The best land under heaven : the Donner Party in the age of Manifest Destiny
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 427-436) and index.

In the eerily warm spring of 1846, George Donner placed this advertisement in a local newspaper as he and a restless caravan prepared for what they hoped would be the most rewarding journey of a lifetime. But in eagerly pursuing what would a century later become known as the "American dream," this optimistic-yet-motley crew of emigrants was met with a chilling nightmare; in the following months, their jingoistic excitement would be replaced by desperate cries for help that would fall silent in the deadly snow-covered mountains of the Sierra Nevada. We know these early pioneers as the Donner Party, a name that has elicited horror since the late 1840s. Now, historian Michael Wallis continues his life's work of parsing fact from fiction to tell the true story of one of the most embroidered sagas in Western history.