From the Desk of Truckee's C.F. McGlashan: His Letters to Eliza Donner Houghton, Donner Party Survivor, Investigative Report of a Massacred Wagon Train, Truckee-Tahoe Adventures and More

Charles Fayette McGlashan (1847-1931), truly a genius, is the patriarch of Truckee, California. His life was filled with amazing achievements. He was a pioneer newspaper editor, a formidable criminal defense attorney, originator of winter sports in the West, progressive legislator in Sacramento, inventor, scientist, and a spellbinding orator who was in great demand at civic functions throughout the state. He is best remembered for his History of the Donner Party. In From the Desk of Truckee;s C.F. McGlashan, he tells how, through a chance meeting with a Donner Party survivor, he came to be the Donner Party biographer. Read his letters, never before printed, to Eliza Donner Houghton, just a child when the wagon train was stalled for the winter at Donner Lake. Their exchange of letters helped unravel the details of the tragedy. McGlashan also describes his interview with a pathetic Lewis Keseberg, who was accused of killing Eliza's mother, Tamsen Donner. Read his nationally reported news story of the gruesome slaughter of a wagon train by renegade Mormons dressed as U.S. Calvary "rescuing" the wagon train from Indians. Learn how he accurately measured the depth of Lake Tahoe with a weight champagne bottle and almost drowned, and how he rode a runaway snowplow train through the Donner Summit snow sheds. Read his farsighted letter to the Truckee Chamber of Commerce urging the purchase of property for a winter sports area. Reflect on his handwritten notes to himself on his twentieth birthday - twenty going on fifty. Relish the only published collection of writings of Truckee's C.F. McGlashan. His pioneer spirit, which earned him a lofty place in the history of the West, will earn its way into your heart.