Writer Revisits the Tragic Fate of the Donner Party

The writer James D. Houston had been living in Santa Cruz for 20 years when he found out that a member of the infamous Donner Party had died in his very own bedroom--a fact that set off a physical sensation in Houston.

“There is a tingling across my scalp that I refer to as the literary buzz,” says Houston, “a little signal from the top of my head that there is some mystery here, or some unrevealed linkage that will have to be explored. There is a story-size buzz. There is also a book-size buzz.”

This, as it happened, was a book-size buzz. Houston’s latest novel, “Snow Mountain Passage” from Knopf, tells the story of the Donner Party through two members of the Reed family--James Reed, who was one of the expedition’s co-organizers, and his daughter Patty, who was 8 years old when the wagon train left Springfield, Ill. How Houston discovered the Reeds, and his personal attachment to the family, is one of those serendipitous moments in a writer’s life.

Houston was born in San Francisco and grew up there and in the Santa Clara Valley, where he met and married writer Jeanne Wakatsuki. They moved to Santa Cruz in the early ‘60s and raised one son and two daughters in a steep-roofed Victorian a block from Monterey Bay. Together, Houston and Wakatsuki wrote “Farewell to Manzanar,” the story of Wakatsuki’s family’s experience during and after the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. Houston has written seven other novels, many set in the American West, (including “Love Life” and “The Last Paradise”) and five books of nonfiction (including “The Men in My Life” and “In the Ring of Fire: A Pacific Basin Journey”).

Twelve years ago, he was researching a piece about an influential men’s club in the San Jose region when he paid a visit to the club’s eldest member, one 85-year-old Frazier Reed II. On a wall in Reed’s home, Houston spotted a picture of a very familiar Victorian house.

Startled, Houston burst out, “My God, Frazier, that’s my house!”

“Well, young fella,” Reed answered, “maybe it’s your house now. But it should have been my house.”

Thus began an afternoon-long reminiscence. Reed first explained how he had been disinherited (by a cousin in the deathbed revision of her will) and then recounted in fascinating detail the long-ago ordeal of his great-grandfather James Frazier Reed and the Donner Party.

James Reed, who had helped recruit families for the cross-country trek, stayed with the party as far as central Nevada, where he was banished after a fight with a teamster in 1846. Forced by the others to leave the group, he crossed the Sierras alone into California. When news came that his family was stuck in a high mountain pass for the winter, Reed set out to organize a rescue party--an ordeal in itself.

The family survived, barely, and Reed’s four children grew up in San Jose. The younger daughter, Patty Reed Lewis, ended up in Santa Cruz, and her home for the last 10 years of her life was Houston’s own Carpenter Gothic Victorian, with its views of the bay.

“This woman who survived the cruel Sierra winter of 1846-47,” says Houston, “had died in our bedroom in 1923.” Houston went home buzzing with the idea that his house somehow had a place in the Reed family’s notorious and emblematic journey west. Still, five years passed before he began the background reading for his book and started visiting sites along Reed’s route.

“I was probably six months into it when Patty’s voice came clear,” Houston says. “One day, up in the attic where I have my studio, I was thinking about that family, and I began to hear her, as the elderly woman she’d been in the years that she lived here. I would not say it was actual sound in my head; rather, it was the distinct awareness of a certain way of speaking. And that was the day I began to write.”

From then on, writing and researching went on together. Houston sifted through a huge amount of material--travel narratives, letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper coverage. In a back room at Sutters Fort in Sacramento he found a file called “Reed Family Documents,” which alone contained 644 items.

Stories With Different Voices

“Snow Mountain Passage” has essentially two stories to tell, and its point of view alternates between James Reed’s adventures and Patty’s first-person reminiscence. Reed’s attempts to get back to his family were interrupted by weather, but also by war and politics. California was a minute away from the gold rush, the U.S. was just securing the territory, and any kind of political power had yet to be centralized.

Reed’s odyssey, Houston says, was meant to play against the dark tale from the Sierras or run parallel to it. “Though the marooned families were isolated for months, their plight should not be viewed as an isolated event,” Houston says. “The journey that brought them to Donner Lake and the details of how they were rescued are all entangled with the politics of the day and the dynamics at large in Mexican California during this formative era.”

James Reed is a complex hero, good-hearted yet grandiose, powerful and responsible, yet blinded by his own version of the facts. He took his family across the country in a luxurious, oversized, cumbersome wagon dubbed the Palace Car, which slowed down the group’s progress so that they came to the mountains very late in the season. Reed also maintained a stubborn and ultimately tragic belief in a risky, unproven short-cut promoted by one Lansford Hasting.

A Group Mired in Misfortunes

After intense research and years of writing about the man, Houston’s opinion of Reed’s character is measured and humane: “Reed was a headstrong and willful man who made some decisions he himself later regretted. But so did they all. It had been a group decision to try the Hastings Cutoff, not his alone. All the families voted on it. The farther you delve into the record and into the multiple accounts of what happened and why, the harder it is to put the blame on any one person or family or decision.

“In the end, it’s a mysterious mix of unpredictable weather and bad luck and strange chemistry: a mismatched bunch of people who found themselves stuck with one another in unforgiving country. But there is no question that Reed made a large contribution to the party’s misfortunes. This, in fact, is what drew me to him, as a character. While his own pride makes him a culprit, he is also capable of a redeeming compassion and genuine courage.”

James Reed, whatever his faults or courage, was not present for the terrible ordeal itself. To tell that story, Houston uses an italicized narrative in Patty Reed’s voice: that is, a 75-year-old woman reliving and commenting on the experiences of an 8-year-old girl. Houston found writing from Patty’s wide, long perspective, “liberating, and very instructive. It was like having a zoom lens,” he said. “You could be in very close, inside the mind of the child, the innocence and hope and fear; then, from one sentence to the next, you could pull back and have the long view of the elder who brings to that same moment her lifetime of memory and reflection.”

And then, there’s the cannibalism. The Donner Party is famous for--indeed, has come to be almost synonymous with--cannibalism. Houston doesn’t shy away from the subject--a description of eating the family dog is plenty evocative--but he does not linger there, either. One reviewer recently faulted Houston for not relating many of the specific, well-established details of the cannibalism that occurred.

Houston, while acknowledging that “in a way, the goriest details have helped to give this story its long life,” had his reasons and method. “To write about the Donner Party you have to address this aspect of the tale,” he says. “But I chose not to dwell on it in part because all the prior narratives, both fiction and nonfiction, have emphasized the horrors of what happened that winter at the campsites. But the emphasis has tended to overshadow the more profound and emotionally moving dimensions of the story--the family drama, the mother’s ordeal, the young daughter’s, the father cut off from them and aching for reunion.

“The deep power of this story is not in the details of who ate whom; the story has legendary proportions because people were pushed so far past their known limits, their very humanity was put to the test. Some became savages; some tapped into reserves of bravery and heroism beyond their own imagining.”

These days Houston is practicing yoga, playing string bass in a bluegrass band and laying the groundwork for another novel, “though it’s too soon to talk about that,” and working on a second volume of “The Literature of California,” a large anthology he’s co-editing with Jack Hicks, Maxine Hong Kingston and Al Young, for the University of California Press.

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James Houston will sign his new book at Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, at 7 p.m. Thursday; call (626) 449-5320 for more information.