Book Review: Snowy Mountain Passage
(2/13) I just finished Snowy Mountain Passage by James D. Houston. The occasionally shifting tense didn’t work for me, and I didn’t get particularly attached to the story. That’s either because I know the story all ready — it’s about the Donner Party — or because I find the way the sentences are structured jarring. I haven’t figured out which.
However, as historical fiction it explores one particular aspect of the Donner Party that I’ve always considered underdocumented and that is, what happened when James Reed and William McCutcheon went over the mountain? MCCutcheon is always described in historical accounts, if at all, as a big man who liked to swear, recite Shakespeare, and didn’t much care what people thought about what he said. Houston remembers this when he makes McCutcheon a character.
Houston also remembers several things that are trickier to find — such as the fact that rescuers were paid large sums to retrieve the survivors of the Donner Party, that streets in San Jose are named for the Reed family (Reed, Martha and Virginia Streets — though Houston only mentions Reed), and that McCutcheon left behind a daughter in the camp. The story mentions in passing that the child died — but doesn’t detail how, which is probably just as well, since the one account I’ve found is shaky at best. If Houston found the same account, perhaps he thought it was too historical unreliable. Houston also mentions that the Reed family settled on Market Street, and that Reed was given a (later contested) orchard. I haven’t heard of the orchard before, or that Salvador’s brother came looking for him. I think maybe that’s fictional.
But Houston mentions that the Donner Party were a bit out for themselves after awhile, that when a second murder occurred they didn’t try to string that person up as they wanted to with James Reed (something I hadn’t heard before). In alternating chapters, he cuts between Reed’s banishment from the camp and journey back to his family, and Patty Reed’s remembrances as an old woman. Occasionally, he makes good use of other cultures which would not have recieved much notice at the time: John Sutter’s native Hawaian wife, or Salavador’s memory of the priests at the mission. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that the Donner Party happened right between the Spanish missions and Native Americans, and just before the Gold Rush. Houston points out these things.
Does make me wonder though…did John Sutter have a Hawaiian wife? This book (and Sutter’s Fort museum) say he was Swiss, which I had never read until I went on a field trip there.
Houston also tries to get inside Jim Reed’s head as he’s getting help for his family and the others. What is he thinking about? What does he regret (other than the stabbing that led to his banishment). Houston raises an interesting point here.
[If I could only remember what it was…]
I always thought Jim Reed was, in a way, remarkably lucky that he almost got himself hung, because if he hadn’t gotten banished, the liklihood that anyone else would have been so determined to go into the mountains in a snowstorm, seems less. Of course, Houston makes it clear that Jim Reed the character may have felt very differently.
Now of course, I’m wondering where the Reed orchard was located…
In the end, Houston wraps up the story by giving a summery of people. He notes one of things I always founds neat, but sometimes hard to find: that kids threw rocks and things at Keseberg later on because of what he did; that Jim Reed was involved in the city council. If I remember right, although he mentions San Jose’s contest for state capital, he doesn’t mention that Reed was involved in that, or that Reed and McCutcheon got into some kind of argument through the newspapers.
What Houston does say is that the Reed’s house on Market Street was eventually lost when Patty Reed was grown. Now there’s something I didn’t know. Now I have to look that up. I know Virginia Reed’s house burned down in downtown San Jose fairly recently, historically speaking, because I’ve handled the historic resource inventory for the address at internship.
I know that McCutcheon and Amanda his wife had other children — if I remember right, one of them was given to the family doctor, and that child may have been the one to become a lawyer in San Francisco — but I’m not sure, as I haven’t looked at paperwork in the California room for awhile. I know that McCutcheon became the sheriff, though it’s a shame there’s not more documentation after that about him. If I remember right, there was a William McCutcham who was a general laborer after a time, and due to spelling differences, that might be have been William McCutcheon. But I don’t know. In his account, Houston has other characters refer to William as Bill or Mac.
Well, even though I know James D. Houston has done history books before, I haven’t read many of them, aside from the book Farewell to Manazar, coauthored by his wife (which I’ve always enjoyed). I met him briefly once at a booksigning at SJSU — I forget for which book. I won’t try and argue historical scholarship here — Houston has enough little throw-away lines in this book that are historically hard to find, that I suspect he’s really done some research.
But even though I’m historically and personally interested in the Donner Party, and especially in William McCutcheon and company, I can’t say the story here ultimately grabbed me. Something about the way it was written. I gravited more toward the Patty Reed entries, the more commonly fictionized character, than I did to the Jim Reed sections. It’s not the language — sentences in this often have great imagery — but some of the rest I found too abrupt.
Maybe that’s just me. Other people no doubt will find that this book moves along fine, that they love what’s been done with it. I have to say i’m impressed with what’s in this book — but not necessarily with the way it was done. I’m not sure why. But because it deals with a part of the Donner Party that’s somewhat neglected and reimagines it, and because it has a better epilogue portion than most, I can’t be too harsh about it. I would refer to this in future if I needed a memory jog about a historical location or something, if I already knew where to search — but I would not refer to it for its fiction alone.