The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party

by Daniel James Brown

The packs contained blankets, a little coffee and sugar, some tobacco, and about eight pounds of dried beef for each of them.† This, they thought, if they rationed it carefully, would see them through for the six days that they calculated it would take them to make it through to Johnson’s Ranch in the western foothills. They believed that Johnson’s was thirty or forty miles to their southwest. In fact it was sixty-six as the crow flies, at least seventy-five by the route they would attempt.