How to Survive History
Cody Cassidy
 2023 212 pages

This is a book about a lot of compelling stories – which are told along with retrospective advice.

We have Bob Crowley to thank for find us this fun book which is, the author says, “a detailed, practical manual for surviving the greatest catastrophes and adventures in this planet’s history” useful just in case you find yourself in a time machine which lands you at one of these pivotal evens.

Faithful readers will interrupt here asking were the Doner Summit history, which is the mandate of the Heirloom.  The answer comes late in the book, the “Donner Party.” Which of course was a catastrophe.  Please remember the Forlorn Hope (of which Bob Crowley and friends did a reprise a few years ago) went over Donner Summit as did the four rescue parties (which Bob Crowley and friends did a reprise of a year after the Forlorn Hope adventure), and about half of the Donner Party.

On the way to the Donner Party are other catastrophes to survive.

Each catastrophe comes with background information like the life cycle of carbon, wooly mammoths weighed about 12,000 lbs.  The Great Pyramid took twenty-five years to build, all about magma, a run down of Roman history, symptoms of the Black Death, Malthusian economy, the end of serfdom, scurvy, the rules for being a pirate, and the contents of the library of Constantinople. They are interesting stories.

Then come the survival techniques specific to the catastrophes like how to kill a wooly mammoth, outrunning a Tyrannosaurus, getting out of Pompeii, etc.

We get to the Donner Party on page 143 and here there’s an error noting that emigrants were going west for gold in 1846.  The Gold Rush was 1848, two years later. Lansford Hastings, whose guide book guided the Donner Party to disaster is described as a “respective guide.”  Nevertheless the story is true to life with the focus coming down to the wrong turn.  That focus on the left hand turn misses the other ways the Donner Party could have been saved: strong leadership, team work, keeping track of the oxen, not dawdling, going right over the pass when they arrived at Donner Lake and Edwin Bryant’s story.  He wrote a best selling, for the time, guidebook, What I Saw in California.  He and friends were part of the larger group that included the Donners.  They traded in their wagons for mules at one of the forts along the way and ended up in California weeks before the Donner Party.  That would have been a good survival technique for the Donners so that story is cursory, though true.