Donner-Reed Tragedy

About the Book

Ted Davidson has set the incredible tragedy of the Donner Party in a dramatic structure that maintains the tautness these true events demand. By focusing on Jim Reed (the real leader), Maggie Reed (Jim's wife) and Bill Eddy (the best hunter in the party), Davidson breathes life into all the historically accurate, astonishing events faced by the party-extraordinary confrontations with life and death; courage and cowardice; starvation, madness and murder; love and hate; cannibalism and survival.

To become an expert on the Donner Party, he read reams of books, dug through original documents at the Bancroft Historical Library, 4-wheeled out the Donner trail from the Continental Divide two times, hiked and 4-wheeled the trail over the Sierra many times, snowshoed across Donner Pass atop snow more than twenty feet deep, and vicariously lived and re-lived the experiences of the principal characters in order to empathize with them and accurately bring them back to life. See www.donner-reed.com for more information.

About the Author

TED DAVIDSON was a professor at El Camino College in California, where some of his varied interests were manifest in the anthropology courses and screenwriting workshops he taught. Based on his anthropological research in prison, he wrote Chicano Prisoners: The Key to San Quentin, which describes the prisoners' own illegal, brutal culture as revealed to him by the Mexican Mafia. Before moving to the Bitterroot Valley in Montana to write full-time, he undertook his enormous, multi-year Donner project.