Days of Hope
Miles of Misery
Love and Loss on the Oregon Trail
Fred Dickey 2020 420 pages
We don’t usually review fiction books because there are almost none that have anything to do with Donner Summit. Days of Hope Miles of Misery Love and Loss on the Oregon Trails is fiction though, and despite the title, the story sends emigrants over Donner Summit. Better yet, the story opens with Hannah Blanc watching “the Sierra-show with awe, but her admiration was beclouded by her whisper to the sky – ‘What a taunt, that Hell should be so beautiful.’” It’s a good start.
The first chapter is just one-and-a-half pages long but it sets up the expectation for the story and how hard the journey was, ending with Hannah saying , “Dear God, how did I let this happen?” That’s foreshadowing, for those of us in the literary trade. Days of Hope… is 1845, pre-Gold Rush and pre-Donner Party.
This story is about the most benighted group of emigrants ever to cross the Sierra, at least with the exception of the Donner Party. If you’ve read books about the emigrants or emigrant accounts you’ve come across most of the various episodes in this book. Dickey has done a lot of research about the emigrant experience and all the stories of hardship and human nature are in this book, applied to this group of emigrants. Given the experiences of this group of emigrants it’s a wonder anyone got to California. This is a catalog of everything that ever went wrong with all the trains but given to just one group.
Another issue is that there is unending conflict. Every day someone is having a problem with someone else. That emigrants got to California is proof that groups overcame hardships, personality conflicts, and individual deficiencies. In Days of Hope it’s amazing anyone got to California by crossing the continent, but of course many tens of thousands did.
Days of Hope starts with seventy or eighty people and twenty-eight wagons. By the time they get to California there are no wagons left and only nine adults and five children. There have been suicides, murders, accident, people turning back for home, and a group that decided Oregon has better prospects because of the coming Mexican War. Although there was no cannibalism and the group did not have to over-winter in the Sierra, the story still exaggerates the typical continental crossing.
That said, if you’ve not read about the emigrant experience, Days of Hope will introduce you. Dickey’s research is translated through dialogue and you learn about social mores and customs of the time, dress, trappers’ rendezvous, oxen versus horses, food needed per person and lots of other details. There are good hints in case you want to make the trip: don’t take dogs, take a milk cow, take extra oxen, take “dessicated vegetables,” etc. There are some errors too. For example, Dickey uses latitude in place of longitude (pg 99).
The beginning of the book introduces to two main characters, Nimrod Lee and Hannah Spencer. They have good back stories. Nimrod is going to be the guide but he has other things on his mind too. When Nimrod accepts the guide job for a discount (because of the other things on his mind) the party asks him what to expect and he replies, “The worst.” More foreshadowing. It’s going to get bad.
There are good descriptions, for example, the whimpering of children “was sandpaper on her heart.” Describing dust, Dickey says there were only twenty-five hundred emigrants on the trail in 1845 but dust was still the issue.
“Dust could not be escaped. It flew on the wind and swirled lie a snowstorm in the dry air and invaded everyone’s lungs. It as the leader of a conspiracy of the elements. It kicked up under wheels and into wagons, into water bucket, and into the soups bubbling in Dutch ovens.
“Day after day, the wind never wearied. It worked dirt and sand into every crevice of their bodies, into beards, and babies’ diapers. Eyes became read and irritated because no amount of blinking could shield the grit. Every bit of fried bacon included the sandy crunch of Platte River grime.”
Later the women stage a revolt to do laundry, “They made it clear they were tired of wearing clothes so dusty that when it rained they almost turned to mud.”
Then Dickey went on to describe the sun and its effects. That was only the prosaic discomfort. On top of that there’s a long list of episodes that whittle down the starting 28 wagons to zero: quicksand, Indians, cholera, frustration, prejudice, snapping turtle attack, Rake Face Marcel, accidental gun fire, child birth, dust storms, drownings, suicide, murders, child abuse, insanity, theft, people running off, the desert, snowstorm, starvation, animals dying, a child run over by a wagon, deaths, and more.
In describing things there are a lot of homespun similes that get a little tiring, “He’s as popular as a wet dog at a church social.” “You’re as cocky as a goat on a narrow ledge. “Zack’d last with Nimrod ‘bout as long as sausage in a pig pen. He’d fold like an outhouse in a tornado.”
Dickey at times imagines what must be going through emigrants’ minds to give the reader a sense of the misery of the travel. The summer heat wave drained “energy from people and animals alike.” People were tormented by rashes. They took out frustrations on animals “as they never would have back in their own fields.” The continued upward slant of elevation caused “muscle to burn and breaths to heave… and it shortened people’s fuses in dealing with each other.” “Women got tired of of sweat-sticky clothes and worried about body odor. Children grew bored and took dangerous chances. “Men found fault with each other over matter that back home would have been shrugged off. People were tempted to lash out in their misery.” “Their lives had changed psychologically in ways they could not have prepared for.”
“They were lonely in a crowd: Americans, by circumstance and by choice, were accustomed to lots of space an carefully selected associations. In the small group of pioneers, they had abruptly become hemmed-in by strangers whose habits and manners disgusted them. It was toxic claustrophobia.”
To work through all the travails Dickey’s assembled a varied cast: city people and farm people, educated and uneducated, gay people, and a Jew. Many of the cast are clearly deficient less than desirable people, and that leads to unending conflict. There’s a dope addict, a bully, a drunkard, the educated and the uneducated, a wagon full of prostitutes, and thieves. There are the upstanding people too: the heroes, Hannah and Nimrod, the group’s captain, and some who do nice things with their dying breaths.
There are some problems with the plot besides throwing in every experience emigrants ever experienced and the unending conflict. Hannah is made a leadership committee member. There is no motivation for that, no examples of her good judgement. There is child abuse and one wonders why that had to be brought into to the mix of plot elements. Was that a common emigrant experience? For two different murders there are different reactions. Zack is let off for killing a prostitute but then they later want to hang Edgar for killing Zack. What brings Hannah and Nimrod together except for the convenience of the plot? A former slave is unaccountably given away to the Indians as if that was the only workable solution to a plot problem.
Every little bit through the book someone turns back, runs off, dies, or is murdered. It’s a wonder that anyone was left when they got to Sutter’s Fort.