PJ Vogt

Like, there's even this much time later, when you read an account of it, the writing will be one way where it's like, you know, they've read this book, and the book suggests a shortcut, and the shortcut's sent to the wrong place, and it's sort of one level of detail.

And then once it gets into the cannibalism sections,

it gets so much more detailed and so much more like, at the time this person claims that they didn't do it, but later we found out they did do it.

But it almost takes on the feeling of gossip where how the information got out becomes very important and you just realize like, oh, we are fascinated by this.

It doesn't seem like... Honestly, here's what I will say about the Donner Party.

The most fascinating thing about the Donner Party story is not about the preparation of humans.

It's that, and I didn't know this, the reason they got lost is that there's all these people who are going out West and there was like a cottage industry of people who were selling them guidebooks.

And there was this guy who was essentially a huckster who wrote a guidebook that's like, so you're going out West, here's how to do it.

And what the other guys won't tell you is I've found a secret shortcut to

Oh, it's like maps to the stars' houses.

Yes, except for this map to the stars' house was a bad map that he had not actually tried himself.

After publicizing the book, he tried it once just like on a horse by himself.

And so no one in a wagon had tried to do what he said was easy to do.

And the whole time they're proceeding on this shortcut that they've read about in his book, and they're realizing how bad it is,

He had gone out ahead as like promotion and like nailed to the trees notes encouraging people to keep following his path.

And so things are getting worse and worse and they're beginning to understand the size of their predicament.

And then they're finding these like cheerful notes being like, keep on going.

That's the best part of the Daughter Party story.

It's just the grimness of having received bad advice from someone promoting their book, which feels like a very modern problem.

Yes, at least one recipe.