To Truckee's Trail — Celia Hayes

The greatest adventure never told ... until now! In the year of 1844, a party of fifty men, women and children set out for California from Council Bluffs, Iowa. The men and women of this party are looking for different things by undertaking this long journey: Dr. John Townsend looks to find a place where his invalid wife Elizabeth may recover her health. Isabella Patterson with her six children is hoping to be reunited with her husband, gone ahead to establish a new home for them all in California. The devoutly Catholic and Irish patriarch Martin Murphy, Sr. is seeking a degree of religious freedom for his extended family. Just-married gunsmith Allen Montgomery is looking for adventure. And no one knows what the taciturn blacksmith Elisha Stephens is looking for, all along the California-Oregon emigrant trail - but they elect him as their leader and trust him with their lives.

They form a company, hire a former mountain man, Caleb Greenwood to guide them as far as the Rockies, and set off into the trackless west with their eleven ox-drawn wagons. They walk two thousand miles, across plain and desert, fording rivers,  climbing mountains and hoisting their wagons to the top of a sheer cliff. They blaze a new trail through the desert beyond Nevada's Humboldt Sink and up the valley of the Truckee River into the heart of the Sierra Nevada mountains - the first party to bring their wagons all the way to California.

But they are caught by winter, while still in the high Sierras. Like the Donner-Reed emigrant party of two years later - marooned in the same place at the same time of year - the Townsend, Murphy, Patterson and Armstrong families also face faced starvation and death.  But unlike the Donner Party, this company has an advantage - their courage, faith, and trust in each other and in their leaders. Would it be enough to ensure their survival?