This Week’s Book

‘Snowbound Stagecoach’ by Lenora Whiteman

Moonglade Press — 238 pp — $14.99

As a born-and-raised Pacific Northwesterner, I confess that as soon as we ring in the New Year, I am looking for signs of spring. My Midwestern kin think I’m crazy since the calendar still shows us plumb in the midst of winter.

I’ll give the season one last nod with this review of “Snowbound Stagecoach” — but I’d advise that you brew yourself a hot beverage, settle down by a crackling fire in the fireplace — and for good measure put a warm, purring cat in your lap before you crack open the pages of this book. Even then, “Snowbound Stagecoach” is so evocative it may give you a case of literary frostbite.

Author Lenora Whiteman is a fourth-generation Oregonian with family ties to the folks she writes about in this lightly fictionalized but thoroughly researched account of a tragedy that occurred along the Columbia River during the cold and snowy January of 1862.

The summer before, there had been a gold rush along the Salmon River. Hundreds of men tried to extract every last nugget and flake before leaving the mountains in December and heading home for Christmas.

The men hoped to catch a steamboat in Walla Walla that could take them to Portland. But by the time they’d straggled out of the mountains, winter weather had made river conditions too dangerous for the boats to operate.

A cluster of men opted for a stagecoach instead, which offered “guaranteed arrival in three days, meals included.”

The driver, 24-year-old John Stephens, is thoroughly competent. He knows the route well and treats his horse team right. But stagecoach company management face staffing and supply issues along the route. As Stephens drives the coach through increasingly heavy snows, he finds that some stations are left without adequate feed for the horses or food for the travelers.

The members of the traveling party respond in different ways. Some complain, while others step up to help.

Most of them carry gold home to their families — they’d strap their fortune to their bodies or load it in their pockets. When they need to get out to help push the coach out of snowdrifts, they are hindered by the extra weight.

Furthermore, not everyone is suitably dressed for what often turns out to be miles of slogging behind the coach when the horses can’t pull the weight of the men up inclines.

The party finally arrives at a hospitable station operated by Frank Allphin and his 18-year-old wife, Allie Ann. But the troubles don’t end there.

This is a story of camaraderie and endurance and failure, as the various characters in this story — based on the experiences of real-life pioneers — endure a crippling accretion of hardships throughout the blizzard-bedeviled month of January 1862.

Whiteman employs homespun vernacular and meticulous detail to recreate this spellbinding tale.