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HUNTINGTON -- Halloween may be just barely in the rear-view mirror, but the horror is just about to begin as an outdoors adventure goes wrong, starvation has set in and the unthinkable begins.

Historian and seven-time Pulitzer Prize-nominated author, Allan W. Eckert has burrowed into the nation's most horrific and astounding outdoors survival story in his new book, "Dark Journey: The Tragedy of the Donner Party." It chronicles the life and death struggles of the Reed-Donner Party that became hopelessly stranded in 1845 in a vicious winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains with little food and 40-foot snow drifts.

An Ohio native who now lives in California, Eckert will be doing his first book-signing in the region in about five years, on Thursday and Friday, Nov. 5-6, at his publisher's place, the Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1645 Winchester Ave., Ashland.

Booksignings for the "Dark Journey" (334-page hardback, $25, JSF), will take place from 3 to 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 5 and from 10 a.m. to noon Friday, Nov. 6, as JSF makes this the first chance for the public to buy the new book.

A meticulous historian known for weaving gripping and brutally honest books, including the nationally acclaimed, "The Winning of America" series about the pioneer settling of America, Eckert has been dissecting the tangled web of stories about the wayward journey for the past seven years using more than 40 principle sources and accounts that often chronicled one person's story.

Like Eckert's six-volume "Winning of America" series, "Dark Journey" paints a consummate picture with rich detail of the journey and the array of people involved from trail leaders to children.

"There has been a lot of writing on it but it has been very segmented and usually the story of one person," Eckert said by phone. "It just didn't have that broad picture, so what I wanted to do was just really tell what happened to everyone."

In "Dark Journey," Eckert follows the Donner-Reed Wagon Train on the grim, often harrowing odyssey from Illinois westward to California, beginning in the spring of 1846 and finally -- mercifully -- ending in the spring of the following year.

Eckert follows the first exuberant, heavy-laden and many rich, wagon train families. They were loaded down with everything from pianos to cast-iron stoves as they traverse rugged, unmarked and often brutal and treacherous trails through mountains and the Great Salt Desert that begins to strip the people down to bare bones and raw emotions.

Rather than following the Oregon Trail past Ford Bridger (in modern day Wyoming) to Fort Hall (in present day Idaho) and rather than listening to a local, Western guide, the group took the advice of an eastern travel writer, Lansford Hastings, whose "Hastings Cut-Off" which he named but never took, sent the group over the nearly impassable Wasatch Mountains and torturous Great Salt Desert.

Using dozens of original accounts of this haunting journey that kept going from bad to worse then beyond, Eckert said he tried to paint as accurate a portrait as possible of those on the journey, and those who tried to come to their aid once they became trapped in the maw of a Sierra Nevada winter with 30 and 40-foot snow drifts.

"If a person was going to be a nave or a scoundrel or if he or she was going to be strong and helpful that came out too," Eckert said. "And it was a really very difficult time. No pretensions about it. Your life was in your hands and they all seemed to realize this but the possibilities were great in the West and they were willing to take the chance."

Eckert said one of the hardest things was wading through the numerous texts and then using his own intuition and a lifetime of researching and writing about 18th and 18th century America, to fill in the gaps on stories such as the heroine Tamsen Donner, who stands by her man, and that of Louis Keseberg, who developed quite a voracious taste for human flesh.

"It's pretty difficult because you have so many people who lie even in their own diaries," Eckert said. "After a while though you begin to realize when someone is really telling the truth and when someone is fabricating. I don't know how to explain that realization but if you do it enough, you begin to know who is talking the truth and who is not. That is how you base it on, that and getting as many sources to agree with one another as possible. With Keseberg that was put together with a lot of odds and ends but no direct account because no one was left to say how it came out. This has to be very close to what happened."

Eckert, who is pushing 80, said it was indeed fascinating to write about how so many people faced life's last, great adventure -- death.

John Denton, a thirtysomething pioneer who had reached a point of not going any further trudging through 8,000-foot-high mountain passes with 30 to 40-feet of snow, wrote a full page poem in his journal that was his last act in life.

"Death is one of the greatest adventures in life and I really do look forward to when my time comes with eagerness to see what happens," Eckert said. "Mine won't be too long in coming, I'm pushing 80 now."

While the book is filled with various shades of darkness, it is also filled with the best of human spirit, tenacity, love of family and fortitude as more than half of the party makes it through the unimaginable horrors of being stuck in the unforgiving mountains and make it through to California.

Eckert closes the harrowing tale with an epilogue accounting for the lives of the people such as Patrick Breen and Jim Reed, who survived and flourished in California.

"That chapter that they make it through is very satisfying," Nance said. "It's pretty amazing when you find out what happened to them and that many of them went on to very happy lives."

Eckert, who will be a featured author next weekend at the Kentucky Book Fair in Frankfort, Ky., said "Dark Journey" is the first of three books he has completed on the westward expansion.

He's also finished "The Infinite Dream," about America's march westward and the Mormon battalion, as well as a third book, "The Ultimate Treasure," about the California gold rush during which 300,000 pioneers swarmed California in three years.

All three books capture that American urge to roam in the 1700s and 1800s what John Steinbeck called "westering and westering."

"It was an incredible time and I wished that I would have been there to partake in it," Eckert said. "It must have been something. A lot of people died and a lot of people had severe trouble and only a few people ever really made it rich in California, but it was so built up that California became the second state west of the Mississippi."

Eckert said the Foundation will release one book a year for the next three years.

Although not often called for, Eckert said he thinks today's American public would step up and toughen up and demonstrate great courage like their ancestors were they put into such a life-altering journey as that undertaken by the Reed-Donner Party.

"It was tough beyond what we really we could today measure," Eckert said. "We just don't have any experiences that are anywhere near comparable to what they went through... but my feeling about it is that toughness comes forward when called for. When it's not called for people get fat and happy and they let things go and don't care as much. When it comes to life depending on it and the necessity of you stepping forward and doing things that are quite remarkable, I think it would happen, and that it will always be that way."

Courtesy of the Jesse Stuart Foundation

Allan Eckert is the author of 40 published books and has been nominated seven times for the Pulitzer Prize in literature. He will be signing copies of his most recent book "Dark Journey: The Tragedy of the Donner Party" on Nov. 5-6, at the Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1645 Winchester Ave., in Ashland.

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Courtesy of the Jesse Stuart Foundation

Allan Eckert is the author of 40 published books and has been nominated seven times for the Pulitzer Prize in literature. He will be signing copies of his most recent book "Dark Journey: The Tragedy of the Donner Party" on Nov. 5-6, at the Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1645 Winchester Ave., in Ashland.

Purchase this photo