It’s the story of a family who joins a wagon train to travel to California. In one of the episodes, they meet up with another wagon train before they cross the Sierra Mountains and it turns out that other group was the Donner Party. They went their separate ways. (It didn’t mention what happened to the Donners.) Another vivid part of the book had them crossing the desert, they’re almost collapsing from thirst and tormenting mirages of water appear on the horizon. Also, I seem to remember them carving on rocks, joining the marks of others who had traveled that way.
This sounds like the book West Against the Wind.
This book was written between the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. It was a book from a children’s literature club that my mom beonged to during that time. The children in the book were younger than the ones in West Against the Wind.
Could this be Honore Morrow: The Splendid Journey (published 1929)?
The book is Rolling Wheels by Katharine Grey. The author’s granddaughter posted online saying
“My great grandmother Katharine Grey wrote a pair of novels Rolling Wheels and Hills of Gold, published by Little Brown in the 1930s. Based loosely on the experiences of my paternal ancestors, Rolling Wheels is about a family coming to California from Indiana via wagon train in the years before the Gold Rush of 1849, and Hills of Gold is about that same family living in California during the Gold Rush.
….
I was also repeatedly told that my ancestors came to California in the same large wagon train that included the ill-fated Donner party, except my ancestors made it over the Sierras before the onset of winter and founded the town of Fremont while the Donners starved and ate each other.”
There’s a link to the blog post on my name–not sure if I can post links otherwise–and there’s a copy on Amazon for $18. If you’re searching for it, note variant spelling of “Katharine.”
Thank you so much! I just ordered the book.