Sedler), Harriet Murphy Pike Nye (Sue Cejner-Moyers), and Mary Murphy Covillaud (Karen Compton) each take a turn to speak about part of the family's experience. The Three Murphy Sisters have been very well received and have gotten several requests for future presentations.

I was delighted to learn from Daniel James Brown that he's finished the first draft of his Donner Party book, Seeking Sarah (what is it with these missing Donner Party females?), which focuses on Sarah Graves Fosdick and the Graves family. I very much look forward to seeing it, because, although I try not to play favorites, I have a particular affinity for the Graveses -- five of the six surviving children of the family lived in the area of Northern California where I grew up, and descendants live there to this day. I've gotten to know several of them and they're fine folks. The Graves family's story, filtered through most histories' pro-Reed bias, has yet to be told adequately, and I'm confident that Dan will do them justice.

And then there are the movies. Necrosis, which wrapped in February, is a horror film: six friends, trapped by snow in an isolated cabin in the Sierra Nevada, are haunted by the ghosts of the Donner Party. Not a bad premise, really, but the creators perpetuate the tiresome canard that the Donner Party slaughtered one another a hunger-induced frenzy.

The filming of The Forlorn has just ended -- see previous blog entry called "The movie that couldn't be made." From the title and the dramatis personae, it's obviously about the Forlorn Hope -- the snowshoers who set out from Donner Lake in mid-December 1846 to seek help. More details coming soon!