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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780156011433
ISBN number: 0156011433
Label: Harvest Books
Manufacturer: Harvest Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 336
Printing Date: April 24, 2002
Publishing house: Harvest Books
Sale Popularity Level: 504316
Studio: Harvest Books
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Snow Mountain Passage is a powerful retelling of our most dramatic pioneer story--the ordeal of the Donner Party. Through the eyes of James Frazier Reed, one of the group's leaders, and the imagined 'Trail Notes' of his daughter Patty, we journey along with the ill-fated group determined, at all costs, to make it to the California territory.
James Reed is a proud, headstrong, yet devoted husband and father. As he and his family travel in the 'Palace Car,' a huge, specially built--and ultimately cumbersome--covered wagon, they thrill to new sights and cope with conflict and constant danger. Yet when a fight between Reed and another driver ends in death, Reed is exiled from the group and heads over the mountains alone. The fate of the other families, including Reed's wife and four children, is sealed when they set out across a new, untested route through the Sierra--their final mountain pass. Arriving at the foothills just as the snows start to fall, they are left stranded for months--starving, freezing, and battling to survive--while Reed journeys across northern California, trying desperately to find means and men for a rescue party.
An extraordinary tale of pride and redemption, Snow Mountain Passage is a brilliantly imagined and grippingly told story straight from American history.
*National Bestseller
Amazon.com Review:
Snow Mountain Passage is a novel about the Donner Party. Still reading? Never fear, this is no corpse fest along the lines of Piers Paul Read's Alive, and its concerns are anything but prurient. For James Houston, who has written movingly about California in the past, the Donner Party's experiences exemplify the ambition, the courage, and the sheer hubris of those who ventured into territory as unfamiliar to them as the moon. His book is not just a blow-by-blow account of what went wrong and who ate whom, it's a searing portrait of both the promises and the perils of the American dream.
Houston follows the events of 1847 through the eyes of James Reed and his daughter Patty. Exiled from the party after he accidentally killed one of its members, Reed made it over the Sierras before snow locked what is now called Donner Pass. His family, however, did not. Along with more than 80 other stranded emigrants, they erected crude cabins below the summit and settled in for a long winter of hunger, cold, madness, and cannibalism, chronicled by Patty Reed in prose of uncommon urgency and even beauty. Here, for instance, she watches as her mother walks away with the very first rescue party, leaving her by the shores of Truckee Lake: My body was like an empty bottle sitting on a dark shelf in an empty cupboard. A cold sun was shining. While we stood there the wind came up, rushing through the pines with a sound like surf, a gushing roar like water on the rise, as if an ocean of ice water had begun to pour across the world.
In contrast, the book lags while James Reed crisscrosses California, attempting to scare up a rescue party for his family. And the author spends far too much time describing the landscape. This reader found at least half her attention back at Truckee Lake with the starving emigrants, wondering guiltily, 'Have they eaten anyone yet?' Still, the book generally moves along at a terrific clip, its characters sketched with swift, sure strokes, and their disastrous decisions depicted without excuses or blame. 'You couldn't have stopped him,' Patty thinks about her father, who persuaded his traveling companions to take the fatal route. 'Or stopped any of it.' The Donner Party's fate, Houston implies, was as inevitable as America's great westward expansion. But like that epic movement, Snow Mountain Passage highlights both the best and the worst in human nature. --Mary Park
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Rated by buyers 
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This is a beautiful, beautiful book, brimming with emotion and rooted in the majesty and danger of nature. Although the cover proclaims Snow Mountain Passage to be "a novel of the Donner party," that does not reflect the spirit and depth of this work.
Those of us who have heard of the Donner Party probably have a generic picture of stranded, desperate pioneers, some of whom get stranded in the mountains in the winter of 1846-7 and turn to cannibalism to survive. It's a famous story, and knowing that much isn't a spoiler in terms of reading this book. (You can get the basic Donner Party story by looking it up in Wikipedia.)
But surely there is a more subtle reality -- the Donner Party was made up of real people, real families, forced apart by circumstance, trying to find each other again, trying to make a place for themselves in California or at least to survive long enough to get there. James D. Houston uses the known facts as a framework upon which he thoughtfully builds the imagined lives of the Reeds, one of the families caught up in the mountains that winter.
Only part of the story takes place with the stranded party members. Much of it centers around Jim Reed, who becomes separated from the Donner Party, forced to leave his wife and children behind. He makes it to the west coast, but all he wants is to find a way back through the snow, into the mountains, to rescue his family.
Reading Snow Mountain Passage, it's easy to feel the connection the author feels to the people, the history, the place. Houston takes his time creating a picture of the political and social turmoil of the 1840s West. Mexicans, Native Americans, Californians and new immigrants from the States all struggled to define their place in a changing world of shifting power and alliances. Sometimes I felt as though a better grasp of California history would have served me well as I read this book, and every so often I wished the passages in which characters debated about which side to take were a bit shorter.
Still, none of this took away from the power of the central story, and the breathtaking ability of Houston's prose to make it come alive. This one is a real gem. I hope you won't miss it.
Rated by buyers 
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I admit to being a bit disappointed, as this book turned out to be more about Jim Reed and less about the Donner party. The very first part of the book was very entertaining as it dealt with the Donner/Reed group on the trail to California. A disagreement arises between Reed and another leading to a fight and Reed has to leave the wagon train and strike out on his own towards California on horse ahead of the others. Once the wagon train reaches Truckee and snow hits and they realize they can go no further, the story leaves them and the middle third of the book is about Reed's travels on the other side of the Sierras. I found this part to be quite boring and I was literally skimming and skipping chapters. I just wasn't interested (nor expecting) to read about the US/Mexican war in California nor Reed's involvement with same.
Interspered with the author's writings of Reed's story are Notes from the Trail by his daughter Patty that were written when Patty was much older. Those were the chapters that held my interest, especially the story of the rescue and getting the survivors out of their winter camp and over the mountains to safety.
All in all a reasonably interesting read, but I'm glad I got it from the library as it's one I'm not likely to want to read again. Four stars for Patty's Notes from the Trail, two stars for the story of Jim Reed and the US/Mexican war.
Rated by buyers -
This is simply an awesome display of storytelling, combining historical "fiction" with non-fiction (the latter derived from the actual notes and writings of a real survivor of the incident), and illustrating the incredible power of James D. Houston's mind and writing talent!
If you want to actually imagine and feel and understand what it was like, to cross the western half of this country in an immigrant wagon train, including experiencing the vast power of winter in the California Sierra, then read this book! It is much more historical fact than historical fiction, but beyond this, it is highly "real", and says more about the discovery of the American West than any other book I've ever read (and I've read a lot about this topic).
Rated by buyers 
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Excellent book centered around the recollections of one of the Donner Party. Author did a terrific job of integrating the actual events with the very lucid memoirs of one of the Reed daughters.
Rated by buyers -
The book starts out in Santa Cruz California with Patty Reed recalling her memoies of the "Ordeal by Hunger" (another book) Many times I had to remind myself that Patty herself did not write the words I was reading - it is so good. If you like Historical novels or if you are from the Bay Area (or both) this book is for you. Fast read. I couldn't put it down.
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