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

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #98933 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780156011433
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

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 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

From Publishers Weekly
The myth of California has been a preoccupation of Houston's in both his fiction (Continental Drift) and nonfiction (Californians). Here he reimagines the saga of perhaps the most infamous of California dreamers: the ill-fated Donner Party. The story is told primarily from the perspective of James Frazier Reed, one of the leaders of the party, who sets out in a luxurious, fully equipped wagon he calls the Palace Car, with his wife, two sons and two daughters. Somewhere in Nevada, jealousy and trumped-up murder charges oblige him to ride ahead alone, leaving his family behind with the party. When the wagon train is stranded for the winter in the Sierra Nevada, Reed must try on his own to assemble a rescue team. His efforts bring him into contact with petty despots (John Sutter, for example), thieves and opportunists, as well as people of uncommon nobility and dignity. In making Reed central to the story, Houston is true to history (the Donner brothers were marginal players in the drama) as he presents a compelling portrait of a man who was a mixture of renegade and hero, his unrealistic dreams of grandeur imperiling his family. Alternating with Reed's tale are trail notes written from memory 75 years later by his daughter Patty, depicting the despair and madness besetting starving members of the snowed-in families. A dispassionate observer at age eight, Patty learns to trust and reveal her compassion, and sitting by the bay in Santa Cruz as an old woman, she brings a redemptive note to an undertaking usually viewed with reflexive loathing. Haunting and immediate, Houston's novel reveals its protagonists in all their vulnerability and moral ambiguity. (Apr.)Forecast: This could be a breakout book for Houston, who has a solid but mostly local reputation. His previous efforts have fared well critically, but a 40,000 first printing signals Knopf's commitment to leading his latest into the promised land of higher sales.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Houston evokes a keen and majestic sense of the land and conveys an insightful portrait of selected members of the Donner Party as he recounts their ill-fated journey from Springfield, IL, to California during the winter of 1846-1847. The author uses the device of viewing events from two alternating perspectives. The opening chapters present a third-person account focusing on James Frazier Reed, who, as one of the leaders of the expedition, traveled with his wife and four children. These chapters resonate with the passionate pioneer vision of those whose dreams inspired the crossing, and who subsequently dealt with the privations, personal discords, and catastrophic weather that befell the wagon train. The sense of urgency for rescue is paramount; readers witness acts of selflessness and heroism even as some in the party succumb to cannibalism when desperation presses them beyond the limits of endurance. In the complementary chapters, the author crafts a perspective in the first-person voice of Reed's daughter, Patty, whose "Trail Notes" are penned some 75 years later. These passages yield the retrospective reflections of an octogenarian gazing back upon the journey she made as an eight-year-old. Her memories are stark and piercing, but time and distance conspire to lend a gentling to her voice and a compassionate reluctance to pass judgment upon her fellow wayfarers. This well-told and riveting historical novel is based upon a heavily documented episode in American history that has generated considerable conjecture and analysis and is rich in material for student discussion.

Lynn Nutwell, Fairfax City Regional Library, VA

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Customer Reviews

James D. Houston and the Experience of the West
Comparisons to other historical novels of similar epic sweep, such as Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove," are perphaps inevitable. James D. Houston, however, in "Snow Mountain Passage" escapes the colloquial and anachronistic style of McMurtry's dialogue in favor of an authentic cadence and vocabulary of the Old West, in language as magnificent as the landscape through which James Reed, the protagonist, moves west ahead of the Donner Party, and then east to their rescue.

The novel is written principally through two points of view: James Reed, the father, adventurer, sometime rascal member of an eighty-person wagon train heading west to California from Illinois; and Patty Reed, his eight-year old daughter, who stays behind in the snowy mountains of the Sierra and endures the harrowing privations of the settlers marooned by the lake which now bears their name. The split perspective allows Houston to tell the tale of California's formation from the early days of the Mexican War (significantly, Houston accords the Mexican settlers the dignity of the title "Californians," and pictures the settlers as the usurpers they were). Patty's story is told through her "trail notes," written many years later in Santa Cruz, where she lived out the last years of her long life. Ingeniously, Houston times the months of her journal entries in 1920 with the months of the Donner experience in the mountains.

The voices ring true. The bold, fearless account of James Reed, and the resigned voice of his young daughter now grown old, who, like Holocaust survivors and others who endured too much, is resigned to a life forever scarred and altered.

