In the year of 1844, a party of fifty men, women and children set out for California. They walked two thousand miles, across trackless plain and desert, fording rivers and climbing mountains.

They found a new trail through the wilderness, hoisted their wagons up a sheer cliff, were caught by the winter snows and faced starvation, with nothing to rely on but their own courage and trust in each other.

These are their stories; the doctor-diarist and party co-leader, the old mountain-man who guided them, the feisty woman with her brood of children who means to rejoin her husband in California, the taciturn wagon master… all inexorably drawn to Truckee’s Trail!