Last year I was having dinner with a few friends and one of them made a Donnor Party joke. "Table for three, we were ten but we got hungry waiting." The other friend had never heard of the Donnor Party. I used that as an excuse to look it up on Wikipedia, and an hour later finished reading the entire page. It's a very engrossing article, almost heartbreaking. I had a very clear picture of the families and their troubles crossing the mountains. I had to read more, so I bought the Kindle version of Desperate Passage. The Donnors were trapped in the snow over Christmas in 1846. It's an oddly "christmassy" story. Families spent more time together than they wanted to. There was a lot of snow and fir trees. A few even had tiny Christmas feasts (of beef and vegetables, not other things.) I read it again this year, and as horrible as it sounds, I enjoyed it just as much. Something about reading how other people suffered through the winter, in roughly the same part of the country, helps me to better appreciate the plentiful food, and colorful lights we have today.
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