Impatient With Desire (18 page)

G
eorge’s polished boots wait by the bottom of his platform. He doesn’t want meat, but I feed him a bit of the last biscuit James left.

You have enough? he asks.

There’s plenty, I say.

There are chunks of oxen, and I haven’t even finished my journal cover.

A
ray of sun hits George’s gleaming boots.

I offer him a cup of broth.

I’m not hungry, he says.

Just take a sip, I say.

No, thank you, he says.

Through teary eyes, I look at the boots.

W
e lie awake next to each other.

He whispers, Thank you for staying with me, my love.

I put my hand on his cheek, say, Sleep well, my darling husband.

I
heard a woman screaming in the pines and found myself hitting the ground, my fists bleeding.

I open the coverless Bible to
Deaths
and write,

I light every pinecone and pine kindling torch.

George’s body lies upon a platform. I bathe him. Shave him.

The minister asks, Do you take this woman, Tamsen Eustis Dozier, for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, till death do you part?

I hear George say, I do.

I shake out a clean sheet to wrap him for burial.

People stand all around the platform. It’s our wedding day. George and I are vigorous, and all the people I love are there, you, dearest only sister, Tully, Baby Tamesin and towheaded Thomas, Jacob and Elizabeth, Elitha, Leanna, Frances, Georgia, and Eliza, all of George’s grown children, Allen Francis, Jean Baptiste, Charles Stanton, Milt Elliott…

Do you take this man, George Donner—the minister asks.

I turn to George in my wedding dress, I do, I wrap George and tell him, I do, I do.

Frances steps out of the crowd, holding her hand out to me. I hold my hand out to her.

I’m coming, baby.

I pack the oxen chunk. Unlace George’s boots. Crisp the shoestrings on the fire. Just to be prudent. Responsible people, we made careful preparations. Sometimes your best is not good enough, but that is all you can do. One last entry, Betsey, before I leave this hallowed, godforsaken place.

We are the Donner Party. My husband, George Donner, was the Captain. My name is Tamsen Eustis Dozier Donner. My five daughters are waiting at Sutter’s Fort for me. I am bound to go to my children. Almost one year ago to the day, we left Springfield, Illinois, eager to go to California. We have no doubt it will be advantageous for us and for our children. Chain up, boys! Chain up!

Tamsen Donner never reached California or saw her children again. How she died is unknown. Sometime, possibly two weeks or more after Eddy and Foster left in mid-March with Frances, Georgia, and Eliza, and Tamsen returned to Alder Creek, George died. She wrapped his body in a sheet and set out to cross the mountains.

In mid-April, the Fourth Relief, basically a salvage team, found only one survivor, Lewis Keseberg. The leader, Fallon Le Gros, reported that no traces of Tamsen’s person were found, and little of the Donner money they had expected to find, calling Keseberg murderer, robber, and cannibal, charges and taunts that followed him his whole wretched life.

Thirty-two years later, Lewis Keseberg once again proclaimed his innocence, as he had done his whole life, this time to Tamsen’s youngest daughter, Eliza. Late one night, he told Eliza, her mother had shown up at his cabin wet, shivering, and grief-stricken, saying, “I must go to my children.” He persuaded her to wait until the morning, made a fire, and covered her with blankets. In the morning, he found her dead.

Keseberg had no reason to lie. If he had cannibalized her body, he can’t be faulted for it. Tamsen Donner’s daughter believed his story and I do too.

Tamsen’s journal was never found.

The five Donner daughters lived long lives.

Impatient with Desire
is a work of fiction about an actual historic
event and real people. By definition, it’s a work of imagination, which in some ways suits the subject well, since so few hard facts are known about the Donner Party.

The story of the Donner Party may be the best-known, least substantiated, tale of the nineteenth-century American overland emigration. There are few primary sources and countless contradictory secondary sources, which started to appear soon after the event and continue to the present. The recollections of survivors years later have the strength of personal experience and the weakness of retrospective memory, sometimes confirming another survivor’s statement, just as often disagreeing.

Eighty-seven pioneers were trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains in 1846–47, and every one of them had a riveting story. Unfortunately, almost all of their stories died with them. It is my deep wish that the reader come to see all these people as
real
, their ordeal, almost buried by morbid jokes, become alive.

