The Donner Party

“One of the three or four finest book-length American poems ever-written.”―Poetry

First published in 1970, The Donner Party is the story of a wagon train, led by George Donner, which set out from Springfield, Illinois, in 1846, headed for California. George Keithley’s restrained and vivid narrative poem is a harrowing portrait of a group that was pushed to extreme measures in order to survive.