"A retelling of the fate of the Donner Party, with a Walking Dead style twist"--

Nora Kelly, a young but successful curator with a series of important excavations already under her belt, is approached by the handsome Historian, Guy Porter, to lead an expedition unlike any other. Guy tells his story--one involving the ill-fated Donner Party, who became permanently lodged in the American consciousness in the winter of 1847, when the first skeletonized survivors of the party stumbled out of the California mountains, replete with...

"In powerful, vivid verse, the master behind The Watch That Ends the Night recounts one of history's most harrowing--and chilling--tales of survival. In 1846, a group of emigrants bound for California face a choice: continue on their planned route or take a shortcut into the wilderness. Eighty-nine of them opt for the untested trail, a decision that plunges them into danger and desperation and, finally, the unthinkable. From extraordinary poet and...

"In the winter of 1846-47, a group of eighty-seven pioneers heading from the Midwest to California found themselves snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountain range with no way forward and no food or supplies. While forty-eight of the group members survived, the others perished due to extreme weather, starvation, and illness. To survive, the remaining people resorted to extreme measures . . . including cannibalism. Learn about the many miscalculations,...

A chronicle of the mid-nineteenth-century wagon train tragedy draws on the perspectives of one of its survivors, Sarah Graves, recounting how her new husband and she joined the Donner party on their California-bound journey and encountered violent perils, in an account that also offers insight into the scientific reasons that some died while others survived.