Daniel James Brown

Yeah, well, for one thing, I have a sort of remote and improbable family connection with the Donner Party tragedy.

great, great uncle who led the first rescue expedition up into the Sierra Nevada mountains in spring of 1847.

And so when I was growing up, actually, my uncle Bill had a copy of the diary from that rescue expedition.

I remember handling it.

So for me, the Donner Party was just sort of, it felt real to me.

It felt like there must be real people behind it because I could actually hold this book in my hand and look at the handwriting.

Wow.

Talk about a primary source, huh?

Yeah, it was terrific.

It's now at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley.

Fantastic.

I think they were cognizant, but probably not cognizant enough.

So most of the people that made up the Donner Party came from the upper Midwest, from the drainage of the Mississippi River Valley.

And life had been hard in the mid-1830s and 40s.

There had been a great financial panic in 1837 that had caused the price for farm commodities to

to plunge.

There was a form of malaria called the ague that afflicted many of the people that were trying to farm the bottomlands along the river there.

And on top of that, or in the middle of that, they began to read pamphlets about California, this land of milk and honey, this land where crops practically sprang out of the ground.

So there was a kind of a carrot and stick effect at work in terms of people wanting to get out of this cold, dank place with long, miserable winters, the AU.

and reading about and wanting to go to this much more promising land called California.