Okay, so I watched the movie

Well, all you aspiring screenwriters can take comfort: there's still no Donner Party movie. At least, not one that you need to worry about competing with.

As you probably all know, Anacapa Entertainment's new film, The Donner Party, was released on DVD on January 26. I got my copy yesterday and have watched it twice. I don't quite know what to say, but that won't stop me from saying it.

Donner Party fans will notice a certain similarity between the movie and the story of the "Forlorn Hope" snowshoers who set out from the lake camp in December 1846 to seek help. While reference is made to a wagon train stuck in the Sierra Nevada snow, to someone named Hastings who misled them, and to other emigrants camped elsewhere named Donner and "Kessyberg," the story centers on characters named Foster, Eddy, Graves, Fosdick, Stanton, etc., who set out on snowshoes to California to get help; some people die and are cannibalized. Sound familiar? Good. Because not much else will.

I could go on at length about all the discrepancies, but it would take ages and I don't want to rag on the producers too much. I've talked to enough screenwriters over the years to know how hard the Donner story would be to capture on film: large cast; quantities of animals; wagons; costumes; number of sets; varied terrain (prairie, desert, mountain); varied weather conditions (thunder, searing heat, snow); length and complexity of the story; and so on. Obviously, some liberties have to be taken and events telescoped.

What I don't get, however, is the necessity to butcher the plot. Why? Why not stick closer to the truth? Why, for instance, make Foster the rich fop and Eddy his teamster? Why make up an imaginary cache of provisions left along the trail? The truth just isn't dramatic enough? While he lay dying, Franklin Ward Graves besought his daughters to use his body for food, but apparently that's far too tame. This Mr. Graves (the least gaunt person in the flick) kills himself so his daughters -- his clean, well-kempt, full-fleshed daughters -- will have something to eat.

This leads me to my major beef with the movie: there's no real desperation, no real suffering. There's no cabin full of thin, crying children, no reference to mothers whose milk has dried up from starvation watching helpless as their babies die a slow, agonizing death -- no sense of the real fear that motivated the snowshoers.

Nor of their subsequent trials. There's no Christmas blizzard huddled under blankets, no raving Patrick Dolan, no Sarah Foster comforting her dying little brother in her lap, no powder horn blowing up or axe getting lost. There's some violence but little enough gore for a movie about cannibalism: somebody dies or is killed, then there's a scene of people eating -- which was actually a pretty good way to handle it, IMO. But there's little sense of their growing weakness, the toll the journey has taken on them:

""[Eddy] staggered like a drunken man; and when he came to a fallen tree, though no more than a foot high, he had to stoop down, put his hands upon it, and get over it by a sort of rolling motion. They were under the necessity of sitting down to rest about every quarter of a mile. The slightest thing caused them to stumble and fall. They were almost reduced to the helplessness of little children in their first essays to walk. The women would fall and weep like infants, and then rise and totter along again." -- J. Quinn Thornton, Oregon and California in 1848, II, 151.

This just doesn't come across in the movie.

When the real Forlorn Hope finally reached the settlement, they were skeletal and nearly naked because their clothes had fallen apart; their trail was marked by blood from their frostbitten feet. In Anacapa's parody, the Forlorn Hope was a bunch of well-fed, spiffily dressed day trippers who offed one another the first time their tummies rumbled. With no depiction of their physical and mental deterioration, they come across as depraved, not desperate.

The film does get a few things right. For instance, the pioneers' use of "Mr." and "Mrs." instead of first names, and the emigrants eying each other around the campfire. I also liked the version of "Barbara Allen" sung during the closing credits. On the whole, however, it's a shame for the producers, the viewers, and the memory of the Donner Party that the film didn't turn out better.

More gore

Well, matters move apace! Anybody willing to risk driving up into the Sierra in the dead of winter can attend a special screening of Anacapa Entertainment's new flick, The Donner Party, at the Sugar Bowl's Judah Lodge this weekend. It's showing at 7:00 P.M. on Sunday, January 17, $10 at the door. Director T.J. Martin and several cast members will be there, and there'll be a Q-and-A session after the showing. If anybody reading this goes, let the rest of us know what you think.

Here's website with a photo gallery of stills and a different trailer showing a bizarre plot twist:

http://www.movieline.com/2010/01/donner-party-trailer-tastefully-finds-slasher-pic-in-historic-tragedy.php

The more I see of this movie, the less I like it. Anybody else have a problem with it, or is it just me?

Tribute

I've been slaving away at Donnerpedia and it's getting closer to being ready for prime time -- no launch date in sight, though -- and in reviewing New Light and all the information I've collected over the years, I have to say it's my readers who have helped me the most.

