WRITING SNOW MOUNTAIN PASSAGE

How did I come to write about the Donner Party? I see now that I did not choose the material; the material chose me. The story of this novel is really the story of a house, a steep-roofed Victorian here in Santa Cruz, a block back from Monterey Bay.

When we first moved in, in the early 1960's, it had been empty for three years. It looked abandoned, a relic from a bygone era, and it was cheap. We were renters then, and that's what appealed to us. Whatever history attached to the place would come in bits and pieces: built in 1908; in a style called Carpenter Gothic; occupied for many years by a pioneer family named Reed, or perhaps Lewis.

Such details were intruiging, but my focus was on contemporary fiction and current affairs. So I didn't pursue them, not until a day I happened to be over the mountain in Santa Clara Valley, researching a story about a local men's club whose members had been very influential in the growth of the region. Tracking down the oldest member, a fellow named Frazier Reed II, I found myself at the edge of a golf course on the outskirts of San Jose. As he ushered me into his ground-floor condo, I noticed on the wall of his foyer a large black-and-white photograph of a two-story Victorian with an unmistakable roofline.

I said, "My God, Frazier, that's my house!"

"Well, young fella, he said, with an ironic grin, "maybe it's your house now. But it should have been MY house."

We never did get around to talking about the men's club--that would have to wait for another day. I sat transfixed as this 85-year-old raconteur explained how he had been disinherited (by a cousin, in the deathbed revision of her will.) My keen interest seemed to pique his memory, and he spent the rest of the afternoon recounting the long ago ordeal of his great-grandfather, James Frazier Reed, who had co-organized the Donner Party out of Springfield, Illinois, and had stayed with it as far as central Nevada, where he was banished after fighting with a teamster. He had to leave his family and cross alone into California. In later years, the four Reed children all grew up in San Jose, where the younger daughter, Patty Reed Lewis, married and began to raise her own family. Widowed at 38, she found work here in Santa Cruz. One of her sons eventually bought the house, soon after it was built, and it was Patty's home for the last ten years of her life. From her grand-nephew I learned that this woman who was eight when they rolled out of Springfiel, and who survived the cruel Sierra winter of 1846/47, had died in our bedroom in 1923.

I came home buzzing with the idea that this house somehow had a place in her family's notorious and emblematic journey west. I began to read everything i could find on the Reed family, the Donner Party, that formative era in the settlement of the far west, and in particular the details of the Mexican War as it played itself out in Alta California. I read the published books, then began to haunt the various library and archival holdings around northern California where the letters, diaries, and old periodicals are stored--the Bancroft at UC Berkeley, Special Collections here at UC Santa Cruz, the California State Library in Sacramento, and the file of 644 Reed family documents still stored at Sutter's Fort, documents that for many years were stored here in our house in Santa Cruz. Along the way, I also made a number of field trips, tracing the Donner Party's route, as well as James Reed's route through nothern California in the fall and winter of 1846/47--to places such as the Humboldt Sink in western Nevada, the cabin sites near Donner Lake, and the old Mexican-era Customs House that still stands in Monterey.

For all that, it took me a while to find a way to tell the story. One day, in the attic where I have my studio, I was thinking about the family, and I began to hear Patty Reed's voice, as the elderly woman she'd been in the years that she lived here. I would not say it was an actual sound in my head. Rather, it was the distinct awareness of a certain way of speaking. And that was the day I began to write.

James Houston
January 2001

IMAGES OF SNOW MOUNTAIN PASSAGE

Click on any of the tiles above to see the full-size image along with James Houston's commentary.

MAPS FROM SNOW MOUNTAIN PASSAGE
(These are large images and may take a long time to download.)

1. Map of the United States.

2. Map of first half of the trip of the Donner Party.

3. Map of second half of the trip of the Donner Party.

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