White Hell
Sean Tyler
2025  212 pages

Don’t read this book.

Sean Tyle, the author, must have been fascinated by the Donner Party.  In White Hell he has written his story of a party of emigrants trapped in the Sierra. The inspiration is not just that Tyler’s story is about emigrants caught in the Sierra in winter There are many equivalent details.  The Donner Party story has Lansford Hastings who wrote a book to help emigrants and whose “shortcut” doomed the Donners, White Hell has Gaylord Hightower who has written a book to help emigrants and has a shortcut that dooms the McEwan Party.  Lansford Hasting left notes along his trail for those following.  So did  Gaylord Hightower.  The Reeds have a customized wagon as part of the Donner Party. Likewise one of the emigrants in the McEwan Party has a customized  Conestoga wagon or “land yacht.” It gets left behind in the desert just like the Donner Party’s Reed Family wagon. Just like the Donners the McEwan Pary takes time off from traveling which will put them behind for winter.

The McEwan Party crossed the continent in 1846-47 just like the Donners and was trapped in the Sierra snow just like the Donners.  Given that they were on the same route it’s surprising they didn’t run into each other. They had some of the same problems as the Donners.

The story opens with the McEwan Party coming across some stranded former slaves.  Their one ox has died and there is nothing to pull their wagon.  They claim to have been freed by their master. The McEwans Party argues but the blacks get an ox and continue with the McEwans.

Violet is one of the former slaves and she is beautiful.  The main plot of the book is the MeEwans becoming trapped in the Sierra and resorting to cannibalism.  There is a subplot which is about Peter, the wagon master’s brother. He is smitten with Violet.  He can think of nothing else.  She has “twinkling green eyes”.  She’s big and gorgeous “with an exotic thickness of eye-catching hips and thighs.”  It goes on and on and is tiresome, “And did I say her body was soaked in sweat?  And hardened and busty from the exertion of her muscles?  Jesus Sweating Christ…there was something extraordinary erotic about that…A busty sweaty brown body glistening in the sunlight.”  Then there is every adolescent’s delight as Peter describes Violet bathing. The fantasy goes on for pages and since Peter is the narrator we are subjected to his lust whenever he’s telling the story – which is always.

Another subplot is the still in the Crabtree wagon.  Hard liquor is dispensed in huge quantities with its attendant problems. Some of the party are just drunks.  The author must have thought this bit of “realism” was important because drunken behavior drives a lot of what happens.  It’s ridiculous though.  What emigrants would have made space in their wagon for a still and all the grain need to make the alcohol.  How they did the brewing on the travel is another issue.

Another apparent aim for realism in the book is the profane and racist language.  The more bad language, apparently, the more realism. Modern readers may find this as tiresome as Peter’s lustings well as obnoxious.

It seems too that for realistic depictions of 19th Century emigrants the more obnoxious the characters the more realism we have.  These are some of the most despicable characters in any book with the “highlight” of the despicableness being the ravings of Boggs at the end as he butchers bodies.  Were people in the past so vulgar? We’ll let one example suffice. One of the emigrangs is a former priest who apparently cannot remain sober  He is asked to pray one day,

“And forgive us Lord, for trespassing upon the lands of naked savages and half-wit Mexicans.”

“Oh, and lord, please forgive me for squirtin’ out liquid shit all over this heavenly desert you’ve guided me, too.”

People chuckle because this is in such good taste apparently.

“Oh, and lord Jesus, please forgive me once more… for I confess that I’ve messed my trousers every dog’on day for the last month. My wife can’t stand me anymore…”

The prayer goes on.  Tyler says it is “comedy gold” when the priest is drunk which is all the time. The prayer here shows how uproarious this can be.

The cast of characters arrives at the Sierra and cannot get over. They come back to a small cabin they’ve found (like the Donner Party cabin that had belonged to Moses Schallenberger who wintered two winters before). All twenty-five members cram into the cabin. Snow will get to be ten feet deep and the oxen will disappear into the snow.  It is a wonder that the little cabin is still standing given that its roof is mud and sticks.  It will snow nine days straight and still the roof won’t collapse.  Amazing building.  Slowly the group begins to starve except that there is still a lot of alcohol. This ubiquity of alcohol, called “trail brew,” does not further the plot and does not further character exposition.  We already know the characters are not just flawed but without any redeeming social value.  The alcoholic ubiquity is carried to extremes. Peter needs to perk himself up as they leave the wagons and head for the cabin and maybe to plead his case to Violet by jumping out from a snowbank on the trail to the cabine.. Boggs carries two slabs of beef and ten gallons of Trail Brew and nothing else on his way to the cabin.

