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Автор Дэниел Джеймс Браун
The Indifferent Stars Above
The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride Daniel James Brown
And they had nailed the boards above her face,
The peasants of that land,
Wondering to lay her in that solitude,
And raised above her mound
A cross they had made out of two bits of wood,
And planted cypress round;
And left her to the indifferent stars above.
—W. B. YEATS,
“A Dream of Death”
Contents
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Prologue
Part One:
A Sprightly Boy and a Romping Girl
Chapter One Home and Heart
Chapter Two Mud and Merchandise
Chapter Three Grass
Part Two:
The Barren Earth
Chapter Four Dust
Chapter Five Deception
Chapter Six Salt, Sage, and Blood
Part Three:
The Meager by the Meager Were Devoured
Chapter Seven Cold Calculations
Chapter Eight Desperation
Chapter Nine Christmas Feasts
Chapter Ten The Heart on the Mountain
Chapter Eleven Madness
Chapter Twelve Hope and Despair
Photographic Insert
Chapter Thirteen Heroes and Scoundrels
Part Four:
In the Reproof of Chance
Chapter Fourteen Shattered Souls
Chapter Fifteen Golden Hills, Black Oaks
Chapter Sixteen Peace
Chapter Seventeen In the Years Beyond
Epilogue
Appendix: The Donner Party Encampments
Acknowledgments
Chapter Notes
Sources
About the Author
Other Books by Daniel James Brown
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Even well after the tragedy was over, Sarah Graves’s little sister Nancy often burst into tears for no apparent reason. She mystified many of her schoolmates in the new American settlement at the Pueblo de San José. One minute she would be fine, running, laughing, and playing on the dusty school ground like any other ten-or eleven-year-old, but then suddenly the next minute she would be sobbing. All of them knew that she had been part of what was then called the “lamentable Donner Party” while coming overland to California in 1846. Recent emigrants themselves, most of them knew, generally, what that meant and sympathized with her for it. But for a long while, none of them knew Nancy’s particular, individual secret.
That part was just too terrible to tell.Nancy Graves’s secret was just one part of many things that were too terrible to tell by the time the last survivors of the Donner Party staggered out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the spring of 1847. And for decades thereafter, many of those things were not told, except in tabloid newspaper accounts that were often compounded farmore of fiction than of truth. It wasn’t until a newspaper editor named Charles F. McGlashan began to delve into the story in the 1870s that many of the real details of what had happened that winter in the Sierra Nevada started to emerge. McGlashan set about interviewing survivors, and in 1879 he published his
