Indifferent Stars Above, The: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party (P.S.)

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It was really jarring to read this attempt at traveling West by wagon when most of the stories I read are not this extreme. I think I've always tended to have a fairly romanticized idea of the pioneers that took their families and wagons and re-settled out west. (I'm obsessed, actually.) For a group of people that-by definition-failed at their goal of arriving safe and sound, they were a group of tough, badass women, men, and children. One event that significantly impacted the work of Yeats was his meeting with Maud Gonne, a young woman who became the subject of Yeats’s desires and infatuations. He came to care for her deeply, and she became the inspiration for many of his poems. Although he proposed marriage to her — at least four times — she never married him, saying that she believed a poet could never be happy unless they had unhappiness in their lives to fuel the poetry that gives them solace. She is even cited to have claimed that the world would thank her for never marrying him. In places they resorted to using a windlass to drag wagons… up steep slopes. At a place called Devils Gate, the rope hoisting one of the wagons broke near the windlass. Men rushed to support the wagon, grabbing at the spokes of the wheels and the planked sides, trying to hold it against the pull of gravity. But gravity won. The oxen bellowed and pawed frantically but futilely at the loose talus on the slope. They began to lose ground. The wagon accelerated, sliding down the slope, dragging the wide-eyed and still bellowing oxen with it. The men had to jump free of the rig to save their lives. Then it hurtled over a precipice at the bottom of the slope, pulling the oxen over the edge two by two. There was so much that I didn't know. I didn't know, for example, that the "Donner Party" actually consisted of several extended families traveling to California together, along with a handful of single men hired as workers. I didn't know that the Graves family, who form the focal point of Brown's book, were hardscrabble poineers who had survived plenty of harsh conditions before the fateful trip, and were hardly the foolhardy amateurs that they're sometimes reduced to. I also didn't know that the Donner Party was traveling a route that had never actually been attempted before, and was created by some guy who looked at a map and thought, huh, they can save 200 miles by just cutting through this salt desert in Utah! (spoiler alert, it was not a good shortcut). Basically, these people were doomed from the moment they set out from Independence, Missouri (a whole three weeks after the deadline to avoid the winter, by the way) and it's a miracle that there were any survivors at all. I am so glad I finally read a book about the Donner Part. This book is well researched, superbly written and emotionally devastating. The Donner Party was made up mostly of family’s men, women, and children moving west to California looking for a better life and living. Misfortune left them stranded in the winter mountains, and they were forced to survive, by any means necessary. Half did not survive. This is their story.

A series of unfortunate events and bad choices like few people ever see. The book focuses on Sarah Graves, newly married and deeply in love, as she travels across the country with her family.

Of the remaining ten men, one, Charles Stanton, falls behind. He tells the party he will catch up, but he sits down in the snow and dies. Five of the men and the boy later die and are eaten by the remaining party. The two remaining white men start talking about killing the Native American guides, who wisely disappear that night; later, however, they are discovered by the party, extremely weak—the guides were the only ones who refused to consume human flesh, so they had had virtually no food. One of the two white men, William Foster, had become totally unglued by then, and he shoots the two guides. Everyone eats them. By far the best part of The Indifferent Stars Above is Brown’s inclusion of the personal stories and lives at the center of the Donner tragedy is one aspect that gives the story he tells much more depth but he goes far beyond that. As things begin to grow worse for the Donner Party, Brown includes extensive research on how extreme conditions like starvation and freezing temperatures impact the human body and psyche --effectively putting the reader in a headspace where they are able to somewhat understand the seemingly incomprehensible levels of human suffering Sarah and the others faced in the unrelenting mountains that winter. Also, for anyone who is into true crime or historical disasters, this book is a must read. It’s fascinating on so many levels. Even if you’re into reading about the Frontier Era of American expansion, this is well worth your time. It’s got just the right balance of spectacle and grounded reality to make it an instant favourite for me. When one of them suffered a broken jaw, a cord was tied to the jaw and it was yanked out of his face. Then, slowly and deliberately, their tormentors began to slice off bits and pieces of their flesh—fingers and toes and other appendages—and stuff them down the men’s throats. Finally the two men were disemboweled and left to die.” I won't lie: some parts of the story were hard to read. There were gruesome, bloody parts. And I spent nearly the entire story knowing how things would end up and feeling completely helpless while I watched it all unfold. The first third of the book moves along at a slower pace, but when the group takes the turn to the shortcut trail, things are intense from there. I was astounded at the things these people were willing to do to survive, and I was astounded at how resourceful they were in various parts. I had no idea. No idea.

We’d all like to say that there’s no way whatsoever that we’d ever eat a person, but given the right circumstances? Who knows what we’d do. Who Should Read The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party? urn:lcp:indifferentstars00dani:epub:85cd87f2-8e0d-4457-93fd-6073c79d9c1e Foldoutcount 0 Identifier indifferentstars00dani Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t6nz9bw3n Isbn 0061348112 There are some books that make you want to run outside, open your arms to the sky, and twirl in the cool breeze and sunlight… And there are some books that desperately make you want to stand with your fridge door open, in your heated/air-conditioned house that does not have bugs falling through the roof, with all your curtains shutting out nature, staring at all your processed food, and marveling that you don't have dysentery. I am not sure that I will able to play the Oregon Trail so callously ever again.

What I did know, before reading this, was the bare minimum: The Donner family and several other families migrating to California for a better life, became trapped in the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains. Many died. Many resorted to cannibalism. Cannibalism. Cannibalism. Cannibalism. I feel like it can't be just me who primarily associated them with that word and few others. I also feel like it can't be just me who never gave too much thought to the other families traveling with the Donner brothers, wives and children. The book did go into somewhat great detail on the cannibalism but it wasn't gratuitous and the details were not exploitative. It also remedied the issue of not knowing much about the other members of the Party. I found out about this book through Last Podcast on the Left, which did a phenomenal three-part episode series on the Donner Party and used this book as the primary source for their information. I was so fascinated and intrigued by this story, which I'd only ever heard about in vague details, that I decided to read the book for myself. Beyond that, the little details of frontier life and what it would be like to live out of that wagon for a trip from Illinois to California will transport you to that time. Remarkable…A hard-to-put-down book about an event in American history that has been sensationalized, mythologized, and maligned. What Brown does is make it understood.”

William Butler Yeats lived between 1865 and 1939 and is considered to be one of the foremost poets in Irish and British literature. A great many of his works are commonly read and remembered today, including ‘ The Second Coming‘. He is also remembered for having won a Nobel Prize in Literature. He is also known for highly symbolic and imagery-based works that constitute both physical and abstract meanings. An ideal pairing of talent and material. … Engrossing. … A deft and ambitious storyteller.”— Mary Roach, New York Times Book Review While it is reasonable to assume that the horror stories of the Donner Party’s journey were exaggerated over time, the truth behind their doomed expedition is much more chilling than one would ever expect. Whether we like to admit it or not, we as people have always been fascinated by stories that expose the darker side of human nature. While sensationalist claims of cannibalism draw people into the story of the Donner Party, they are not the reason the tale endures. At its very core, this story represents triumph against unimaginable adversity as well as the range of human suffering that exists in the world -- a fact that is remarkably illustrated by Daniel James Brown in his book, The Indifferent Stars Above. Like, as long as they die of natural causes, what’s the big deal? Honestly, if I were starving to death, I’d sooner eat a human that died naturally than kill an animal. As the young heroine of this book, Sarah Graves, said simply of her young husband’s body when asked by companions if they could eat it, “You cannot hurt him now.”heroes are sometimes the most ordinary -seeming people. It reminds us that as ordinary as we might be, we can, if we choose, take the harder road, walk forth bravely under the indifferent stars. We can hazard the ravages of chance. We can choose to endure what seems unendurable, and thereby open up the possibility of prevailing. We can awaken to the world as it is, and seeing it with eyes wide open, we can nevertheless embrace hope rather than despair.” Overall, Donner Party men died at nearly twice the rate of women (56.6 percent of the males, 29.4 percent of the females). They died much sooner, too. Fourteen Donner Party males died before the first female did. And it was men in their prime years who died earliest and in the largest numbers. Of twenty-one men between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine, 66 percent died; of thirty women in the same age group, only 14 percent died.” Another factor that contributed to survival: family. The single members of the party nearly all perished. Family groups were the most likely to survive regardless of gender; some family groups, such as the Reed and Breen families, survived entirely intact. This is true of disasters generally, perhaps due to the importance of social ties in acquiring resources, sharing information, and keeping morale up. The author himself traveled as best he was able, the route Sarah Graves and company traversed. His personal thoughts at the end of the book on their journey, and later what happened to the survivors made it especially poignant for me.