Donner Lake is a Misnomer Anyone who took high school American
history is familiar with the Donner party and the great tragedy
that befell them when they attempted the monumental crossing
from Illinois to California; they got snowed-in in the Sierra
Nevadas and had to resort to cannibalism to survive starvation.
Everyone is familiar with the grisly details of this doomed
journey. In James D. Houston’s Snow Mountain Passage, new
insights are brought to life, and the reader is taken on a
journey quite different from the one they learned about in
American history 101. “I gaze down from the summit at the icy
ring of Truckee Lake, the one they now call Donner,” recounts
Patty Reed, one of the survivors, in her diary some 75 years
after that cruel winter, “an it’s odd to think that neither
George nor Jacob ever got anywhere near the lake that is named
for them . . . It tells you something about the way things get
remembered.” Our main family is not the Donners but the Reeds,
our narrator is Jim Reed (and Patty Reed