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The Mothers: A Documentary Novel of the Donner Party
western, historical, novel
287 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1943
About the author
Vardis Fisher
93 books37 followersVardis Alvero Fisher was a writer best known for his popular historical novels of the Old West. He also wrote the monumental 12-volume Testament of Man (1943–1960) series of novels, depicting the history of humans from cave to civilization. It was considered controversial because of his portrayal of religion, especially the Judeo-Christian tradition, emphasis on sexuality, and conclusions about anthropology.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 12, 2023
The Mothers by Vardis Fisher is a historical fiction novel that follows the members of the Donner-Reed Party during their 1846 journey towards California. In the winter of 1846-47, the group became trapped in snow in the mountains while following the "Hastings Cutoff" a largely untested route that led to the deaths of 42 people.
A fantastic novel. I love that Vardis credits the women, the mothers of the Donner Party, for their resilience and strength in trying to keep their families alive. Although told in third-person omniscient narrator style, Vardis made William "Bill" Eddy a major character and it was interesting to see his perspective, especially during the events of the Forlorn Hope Party. Had it not been for the efforts of the survivors of the Forlorn Hope and James Reed, I don't think anyone at Truckee Lake would have lived.
Another fascinating read about the Donner Party.
A fantastic novel. I love that Vardis credits the women, the mothers of the Donner Party, for their resilience and strength in trying to keep their families alive. Although told in third-person omniscient narrator style, Vardis made William "Bill" Eddy a major character and it was interesting to see his perspective, especially during the events of the Forlorn Hope Party. Had it not been for the efforts of the survivors of the Forlorn Hope and James Reed, I don't think anyone at Truckee Lake would have lived.
Another fascinating read about the Donner Party.
May 4, 2010
I read this when I was just ten years old and my dad recommended I read something from his library- he collected books on Idaho/Oregon history. It was a first edition and the pages were old and yellow- much unlike my brand new Little House on the Prairie series.
I loved this book. I cried and I worried as I read about the Donner Party.
Many years later when I told my dad I couldn't find a copy of it, he told me he had sold his only copy, but that he would track one down for me. He did, and gave it to me on my 35th birthday.
I loved this book. I cried and I worried as I read about the Donner Party.
Many years later when I told my dad I couldn't find a copy of it, he told me he had sold his only copy, but that he would track one down for me. He did, and gave it to me on my 35th birthday.
May 9, 2012
The first novel I read about the Donner Party was James Houston’s Snow Mountain Passage, a very moving account which follows the life of Patty Reed, who was only eight when her family joined the wagon train in 1846, beyond the mountains into her California. I happened to meet Houston at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers shortly after the book was published and asked him why he thought the world might need another book about what is undoubtedly among the most closely-documented events of western history. Turns out that he lived in the house in Santa Cruz where Patty Reed was living when she died in 1923 at the age of 93. He didn’t know that fact when he moved in, but had been hearing her voice in the rooms and felt compelled to tell her story. A friend I hadn’t seen for a while had developed an interest in the whole Donner event during the years since we’d last seen each other, and he referred me to Vardis Fisher’s The Mothers. I feel fortunate to have more or less by accident come upon the rich experience of reading this pair of novels.
Unlike Snow Mountain Passage, which is intensely personal, drawn from Patty’s imagined “trail notes,” and focuses on the emotional response to a fairly small group of the unfortunates in this drama, The Mothers takes the long view. As you can see from the reproduction of the frontispiece above, Fisher calls it “An American Saga of Courage,” and adopts an omniscient view of the events, passing more or less Olympian judgment on his characters. As the title implies, his primary thesis is that those who have the most at stake--namely children and family--will demonstrate the most courage in extremis, and that you’ll find that courage manifested most strongly in mothers. He does acknowledge exceptions, allowing that passive or generous natures sometimes prevent the spirit of the true survivor from shining through. The kind of mother Fisher most admires would never, for example, have given up meat that her children might need, as Eleanor Eddy did, even to help her husband make it across the mountains for help. Still, it’s a fascinating hypothesis, and there are enough demonstrated examples in the tale to make you think that amiability and survival might be mutually exclusive.
