"The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny" by Michael Wallis (Liveright. 453 pp. $27.95) Sarah Murphy Foster sat by a campfire in the early winter of 1847, grieving the death of her brother, Lemuel. "She looked up," the historian Michael Wallis writes, "and noticed some of the emigrants on the other side of the fire roasting meat spitted on sticks. Suddenly, Sarah realized she was watching someone eat the broiled [...]
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