I'm driving through Donner Pass this holiday season and it made me wonder what historians know about the Donner Party. And why was it called The Donner Party? Did they finance or organize it? Was it just one family?
There’s an awesome documentary on the Donner Party that you can find here.
It goes into great detail and tells the story from beginning to end.
The Donner Party disaster is very well known, and 1st hand accounts of what happened still exist. This book uses the primary documents to go into the reasons why it happened the way it did: Desperate Passage: the Donner Party's Perilous Journey West, by Ethan Rarick. It was not just one family, and the group made fascinatingly ill-informed choices at several key points.