Oh, sure, I've pestered my share of historians, researchers, librarians, archivists, and sundry other victims over the years, and they've all been helpful, some of them exceptionally so -- Will Bagley, for instance, has been putting up with me since about 1993.

But really, as a group, it's been readers who have helped the most, often in unexpected ways. Readers have supplied me with information and photos, blown my mind with new ideas and insights, asked terrific questions, pointed out errors, inconsistencies, and typos, given me praise and encouragement, and generally kept me going. Oh, sure, there's an occasional crank, jerk, or weirdo, but on the whole it's been good.

I just wish I could remember everyone. I've moved into new computers twice and had a couple of hard drive crashes, so I've lost a lot of the e-mail I'd hoarded over the years. However, a few people stand out. Jo Ann Schmidt, for instance, is the Donner Genealogy Queen, as far as I'm concerned, and then there's Gabrielle Burton, and Marilyn Acuff, and Anne Trussell, and then there are all the descendants, Donner Party buffs, historians, students, novelists, dog handlers, genealogists, reporters, documentarians...

I could go on. However, the one person I really want to thank is Ken Dunn. He's corresponded with me for years, listened to me whine and wonder and rhapsodize, answered questions, asked questions, helped with research, alerted me to news, and much, much more. Most of all, he's a bouncer -- not a chucker-out, an idea bouncer. Ken knows his stuff when it comes to the Donner Party, and when I need to really thrash something out, I write to Ken. Answering questions all the time gets a bit wearing, so it's a relief to have somebody knowledgeable to talk to. Thanks, guy.

And we have a winner!

Last night as I went to bed after posting my quiz, I thought, "Dumb idea-- nobody's going to answer." This morning I get up and not only is there an answer but a winner. Eric Baumgartner identified the three errors in the blurb describing the new Donner Party movie :

Based on the harrowing true story, The Donner Party picks up after William Hastings steers a group, nicknamed "Forlorn Hope," off course by promising a shorter route to California through the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Eric posted to the comments section:

(1) Hastings' first name was Lansford, not William.
(2) The group that he led astray was not the "Forlorn Hope," but the Donner Party, of course.
(3) Hastings steered them to a shortcut through the Wasatch and across the Utah salt desert.

Absolutely correct! So, Eric, if you'll e-mail me (there's a link at New Light on the Donner Party) and send me your address, I'll mail you your postcard.

New Donner Party film clip

Check out this newly available clip from the film The Donner Party. Franklin Ward Graves goes bugeye crazy and takes his son-in-law down. And pipe the snowshoes -- guess the Forlorn Hope did their outfitting at Cabela's. "We don't need no stinkin' oxbows..."



QUIZ

Identify three errors in the following blurb:

Based on the harrowing true story, The Donner Party picks up after William Hastings steers a group, nicknamed "Forlorn Hope," off course by promising a shorter route to California through the Sierra Nevada Mountains."

First one to answer correctly gets a vintage postcard with a Donner Party theme.

Happy 2010!

It looks like 2010 will start off with a bang for Donner Party buffs -- the long-awaited movie is scheduled to be released on DVD on January 26. You can pre-order a copy at Amazon.com.

A lot of people have written me asking about this film, but I've had a very busy fall so haven't tried to keep up with it. Here's what I know, with some opinions thrown in:

This film, the first production of Anacapa Entertainment, started out with the title The Forlorn. It's about the "Forlorn Hope," a party of 15 emigrants who set out from the Donner Party camps in December 1846 on snowshoes to seek help for the stranded wagon train.

The film premiered at the Austin Film Festival in October, with two results: the producers decided against a theatrical release but to send it straight to DVD, and they changed the title to The Donner Party.

I can't say much about the straight-to-DVD decision; it strikes me as unfortunate and must have been a disappointment to the producers, but that's not my call. I do wish, however, they hadn't changed the title. The Forlorn is much more evocative, to say nothing of accurate, while The Donner Party is trite, inaccurate (it's not about the Donner Party, only a fraction of it), and already taken (by Ric Burns' documentary, to say nothing of myriad books and articles).

However, the website bills the movie as "a true story of survival," which I take exception to. It changes the facts, the cast of characters, their names, their relationships with one another (it has Eddy as Foster's teamster, for instance), their motivations, leaves out a lot of details, and presents the "desperate" emigrants as well-fed, well-dressed urbanites who step out of a bandbox to tramp through the mountains.

Of course, the foregoing criticism is unfair because I haven't seen the movie yet and I don't give a rat's about much besides historical accuracy. The film may have all sorts of redeeming features that capture the drama of the Forlorn Hope despite the historical deficits. I hope so, and I'm looking forward to finding out.

