By Ken Stern 

Donner Party’s hard time relived in ‘Answer Creek’

 

September 9, 2020



The American trait of impatience, that drive to get things done now, caution be damned, is often fatal. It was for Ada Weeks’ step-parents, who in the opening pages of Shelter Bay resident Ashley Sweeney’s new novel, “Answer Creek,” plunge their oxen-driven wagon into the late-May Big Blue River, swollen to twice its normal flow and carrying whole trees. In minutes the wagon is rammed, turned into the current and swept downstream. Humans and oxen are upended and disappear. Gone.

The 19-year-old Ada, along with hundreds of others in the Donner and Russell parties, were only days west of their Independence, Missouri launch point. Yet these was not the first deaths.

Ada is taken in by the Breen family of nine Irish immigrants from Iowa. She will walk with them for the next five months, through Indian Territory (the central Great Plains), into Unorganized Territory, across the Continental Divide, over the Great Salt Desert, until running into an early, brutal winter on the eastside of the Sierra Mountains at Truckee Meadows in today’s Nevada.


The family overwinters there with a remnant group of the great caravan. The Breen family holes up in a cabin, buried under snow. They find no game, no fish, no fruit, nuts or seeds. They subsist on blankets, book covers and shoe leather. Party members perish. Others, desperate, survive by eating the dead: Cannibalism is the everlasting legacy of the 1846 Donner Party.

In late February, after a rescue party has taken 19 others across the summit, Ada, outside, “sees Levinah Murphy hauling an ax and an extra piece of sheeting” and watches her hack at a corpse half-buried in the snow. Sweeney, who read a hundred books, spent two years following the Oregon Trail and spoke with historians and museum staffs, faces squarely but subtly the starvation, deterioration and survival decisions party members made to endure in an environment they had no inkling they would be in and for which they were not prepared.


This novel is as much about dying as living, seen through the eyes of a protagonist who wills herself to live.

In Sweeney’s historical fiction, her protagonist is rendered whole, a complex, thoughtful, observant young woman aware of life around her. Sweeney details with realistic specificity the slow daily progress cross country. We get the minutia of Ada’s journey, from the joy of bathing in a mountain creek, to the stale, sweat stained clothes and the months between baths and, finally, a clump of hair coming out in her hand. That is the long, great middle of the novel, when Ada’s world has shrunk to the size of her ever-gnawing stomach.


Much earlier, in Beaver Creek canyon on the fourth of July, Ada’s world is much more expansive and Sweeney beautifully captures the sounds of the breeze in grasses, the myriad bird songs and the late evening sun, the canyon “awash with radiant color, swarths of corals and salmon where the sun still beats on age-old walls. As soon as the sun abandons the rock face, the colors change abruptly to deeper shades of russet and burgundy.”

Western novels don’t have to be love stories, but this one is. Ada is a tough, working class, practical and three dimensional character. A second rescue party brings her across the Sierra Nevada, her hands tied, led on a rope. She is delirious. It is not hunger, but a brain-fever. Later, after getting to Fort Sutter, resting, and for the rest of a long life she holds the memories of the specific emigrants who perished that winter. But to Californians “the entire Donner-Reed entourage is tainted with shame, disgrace and humiliation”


Ada is going to do more than survive; she will thrive, but not by going to San Francisco. She goes up the American River, a Sierra highlands valley, with Julian Riddle, from the rescue party. She means to homestead on her own, but life and novels have a way of partnering people up.

Sweeney, as in her debut novel, “Eliza Waite,” creates a strong, smart, scrappy heroine, a role model for all of us. Walking into America’s future requires awareness, patience, persistence, resilience and heart. Compassion, too. This is as true today as in the 1840s. This is a novel to make time for, even if you don’t have time on your hands.

“Answer Creek” has been out since May. It is available at Seaport Books and the La Conner Library.

 

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