Forlorn Hope

FORLORN HOPE

A HAUNTED HISTORY OF THE DONNER PARTY

BY TROY TAYLOR

"In prosecuting this journey," warned an 1849 guidebook to the West, "the emigrant should never forget that it is one in which time is everything."

It was the best advice that any settler going West was given during the days of the wagon trains to California. The clock ticked with each passing mile, sounding an alarm that meant success for most but doom for an unlucky few - like the Donner Party.

In Troy Taylor's latest book of historical horror, discover the true story of the Donner Party, which left Illinois in the spring of 1846 and traveled by wagon toward California. Most of us know how the story ends - with cannibalism in the mountains - but most don't know how they ended up there, snowbound in a winter landscape of ice and snow.

The Donners began their journey filled with hope and a hunger for new land in the sunshine, but they had no idea what awaited them on the overland trail. Cursed by bad luck, they made careless mistakes, took an untested shortcut, and were plagued by death and bloodshed along the way. Within these pages, you'll travel along with them as they face horrifying storms, cut a new trail through the Wasatch, spend four days in the desert with no water, and banish one of the caravan's best men after a murder in self-defense. They only had to cross the Sierra Nevada before the heavy winter snowfalls - but they didn't make it.

Trapped for months in the snow-covered mountains, slowly dying from cold and starvation, they did everything they could to stay alive - even the unthinkable. Discover the events that left them stranded at Truckee Lake, the plight of the first escape attempt by a snowshoe, the horrors found at the camps by the rescue parties, the desperate hunger that led to eating human flesh, the monster that acquired a taste for it and, finally, the eerie hauntings left behind in the wake of the tragedy.

This is a story that we all think we know - but there's much more to it than we hear about in school. This is one of the author's strangest and most unsettling books so far