To Truckee’s Trail is a fictional retelling of the all-but unknown real-life adventure on the California wagon-train trail. The Stephens-Townsend Party were bold, daring, and lucky … and did everything right, two years before the ill-fated Donner-Reed party, who followed the very same path, but encountered only disaster.

Half a dozen families set out from Council Bluffs, Iowa in the spring of 1844, venturing into a barely known and lightly-tracked wilderness. Those fifty men, women and children walked nearly two thousand miles, across plain and desert, fording rivers and climbing mountains, depending on nothing more than their own skill and courage... and each other. They hoisted their wagons up a sheer mountain cliff, got caught in the snow and nearly starved… and when nearly at the end of their epic venture, were press-ganged into participating a small civil war. They were the first to bring wagons over the perilous wall of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and yet hardly anyone has ever heard of them. Until now.

Writer Celia Hayes has imagined that a diary account of their trail-blazing adventure exists and told their stories, from Dr. John Townsend, the diarist who is the party’s co-leader, to Elisha Stephens, the taciturn wagon master who distains the company of other people, the old mountain-man Caleb Greenwood with his Indian sons who led them into the wilderness, the feisty Isabella Patterson with her brood of children who means to rejoin her husband in California, and her youngest son, the talkative and fearless Eddie. Ordinary Americans all, but on an extraordinary adventure on an unknown path through the wilderness, as they find their way To Truckee’s Trail.