While other reviewers have noted the detail of natural description with a critical eye, this cavil perhaps misses the point. In "Snow Mountain Passage" as in all of Houston's writing, the land itself is a character, a shaping force. Maybe the most wonderful thing about this wonderful novel is that it allows the reader with an imagination as full and daring as Houston's the chance (the only chance) to live in the California that once existed, before freeways, strip malls, and sprawling subdivisions obliterated its incomparable natural beauty and diversity.

Worthy
There have been so many excellent books about the 19th century American West in the past year, starting with "Gates of the Alamo" to "The Borderlands" and "The Heartsong of Charging Elk" (my nomination for the best novel of 2000), straight through to "Snow Mountain Passage."

James Houston tells the story of the Donner party from the point of view of James Reed, a member of the wagon train who did not spend the winter of 1846 in the Sierra Nevadas. He had been sent on ahead, and was one of the people trying to reach the stranded families from the other side of the mountains. His frustration is excruciating as he battles for support in an area that is consumed with breaking away from Mexico. Rescue parties he mounts are turned back again and again by blizzards. Reed refuses to accept that rescuers may not be able to reach the settlers until the terrible winter is over. He knows that his family and the others cannot survive that long.

Survival in the freezing camp is recorded by his youngest daughter, Patty, who looks back on that winter as a woman in her 80's. Her story is told with the clear eyes of a child and the wisdom of an old woman. The fact that there were any survivors is incredible. This was an exceptionally frigid winter, and the families crammed into hastily thrown-together shacks, without heat, polar fleece, or thermals, eating anything, anything to stay alive. There was little heroism. Each group was on its own. Patty's trail diaries reveal the smell, the anger, the hunger, the despair that no one will come to help in time.

The desperation is heightened for the Reed family because they are one of the reasons the group did not make it over the summit before winter set in. What keeps James Reed from hero status is his hubris in building an enormous two-story wagon so his family could travel west in comfort. This "Palace Car" slowed everyone down, delaying the group's arrival in the Sierra Nevadas until too late in the year. The Reeds' descent from being the most envied group on the trail to the one with the fewest remaining resources makes Jim Reed even more complex, frantic to save his family from the result of his pride, yet so wrenched by guilt that he is tempted to flee south to fight the Mexicans.

Vivid and powerful, "Snow Mountain Passage" is a fine and affecting example of literary fiction, historical fiction, and plain great reading.

Native Californian finds heroism in Donner tragedy
One of the most horrifying stories in American history is that of the ill-fated Donner party, stranded in the high Sierras by a vicious snowstorm and held there for months without food before rescue was possible. When the news hit the newspapers at the time, it was sensationalized far beyond the truth, and the horror has never left us. Now native Californian James D. Houston, an award-winning writer, has written a novel about it. A lesser writer would have drawn mostly upon the gory aspects of the story, but Houston is a sensitive author, and in his hands it becomes one of death and survival, of ordeal and weary triumph.

Houston has concentrated his novel on two of the characters: James Frazier Reed, and his daughter Patty.

James Reed was an affluent father when he set out in 1846 with his wife Margaret and their four children following the California dream and the untried map of Lansford Hastings. From the beginning, Reed incurred the envy of many of his fellow travelers because of his large, specially-made wagon and many comforts the family were taking along the trail.

The envy would finally wreak its effects on Reed when after being attacked by a fellow traveler, John Snyder, Reed kills the other man. Reed is almost hung by his irate companions, but after some reason prevails, he is instead banished and sent on ahead while his wife and children continue with the wagon train. No one knows at the time, but being sent ahead will save Reed's life by allowing him to cross the mountains ahead of the snowstorm. His wife and family will be stuck there without him, while he traverses central California looking for a rescue party, then has to wait frustrating months until the snow is passable.

Meanwhile, Patty, aged eight, is high in the mountains with her mother, small brothers and older sister. When she is an old woman in her eighties and living in the same house where Houston now lives, she remembers the time through her child's eyes, the intense isolation, gnawing hunger, and severe deprivation experienced by the survivors, the many deaths, and eventual cannibalism. This alternating of narration is a very effective structure for Houston to have followed and dramatizes the plight of the characters.

Snow Mountain Passage reads like a suspense thriller, even though the reader knows the outcome of the journey and the people who undertook it. Thanks to one of Reed's descendants and his own great skill as an author, Houston is able to weave the story together by alternating Reed's search for a rescue party and Patty's memoir. I could not put the book down until the final page was read.

This will surely become a classic of historical fiction.

Mari Lu Robbins