Some links:

Preview -- (There's also a clip on the official website but I can't get it to load no matter what browser I use, so I'm including this one; it may or may not be the same.)

Reviews from the Austin Film Festival -- Click on the "Reviews" tab to read all of them.

Slackerwood review

In other news...

Oh, yes, I've been meaning to mention: As regular readers might recall, I've been unable to edit New Light On the Donner Party for ages and have been investigating various alternatives: new software, new host, new format. Since late October I've been working on a new site, which I'm calling Donnerpedia, unless somebody can suggest a better title. Anyway, it's a reworked version of New Light, using Wikipedia-type software and navigation. I've been learning the software, experimenting, and editing like mad -- there's a slew of information to add and every page has to be edited. It will also have some graphics, unlike New Light.

There's no projected launch date yet. I hoped to have it up the first of the year, but it's taking forever to translate everything into Wikinese. Keep watching the blog and I'll let you let you know when it's up and running.

New offering from Gabrielle Burton

Last year the University of Nebraska published Gabrielle Burton's memoir Searching for Tamsen Donner, in which she chronicles her quest to find the elusive heroine of the Donner Party. Next year Hyperion will publish Gabrielle's novel, Impatient with Desire, which tells Tamzene's story through an imaginative recreation of her lost diary. The book isn't due out until March 1, 2010, but can be pre-ordered through Amazon at a significant reduction of price. (Standard disclaimer: I have no financial interest in the book.) For more about Gabrielle and her work, visit her website: www.gabrielleburton.com

Save your money

I got my copy of Allan W. Eckert's Dark Journey: The Tragedy of the Donner Party in the mail today, and it's... bad. Really bad. I haven't even read the book yet, just the notes, and perused the text here and there, and I'm telling you, folks, it's a train wreck.

First, despite the publisher's flowery obfuscations, it's a novel: Eckert makes things up. Now, history can be dull, and of course one wants to liven it up, recreate what people did and said. But a what point does reasonable inference turn into sheer fabrication? Wherever you draw the line, Eckert is on the wrong side of it.

Second, the book is poorly edited. I did a double take at "Russsell," for instance, and don't get me started on the internal inconsistencies, the maps, or the index.

Third, it's full of errors. Small, annoying errors, whoppers, howlers, and outright falsehoods. One particularly choice example: According to Eckert, although John Snyder was buried at Gravelly Ford, he was killed at Iron Point, "40 miles east." First of all, why would anybody haul a corpse for three days just to bury it? Second, there's the minor matter of geography: Iron Point is 80 miles west of Gravelly Ford. And third, the primary sources state that Snyder was buried the day after he was killed. This is in a "rigorously accurate" history? Clio help us. And this is only the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

I expected to like this book, having heard only good things about Eckert's work, and am sorry to have to write this.

P.S. It's very nicely bound, though.

Online archaeology video

Some time ago a reader kindly sent me a link to On the Trail of Tragedy: Excavation of the Donner Party Site, a video about the 1994 excavation at Alder Creek, which you can watch for free online. Check it out!

New Book Available

I checked the Jesse Stuart Foundation website yesterday and Allan Eckert's new Donner Party book, Dark Journey, is available for purchase here. 334 p., $25.00. Haven't read it yet, but hope to soon.

It's My Bloggy and I'll Crow If I Want To...

It suddenly occurred to me that I coulda mentioned this a coupla months ago: in August I was awarded the Oregon-California Trails Association's Merrill J. Mattes Award for Excellence in Writing for my article "Survivor: Sarah Graves Fosdick," which was published in Overland Journal 26, no. 1 (Spring 2008). The award itself is a handsome engraved plaque on a walnut base and I have no idea what to do with it. Anyway, it's a thumping great honor and I was dumbfounded (and a bit teary) when they notified me. Thanks, OCTA, and everybody whose help and encouragement made it possible.

Demanding to be haunted

Since it's Halloween and all...

Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwrecks. --Robert Louis Stevenson

One would think that, of all places, the scenes of the Donner Party tragedy would be haunted, but there just aren't many Donner ghost stories, and with few exceptions the ones I've encountered are distinctly unsatisfactory. The paucity of stories is no doubt due to the fact that nobody actually lives at Donner sites to witness anything (if there's anything to witness at all, of course). Oh, sure, people "live" temporarily at the campground at the state park, but not at the actual cabin locations, and while the (shudder) development around Prosser Reservoir blights the environs of the Donner family camp, no one lives at Alder Creek. Whatever walks the meadow walks alone.

