Daniel James Brown

After several attempts to hike out of the mountains, all of which failed, it occurred to him to try to manufacture snowshoes out of some oxbows that they had saved.

So they made 15 pairs of homemade snowshoes.

And then Franklin Graves, his daughter Sarah, whose character I follow principally in the book, another daughter named Mary Ann Graves, and a number of other relatively young, healthy people set off on snowshoes to try to get over Donner Pass.

what we now call Donner Pass, and get down to a place called Johnson's Ranch.

Johnson's Ranch is the first American settlement they would come to in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

So they set off, and they take six days' worth of provisions.

At this point, all anybody has is just dried beef, basically, jerky, if you will.

They take six days' worth of rations, thinking that it will be a six-day journey.

it turns out to be over a month long journey.

And it's just a horrific thing.

It's a very interesting thing.

One thing I often like to remind people is that the Donner Party is a story of death and tragedy, and we have these characters of people

caricatures of people sitting around gnawing on bones.

It's also a survival story, though.

Slightly more than half the people survived.

And many of them who survived survived because some of these people who set off on the Borgorn Hope expedition, a few of them actually made it through and got word out to the rest of the world what was happening.

Yeah, they did fairly well the first few days.

Charles Stanton, who had been over the mountains once before, volunteered to go with them.

And these two young Miwok boys, Native American boys, also went with them.

So they were among the 15 who set off to get over the mountains.