The whole event is most famous, of course, for the cannibalism, a subject on which both Fisher and Houston tread fairly lightly. It was by no means the only instance of cannibalism on the frontier, but it’s the best known, the one most of us heard about in school. Both authors treat the horror of the taboo and show fascination with some of the rituals and procedures that develop once it’s been violated. One of the most touching moments of The Mothers is when a dying father suggests his daughters to eat his flesh to save themselves once he passes on. There are those who will eat only those who are already dead, others who aren’t willing to wait for death to come naturally. Still, the focus of both novels is on the struggle to survive and the inner character that the extreme conditions reveal rather than on the mutual munching.
Fisher joins the company during their trek along the Humboldt River, and his account provides a carefully detailed account of the elements that got them into such trouble. The carelessness and thoughtlessness are astounding. They lose precious animals because they allow them to wander without setting up guards. Then they get careless about guards and lose more even though they know the cattle are their lives. They continually bicker and refuse to cooperate in a situation where mutual support is all that will save them. Houston starts us off with the preparations to leave for the trip, showing how the Reeds’ insistence on outfitting a huge and heavy wagon nicknamed the “palace car” may have sown the initial seeds of the party’s destruction. Without the delays in getting started which the big vehicle caused and its lumbering pace, they might have beat the storms to the pass. However, the bitter quarrels about everything from the route to the disbursement of provisions showed in both novels that the endemic ability to truly join together and perhaps the lack of a strong leader doomed the enterprise from the beginning.
A reading of The Mothers and Snow Mountain Passage is a fine way to experience this piece of history-cum-mythology. The Mothers is very fine for its detailed historical, chronological record and for the descriptions of personality and character that certainly debunk the notion that our pioneer forebears were uniformly courageous and virtuous. Snow Mountain Passage demonstrates how a strong and loving spirit can transcend even the most horrible of human (inhuman?) experiences and find not only survival, but happiness. I wonder where I’d have fallen in that spectrum. I’m glad I won’t (at least I hope I won’t.) have to find out.
Unlike Snow Mountain Passage, which is intensely personal, drawn from Patty’s imagined “trail notes,” and focuses on the emotional response to a fairly small group of the unfortunates in this drama, The Mothers takes the long view. As you can see from the reproduction of the frontispiece above, Fisher calls it “An American Saga of Courage,” and adopts an omniscient view of the events, passing more or less Olympian judgment on his characters. As the title implies, his primary thesis is that those who have the most at stake--namely children and family--will demonstrate the most courage in extremis, and that you’ll find that courage manifested most strongly in mothers. He does acknowledge exceptions, allowing that passive or generous natures sometimes prevent the spirit of the true survivor from shining through. The kind of mother Fisher most admires would never, for example, have given up meat that her children might need, as Eleanor Eddy did, even to help her husband make it across the mountains for help. Still, it’s a fascinating hypothesis, and there are enough demonstrated examples in the tale to make you think that amiability and survival might be mutually exclusive.
The whole event is most famous, of course, for the cannibalism, a subject on which both Fisher and Houston tread fairly lightly. It was by no means the only instance of cannibalism on the frontier, but it’s the best known, the one most of us heard about in school. Both authors treat the horror of the taboo and show fascination with some of the rituals and procedures that develop once it’s been violated. One of the most touching moments of The Mothers is when a dying father suggests his daughters to eat his flesh to save themselves once he passes on. There are those who will eat only those who are already dead, others who aren’t willing to wait for death to come naturally. Still, the focus of both novels is on the struggle to survive and the inner character that the extreme conditions reveal rather than on the mutual munching.
Fisher joins the company during their trek along the Humboldt River, and his account provides a carefully detailed account of the elements that got them into such trouble. The carelessness and thoughtlessness are astounding. They lose precious animals because they allow them to wander without setting up guards. Then they get careless about guards and lose more even though they know the cattle are their lives. They continually bicker and refuse to cooperate in a situation where mutual support is all that will save them. Houston starts us off with the preparations to leave for the trip, showing how the Reeds’ insistence on outfitting a huge and heavy wagon nicknamed the “palace car” may have sown the initial seeds of the party’s destruction. Without the delays in getting started which the big vehicle caused and its lumbering pace, they might have beat the storms to the pass. However, the bitter quarrels about everything from the route to the disbursement of provisions showed in both novels that the endemic ability to truly join together and perhaps the lack of a strong leader doomed the enterprise from the beginning.