When we get to the cannibalism things get grossly disgusting.  Fingers and toes get gnawed and flesh gets sucked clean from the bone. Then there is the butchering. Boggs becomes maniacal. Peter says the cabin is full of lunatics.  People don’t just die of hunger even though Boggs seems to maintain himself. There is murder too.

Also without much value to the plot is the run in with Mexican border agents.  There was no such thing in real life but maybe having some criminal Mexicans who appear out of nowhere is needed to convince the reader of the authenticity of the story. The result of the run-in keeps the blacks from being taken back into slavery. There is a standoff and at the end and most of the Mexicans are dead and the McEwan wagon master, Irwin who is also Peter’s brother, is wounded. He will later die.  All good westerns have to have a shoot-out. But in this case not before the border agents present the wagon train with the head of the one Indian who had been accompanying them.  This just pops out of nowhere because we never hear Takoda has disappeared. Takoda has no real part in the story.  He just appears on a spear.  Here too we meet the head of Gaylord Hightower.    The bad guys were dead and the “good” guys continue on except that Irwin is wounded and will die.  This will open up the leadership to chaos.

Eventually after weeks of starving in the cabin Peter will get knocked out and everyone except the villain, Boggs, will decided it’s time to cross the mountains. Somehow they have regained their strength. When Peter comes to he discovered he’s been left behind.  This, despite the fact that everyone is starving, whimpering, and  are lunatics.  Peter says he own flesh is rotting on the bone and his hair is falling out. Regardless, everyone is able to walk through the snow and climb over the pass.  Peter, a few days later, will be able to ride off.

Here we get to admire the author’s craft.  We’ve got to tie things up.  Authors have to be careful not to get their characters in too much trouble or they won’t be able to realistically extricate them from the plots conflicts.  Here’s how Tyler extricates his main characters.

There’s not enough room in the book to follow the majority of the surviving party.  What happens to them we don’t know.  Violet reappears though, as does a slave catcher who has been tracking her across the country, and maybe the other surviving former slaves (those not having been eaten), but he only says he’s after Violet.  He forces her to put on the extra snowshoes he’s carrying.   Violet is carried off into slavery again.  Peter has found Irwin’s missing horse, mounts the horse, and heads for California.  Peter ruminates “I was in love… and that’s what love will do to man. Get him up on that horse and send him down that dusty road through uncharted territory, striving and suffering day after day giving it all to read that fabled promised land.”   Did Peter find Violet again? Again, there weren’t apparently enough pages.  We have to admire the craft here tough. The slave catcher has followed the former slaves across the country, gotten to California, picked up two pair snowshoes (apparently if he found more than Violet they would go without snowshoes) and then came to the east side of the Sierra to intercept Violet. The Sierra are that small mountain range in California where everyone will take the same routes, the same river valleys, etc. and so run into each other (except that the McEwans won’t run into the Donners).  Miraculously the slave catcher crossed the Sierra at exactly the right time at exactly the right place to run into Violet.  That required massive work on the author’s part.

We’re not done with it yet.  Peter, riding Irwin’s found horse, goes down into California, apparently without food, comes across the source of a river, goes behind a waterfall and finds a warm water pool.  Miraculously there’s room for three beautiful nude American Indians to arrive to bathe along with their father who speaks perfect English.  Suddenly they disappear.   What was the point?  Like the rest of the book its unfathomable.

More of the author’s craft.
There are homonym errors in the book.  Those don’t get caught by spell checkers.

Then there are lapses in logic.
Peter wants to jump over the wagon tailgate “and storm into his [Irwin’s] bed, snatch him into a good wrestler’s underhook, and shove him out of the wagon in a burst of tough love, forcing him to be that the boss man again.” Irwin has been shot and is dying.

The wagon train is camped for a few days at what must be Donner Lake Peter and Violet go swimming. It will snow the next day.  With it being that cold they could not have lazily swum around.

The oxen have disappeared, but one member goes out probing for them.  That doesn’t work but apparently he dug so much there is a cavern big enough for Peter and Violet to make love in. The author had to figure out a way to get the pair out of the cabin.

It had been snowing feet and Peter wants to know if Crabtree has been following hoof prints of the oxen as a way to find them.

Old Man Crabtree died.  His son went out to dig a grave in the earth (under ten feet of snow.)

Then there are errors. 
The McEwans trave in Conestoga wagons.  That’s not what emigrant across the country had at that time and people did not ride in the wagons.

Finally, inexplicably, there is one chapter titled, “The Essex.”  This was a whaling ship in the early 19th Century that ran into trouble. The survivors engaged in cannibalism.  Those pages could have been given over to some actual plot.