Ordeal By Hunger Summary

The novel Ordeal by Hunger was written by George R. Stewart. Stewart was a professor, novelist, and American historian. Ordeal by Hunger was written about the Donner party and their westward movement. Environment and nature played a huge role in what happened to the people traveling. The Donner party is the most famous westward movement tragedy ever. The narrative was written to inform people about the tragedies and truth about westward expansion. It was written from an outside perspective, Stewart was telling the story. Stewart got some of his information from the journals of the people in the Donner party. The novel gives an accurate and gruesome view about what the people traveling experienced. Readers should know all of this in order to …show more content…
They began traveling across the desert where they lost numerous oxen. Then they came upon a trail salesman, Hastings, was selling maps trying to get money. In order to sell them his map, he told the Donner Party that he knew a shortcut for them to take, which was through the Sierra Nevada mountains. Their first mistake was taking the map. This new shortcut was not safe and had never been traveled on. Half of the party took the shortcut and the other half took the original trail. The group traveling on the shortcut trail came to a place called the Donner Pass, which is where they had to stay because the weather got too bad. They tried to climb past all the snow but it was too deep. Many perished because of such harsh conditions and lack of food. The survivors resorted to cannibalism and were rescued after months but not many were still alive.
Ordeal by hunger was not written solely to entertain people by the fact that people had cannibalism during westward expansion. It was written to inform people about …show more content…
I did learn a lot about westward expansion and human interaction with the environment. No I do not think this book was worth reading. Although I learned a lot of things about the Donner Party, this book was so long and so boring. I would not recommend this book to a friend unless they liked reading books that were historical. I thought the book was boring because the author wrote long paragraphs that repeated themselves over and over. To make me like this book, the author could have condensed it down to a smaller book and got right to the story. It would have also been more interesting if Stewart would have included conversation between the characters not just stating what happened. I mainly did not like the length or the writing style of the novel, but the information included in the book was very good and informed me of the struggles of the Donner party. If you were to read this book, you would have to be good at putting yourself in the time period that the novel was written in, or it will be hard to read. Overall, I thought the book was well written but