Donners of the Dead

A note from the author:

Please keep in mind, Donners of the Dead is set in 1851 – couples were often thrust into marriage together with short courtships, racism was widespread and not overly frowned upon, and women had little to no rights. What wouldn’t fly in today’s day and age was unfortunately the norm back then and I did my best to represent that.

The tale of the Donner Party is one of the more compelling yet horrifying events in American history. During the winter of 1846-1847, the party, compromised of not only the Donner family but various wagons representing a range of families who decided to head out west, were stranded in the Sierra Nevadas due to a series of unforeseen circumstances. The weary wagon trains had already faced starvation, murder and theft on their journey so far and were oh so close to their final destination in the valleys of California when tragedy struck. Some people resorted to cannibalism to survive, eating the frozen flesh of those that had died and a few individuals even got a taste for it, rumored to have resulted in many cold-blooded murders. Though there was a search party that managed to rescue the remaining survivors and it was widely known that the wagon train got stranded in the snows, the reports of cannibalism – and the horrific scenes they witnessed – were actually not made known until several years later – after the time period set in this book.

With that being said, although I tried to stay true to the original tale with research from such books as Wagons West by Frank McLynn, I have taken a few fictional liberties with the story and as a result Donners of the Dead cannot be held as historically accurate. I mean, hello, zombies. If you want to know more about the actual events that took place during that horrendous winter, I highly recommend reading up on it.

Sometimes the truth is more gruesome than fiction.