A reading of The Mothers and Snow Mountain Passage is a fine way to experience this piece of history-cum-mythology. The Mothers is very fine for its detailed historical, chronological record and for the descriptions of personality and character that certainly debunk the notion that our pioneer forebears were uniformly courageous and virtuous. Snow Mountain Passage demonstrates how a strong and loving spirit can transcend even the most horrible of human (inhuman?) experiences and find not only survival, but happiness. I wonder where I’d have fallen in that spectrum. I’m glad I won’t (at least I hope I won’t.) have to find out.
December 6, 2023
Get ready for some hard and unbelievable events on a journey across the US … like nothing you’ve ever read or thought of before!
February 24, 2014
The best of all the novels relating the adventures of the Donner Party.
February 27, 2023
A morose and depressing subject (Donner party) but I pushed through because I love Vardis Fischer.
October 1, 2024
This was obviously written in the 1970s which meant some language and such were not great but it was still an interesting account of the Donner party & what went wrong.
August 12, 2025
Hard to read
The story of the the Donner party is hard to read. It is the ultimate in survival literature. Wished I!never had read it. But glad I did
The story of the the Donner party is hard to read. It is the ultimate in survival literature. Wished I!never had read it. But glad I did
December 28, 2019
This book was assigned reading back when I was in 8th or 9th grade. Clearly, it made an impression as I wanted to read it again, so I found a used copy. This is the "fictionalized biography," a "novel" about the doomed Donner-Reed Party of 1846-47, emigrants to California who started through the Sierras too late in the year and with only a meager food supply, were trapped in the mountains by twenty feet of snow, and had to resort to cannibalizing those who had already died of starvation.
The story is well told as far as it goes, but the arrival of various rescue parties is--to me, anyway--only the beginning of the end. In this book, there's no ending to the end. We are told of the Breen family (those who had not been taken out by the first relief party) refusing to budge during a snowstorm as they trekked toward Bear Valley with the second relief party, then being left behind and forced to cannibalism. That's it. I'm left with the mental picture of a bunch of people sitting in the snow, gnawing on a human leg, fade to black, but in fact they were all brought out by a third relief party, and all survived.
No epilogue, no aftermath. And while I know it's written as a novel, I'm miffed that there is no source material listed. I am aware that it was published in 1960, when all the source material may not have been available to the author, but there had to have been some archives he consulted. The writing is a bit stilted at times, but not unbearably so.
I do see why it moved me so much when I was a young teenager. It's a decent read, if you like to immerse yourself in gory stuff like I do.
The story is well told as far as it goes, but the arrival of various rescue parties is--to me, anyway--only the beginning of the end. In this book, there's no ending to the end. We are told of the Breen family (those who had not been taken out by the first relief party) refusing to budge during a snowstorm as they trekked toward Bear Valley with the second relief party, then being left behind and forced to cannibalism. That's it. I'm left with the mental picture of a bunch of people sitting in the snow, gnawing on a human leg, fade to black, but in fact they were all brought out by a third relief party, and all survived.
No epilogue, no aftermath. And while I know it's written as a novel, I'm miffed that there is no source material listed. I am aware that it was published in 1960, when all the source material may not have been available to the author, but there had to have been some archives he consulted. The writing is a bit stilted at times, but not unbearably so.
I do see why it moved me so much when I was a young teenager. It's a decent read, if you like to immerse yourself in gory stuff like I do.
February 7, 2008
A story of the Donner party. Based on historical records a telling of what happened to this group of settlers trapped in the mountains during the worst winter on record.
A absorbing tail of how the party got in trouble. Who survived and how they did it. Does not dwell on the more sensational aspects of the tale.
A absorbing tail of how the party got in trouble. Who survived and how they did it. Does not dwell on the more sensational aspects of the tale.
September 11, 2014
This was a hard book to read! The struggles and hardship of these people were so overwhelming! The amazing mothers in this story kept children alive through feats of unbelievable strength and courage. They are women to be looked up to-even through the difficult decisions some of them were forced to make. Go find this old book and read it-it should be a classic!
April 17, 2008
The fascinating factual story of the Donner Party showing that the mothers of the party were the ones who ensured the survival of those who made it. This book is very well written and is a riveting story.
March 15, 2012
I judge books by how hard they are to put down. This one gets five stars because I read the last half in 24 hours. I just wish I knew how much was true and how much was fiction.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews