The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride (review)

A single black-and-white portrait of a young woman with bright eyes led Daniel James Brown to write his compelling narrative of newlywed Sarah Graves, who, as a member of the snowshoe party known as the Forlorn Hope, wandered the Sierra Nevada for over a month in the winter of 1846–47 to bring news of the Donner party's entrapment.

Brown uses a novelist's tools to recreate the sufferings of Sarah and her family, "extraordinarily hardy people," who independently traveled west from Illinois before they met up with the Reed and Donner wagons in midsummer (7). He packs each page with details of Sarah's world—from choosing which of three types of flour to bring to marriage customs to daily trail routines—minutiae that become less important as winter snows progress and the snowshoe party sets out on its desperate journey.

Within days of leaving camp, the snowshoe party is lost and suffering from snow blindness. Brown focuses on their deteriorating mental state and squalid hygienic conditions, meditates on the psychology and science of hunger, and offers new theories on the group's sufferings. He speculates that members of the group likely died of hyperthermia, a condition of overheating caused by the body's rise in temperature during heavy exertion, such as scaling mountain ridges. This, in combination with the contrasting effects of hypothermia, brought about by exposure to extreme winter weather, could have contributed to their willingness to cannibalize the dead only six days after running out of food.

Brown wants to know what it would be like to watch loved ones freeze to death and then butcher their bodies to survive. To experience these horrors, he leads us to the edge of the campfire for a closer look. Sarah watched her husband and her father die by a similar campfire and endured the cannibalization of their bodies. She lived long enough to bury her second husband, marry a third, and raise eight children, including six of her own.

Brown resists sentimentalizing Sarah and crafts a well-rounded, realistic portrait of a woman who walked into history on her own two feet, eyes wide open. In his epilogue, he muses on his nearly two-year driving tour to visit the landscapes Sarah knew while listening to "the quiet whisperings of the bones" on the pioneer trail, "bones now turned to rich, black humus in quiet mountain meadows" (274). He writes, "It reminds us that as ordinary as we might be, we can, if we choose, take the harder roads, 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" (286).