53A. McGLASHAN, C[harles] F[ayette]. Terrible! Thrilling! True! History of the Donner Party. A Tragedy of the Sierra [view, with “Photo Eng. Co. White” at lower right corner] Price, Paper, - - $1.00. Sent Prepaid to any Address on Receipt of Price, by the Author C. F. McGlashan, Truckee, Cal. Sacramento: H. S. Crocker & Co., [1879]. Broadside advertisement printed on heavy paper in blue with red and green decorative border (27.7 x 35.5 cm; 11 x 14 inches). Fine.
          Promotional for McGlashan’s book. Scarce ephemeron.          ($300-600)

The tragedy of the Donner Party is, without doubt, one of the most sensational events in the history of the American West, rivaling the fall of the Alamo and Custer’s last stand. C. F. McGlashan, the editor of the Truckee Republican and earlier author of a series of articles on the emotion-charged Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah, wrote the first detailed narrative history of this horror in the snow which still must be regarded as the beginning point for any serious study pertaining to this most controversial of all overland episodes. McGlashan had the advantage of timing. He was distant enough from the event to have perspective and yet close enough in time to have access to the primary sources. In preparation for this book, he interviewed twenty-four out of the twenty-six living survivors, wrote and received over two thousand letters, read virtually every printed account, read manuscript diaries including the famous Patrick Breen diary, and thoroughly inspected the scene of the disaster while still in a relatively undisturbed state. His thoroughness in gathering documentation was nothing short of remarkable for a journalist of the 1870s not trained in historical method or archaeology. McGlashan succeeded in gaining the confidence of many of the families including Graves, Murphy, Reed, Breen, Donner, and Tucker, and from them pieced together this heart-rending history. Furthermore, McGlashan followed up his chronicle of tragedy with a review of the subsequent recriminations, rumor mongering, and demonizing of Lewis Keseberg, and how individuals and families were faring in the 1870s. By and large he was able to separate fact from mythology. Regrettably and tragically for history, McGlashan burnt much of his Donner archive shortly before his death in 1931.
          To preview the sad, distressing subject of his book, McGlashan opened his preface with the following spine-tingling sentence: “The delirium preceding death by starvation is full of strange phantasies.” In this preface, he contrasted the horrible event with the peaceful mountain site not far from the railroad tracks, writing: “More thrilling than romance, more terrible than fiction, the sufferings of the Donner Party form a bold contrast to the joys of pleasure-seekers who to-day look down upon the lake from the windows of silver palace cars.” The chapter subtitles warn the squeamish that this is not going to be an “everybody lived happily ever after” story. “A Poem Composed while Dying,” “Starving Children Lying in Bed,” “The Sleep of Death,” “Living upon Snow Water,” and “The Flesh of the Dead,” to name just a few, indicate the horror that awaits the reader.
          When published, the book sold out in less than two weeks, an unprecedented sale for the time period. McGlashan issued a broadside to promote the book with the attention grabbing words “Terrible! Thrilling! True!” serving as the headline. The book, selling for $1.00, was a work in progress. After the first edition appeared, the author revised, expanded, and corrected the text, and added illustrations and portraits. By 1940, when Stanford University Press printed a new edition, the book had already been reprinted twelve times. McGlashan’s book has been criticized for its biases, florid language, and kid-glove treatment of those who supplied him with information. For the second edition published in 1880 by A. L. Bancroft in San Francisco, McGlashan deleted or revised passages that disturbed Eliza P. Donner Houghton, the Reed women, and William Murphy. Bliss McGlashan Hinkle, the author’s daughter, and her husband, George H. Hinkle, wrote the foreword to the Stanford edition. Both were trained historians specializing in the Sierra and did not mince words about the shortcoming of the elder McGlashan’s book: “Its language is saturated with sentiment, and great stretches of the narrative are written in the pressed-flower-and-keep-sake style of a young lady’s album of the period.” Even with its flaws, The History of the Donner Party remains a respected work. Joseph A. King, in a recent study (1998) of the many interpretations of the ordeal, offered this assessment: “An historian today, attempting to write a history of the Donner Party, could work without [J. Quinn] Thornton [Oregon and California in 1848], [Eliza P. Donner] Houghton [The Expedition of the Donner Party], and [George R.] Stewart [Ordeal by Hunger], but could not do without the McGlashan book.”

——Gary F. Kurutz

Additional sources consulted: George H. Hinkle and Bliss McGlashan Hinkle, Foreword to History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1940); Joseph A. King, Winter of Entrapment (Lafayette, California: K & K Publications, 1998), pp. 185-86.