I've read a variety of "true" Donner ghost stories which are obviously based on peoples' faulty notions of what happened back in 1846-7, like the appearance of a woman in bloody, old-fashioned clothing (taken as "proof" that Louis Keseberg murdered Tamzene Donner). Pfft. I much prefer stories of vague, creeping dread that might -- or might not -- be due solely to the imagination of the percipient.

For example, back about 1997 I asked a Donner Memorial State Park ranger if she knew of any odd happenings. To my delight, she said yes. Occasionally when staff worked alone in the museum at night they would experience disquieting sensations of not being alone, of being watched, and would hear unexplained noises.

Then there was the woman who bought a Murphy cabin vial with tags signed by Frances Donner Wilder. The purchaser had never had any problems before, but after she displayed the vial in her home next to some old family memorabilia, odd things began to happen. She and her husband heard the sounds of a child's voice, her dogs whined and growled savagely when in proximity to the vial, a small rocking chair moved and rocked by itself, and so on. When they got the vial out of the house, the phenomena ceased.

Probably my favorite Donner "ghost" story comes from Alder Creek, where, in 1998, a young woman named Elizabeth toured the site. It was late afternoon and she was by herself -- no other cars in the lot, no other people anywhere around -- yet she was overcome with the sensation of not being alone, of panic, and depression as she walked the site. While using the women's restroom, she heard a sound like scuffling feet and a tinkering noise, as of someone sorting through a toolbox, coming from the men's room next door. She was relieved to get away.

When I related this story to a friend with whom I'd visited Alder Creek, she was taken aback. "Oh, wow," she said. "I heard weird noises from next door and got a really creepy feeling when I was in that restroom myself."

Another new book

Well, this one sneaked up on me -- I had no idea there was a new Donner Party book in the works when I stumbled on some buzz about Dark Journey by Allan Eckert, published by the Jesse Stuart Foundation. You can read more about the book here. Sounds interesting, but it looks like we'll have to wait to order it -- I just visited the foundation's website and the book isn't listed yet. Keep checking!

Had to laugh...

Today my genealogy program told me that Noah James was the half-brother of the father-in-law of the brother-in-law of a second cousin of the husband of a great-granddaughter of George Donner.

I did not ask for this information.

John Sinclair

Exactly 160 years ago today, San Francisco's Alta California published news of the death of John Sinclair, an early California pioneer who had participated in the efforts to rescue the Donner Party.

Sinclair arrived in California in 1834, obtained a land grant, and plowed the first furrow in the Sacramento Valley, according to the Alta. He settled at Rancho del Paso, 2-3 miles north of Sutter's Fort across the American River, and was serving as the alcalde of the Northern District in the winter of 1847 when the news of the Forlorn Hope's arrival at Johnson's Ranch reached him. He promptly sent a message to Washington A. Bartlett, the alcalde at San Francisco, soliciting aid, then hurried up to Johnson's to interview the survivors. Sinclair helped coordinate the rescue of the Donner Party, sheltered some of the refugees in his home, and later, in May and June of 1847, officiated at the marriages of five of the survivors.

Sinclair did well during the early days of the gold rush and amassed a considerable fortune. In the spring of 1849 he and his family set out for New York by the isthmus route. During the voyage he became ill (cholera, according to some, yellow fever according to others) and died aboard the steamer shortly before it arrived in New Orleans.

Wildfire on Hastings Cutoff

Skull Valley was full of smoke on the afternoon of on August 2, 1846, when the nine members of the Bryant-Russell Party arrived at Redlum Spring. They camped early and rose in the middle of the night to begin preparations to cross the Great Salt Lake Desert. At 1:30 A.M. on August 3, Edwin Bryant wrote, the nearly full moon* looked "like a ball of fire, and shining with a dim and baleful light, seemed struggling downwards through the thick bank of smoky vapor that overhung and curtained the high ridge of mountains to the west of us." The Donner Party, passing through the area a little over three weeks after Bryant, made no mention smoke or fire, one of the few misfortunes they missed on their disastrous trek west.

163 years later, the moon is full and Skull Valley is again filled with the smoke of a wildfire. A lightning strike near Iosepa on August 6, 2009, sparked the Big Pole Fire, which, fanned by the wind, has consumed more than 44,000 acres as it's raced north along the Stansbury Mountains on eastern side of the valley. BLM firecrews battled the flames all day Thursday and today; this morning the smell of smoke hung in the air in Salt Lake City, over40 miles away.


*The U.S. Naval Observatory website provides details of moon phases -- type in any year you like between 1700 and 2035 in the search box and click "Get data."

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.