A contender for the best book I’ve read this year is George R. Stewart’s Ordeal by Hunger, which is considered the definitive account of the Donner Party tragedy. I came across this book as an admirer of Stewart’s delightful treatise Names on the Land, a historical accounting of the US and its place names.
I wouldn’t, by the way, describe Ordeal by Hunger as “delightful.” Given its subject matter, this is a difficult book. Violence, murder, starvation, freezing to death. Cannibalism. The tale it tells is not for the squeamish.
But that’s also how the Donner Party lives on in the popular imagination—or at least in mine. Scorched by the taboo of cannibalism, the Donner Party represented to me a low point in our collective human history. Basically, we’d rather not talk about it.
Stewart’s account makes me question this default stance of disregard. For as much as there is to recoil from in the episode of the Donner Party, there is also plenty to admire: courage, endurance, loyalty, sacrifice.
Stewart makes a case that we ought to see the story as one of people pressed by circumstance into acts of desperation, more than a simple story of depravity. He points at this story and says: Look at what humanity can endure.
There are heroes to this story, as it turns out—men and women who made unimaginable choices. Men who braved the snowed-in Donner Pass multiple times that winter. Women who faced the impossible calculus of choosing to stay with sick or weakened family members and starve at the cabins rather than leave the helpless behind.
It’s this aspect of the story that Stewart shed light on for me—how the Donner Party is more than tragedy, more like a trial of the human spirit.
Taylor Coe 