Snow Mountain Passage is a powerful retelling of the most dramatic
of our pioneer stories--the ordeal of the Donner Party, with its cast of
young and old risking all, its imprisoning snows, its rumors of
cannibalism. James Houston takes us inside this central American
myth in a compelling new way that only a novelist can achieve.
The people whose dreams, courage, terror, ingenuity, and fate we share
are James Frazier Reed, one of the leaders of the Donner Party, and
his wife and four children--in particular his eight-year-old daughter,
Patty. From the moment we meet Reed--proud, headstrong, yet a
devoted husband and father--traveling with his family in the "Palace
Car," a huge, specially built covered wagon transporting the Reeds in grand style, the stage is set
for trouble. And as they journey across the country, thrilling to new sights and new friends,
coping with outbursts of conflict and constant danger, trouble comes. It comes in the fateful
choice of a wrong route, which causes the group to arrive at the foot of the Sierra Nevada too late
to cross into the promised land before the snows block the way. It comes in the sudden fight
between Reed and a drover--a fight that exiles Reed from the others, sending him solo over the
mountains ahead of the storms.
We follow Reed during the next five months as he travels around northern California, trying
desperately to find means and men to rescue his family. And through the amazingly imagined
"Trail Notes" of Patty Reed, who recollects late in life her experiences as a child, we also follow
the main group, progressively stranded and starving on the Nevada side of the Sierras.
Snow Mountain Passage is an extraordinary tale of pride and redemption. What happens--who
dies, who survives, and why--is brilliantly, grippingly told.