The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny

If you’ve studied outdoor education, you’ve learned about heuristic traps: human factors like leadership trust or summit fever that affect decision-making. Should you make a move in the storm or wait it out? And if you can only choose one, do you eat your friend’s heart, liver, or brains? Hmmm. Many think of the Donner Party as a distant textbook chapter, but historian Michael Wallis brings new life—and death—to the survival saga. As the 1846-47 winter snowdrifts pile up to twenty-two feet in the eastern Sierra, you’ll feel like you’re there, shivering under wool blankets, eating through the rations until it’s live mice on the menu, then shoe leather, then pet dogs, then…Samuel Shoemaker’s arm. Out of the eighty-seven migrants who started, only forty-six survived. Would you have done anything differently? With maps, photos, and diary excerpts, this full-bodied chronicle invites you to jump on the wagon train and consider the question for yourself.