The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses starvation, cannibalism, and death.

Authored by Lansford Hastings, this guidebook stands as one of the earliest resources for pioneers heading to the American West. Among the first overland guidebooks, it depicted the West as a virtual Garden of Eden and promised a more direct route to California. The Indifferent Stars Above portrays it as a crucial but ultimately unreliable resource, blending observation with propaganda rather than offering reliable guidance. Its often vague, untested, or dangerously misleading directions significantly contributed to the disastrous outcome for the Donner Party. This guide symbolizes the perilous balance between ambition and peril that characterized the westward expansion, illustrating how misinformation and the allure of a promising path can lead to tragic consequences.

In The Indifferent Stars Above, the Hastings Cutoff is characterized as a deceptive and treacherous detour from the main Oregon Trail, infamously proposed by Lansford Hastings. Promising to shorten the journey to the San Francisco Bay Area by 300 miles, Hastings touted this route as the “most direct route” to California’s fertile lands. However, the reality of the Cutoff proved grimly different: It led emigrants, including the Donner Party, through the waterless expanses and difficult terrain of the Wasatch Mountains and Salt Lake Valley, requiring the travelers to carve their own wagon path, leaving them behind schedule.