"The Indifferent Stars Above:" The science behind the Donner Party Tragedy

"The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride"

by Daniel James Brown

Morrow, 337 pp., $25.99

Five and a half Big Macs a day would have saved Sarah Graves from the horrors of the Donner Party disaster of 1846.

It may seem irreverent for Redmond author Daniel James Brown to mention two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions on a sesame-seed bun in the same breath as the American pioneers who resorted to cannibalism to survive being snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

But Brown's use of the present to explain the past is what makes "The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride" such a remarkable book.

Those Big Macs add up to the number of calories (3,063) Sarah would have needed to maintain her weight as she snow-shoed with 14 others seeking help for the trapped emigrants. Instead, she had eight pounds of dried beef to last her through what was expected to be a six-day trek. That would be about 1,600 calories a day.

The struggle to find help took 32 days, and when the dried beef ran out, she had her dead companions: eight members of the party, including Sarah's husband and father, died during the journey.

Brown brings considerable modern knowledge to bear on all aspects of the Donner Party and the deaths of 47 of its 87 members. Besides such examples as the Big Mac, he uses science and study in other fields to analyze diseases suffered by those on the Oregon trail, the lack of hygiene, hypothermia, starvation, snow blindness and, of course, cannibalism and why some in desperate situations turn to it to survive and others just die.

Add that to the thorough historical research Brown has done and his very readable descriptions of travel on the Oregon Trail, and the result is a hard-to-put-down book about a event in American history that has been sensationalized, mythologized and maligned.

What Brown has done is made it understood.