The novel focuses on one family, George and Tamsen Donner and their five daughters, with the hope that the reader will understand other pioneers through them. The voice is that of Tamsen Donner, a heroine I chanced upon in the early 1970s while writing an apprentice novel about an unrelated subject. A consuming interest in her—obsession would not be too strong a word—began and has continued through decades.

Between numerous other projects, I moved away from Tamsen and back to her, reading widely and deeply on the Donner Party, including the original Patrick Breen diary and many out-of-print books found through rare-book dealers, and corresponding with numerous historians, librarians, and genealogists. Through the courtesy of the Huntington Library, I was privileged to examine letters written by Tamsen Donner, seen by few outside her immediate descendants until recently.

Because I was trying to be a writer and a mother simultane
ously, my professional interest in Tamsen Donner became an integral part of our family life:

My husband, five daughters, and I traveled to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where Tamsen was born and grew up.

We went to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, where she taught school, married, became a mother, and in one terrible three-month period lost her first family: her husband, a son, a daughter.

We spent an entire summer retracing the Donner Party’s overland route from Illinois to Donner Pass.

We camped, our first time ever in a tent, on Tamsen and George Donner’s farm in Springfield, Illinois.

I spent the longest night of my life by myself at the base of the tree where it was believed Tamsen had spent nearly five months in the mountains.

Our kids all became experts on the Oregon/California Trail, dashing off countless school compositions on the subject.

Our dog was named Tamsen.

I wrote an Oregon Trail of words about the Donner Party before realizing that, although I respected historical scholars greatly, I didn’t want to write a history of the Donner Party. What I wanted to do was capture Tamsen Donner’s spirit.

What I was most interested in was unknown and would never be known: What
really happened
in the more than four and a half months that she was trapped in the mountains with her dying husband and five daughters? What dramas, triumphs, and despairs went on in that tent buried underneath snow? To explore this is to imagine it.

Where possible in the novel, I used historic facts known about the people, route, and dates, although I occasionally deviated slightly for dramatic purposes. For example, William Eustis, Tamsen’s father, was actually a sentinel at Old South Meeting House, not Old North Church.

In the attempt to portray real people suffering real tragedy, I speculated, assumed, imagined, ending up with the writer’s paradox: moving away from the actual personalities of the Donner Party individuals in the attempt to get closer to their shared humanity with us.

In other words, this is fiction: a lie seeking truth.

I kept the characters’ real names in most instances, but not always precisely, because there were a plethora of Williams and Elizabeths/Elithas/Elizas and so forth. Tamsen’s sister, Elizabeth Eustis Poor—sometimes Eliza—is Betsey here. Tamsen’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth Blue Donner, Betsy in some books, is called her formal name here to lessen confusion.

I took one known fact about Elizabeth “Betsy” Donner—her husband abandoned her with two small boys and she filed for divorce in 1834—and wove a wounded character.

Nothing is known about George Donner’s relationship with his brother, Jacob. I took Jacob’s character from a single sentence Tamsen’s niece Frances Eustis Bond wrote in 1879 to Tamsen’s daughter Eliza: “Your Uncle Jake was a sickly,
complaining
man, always had a
whine
.”

Doris Wolfinger is invented almost entirely out of whole cloth. I portrayed her as nearly catatonic and crying nonstop, because that seemed plausible behavior for one in her situation. Doris Wolfinger had her personal nightmare within the Donner Party’s general nightmare: a new German bride, widowed at nineteen, in a foreign country with no family or friends, unable to speak the language, her husband mysteriously disappeared on the Trail, two of her countrymen his likely murderers. She may well have coped heroically, but that is yet another unknown.

Sometimes I gave known incidents that happened to a different person in the Party to one of the Donner family. Virginia Reed Murphy went buffalo hunting with her father and had to
leave her beloved pony behind on the trail; in this story, Leanna Donner does. It’s known that the Breens and the Reeds ate their pet dogs; I assume the Donners ate theirs too. I take words from others’ mouths—those of Mary Graves, Virginia Reed, Patty Reed—and have a Donner speak them. I did this not to distort history but because it’s likely that the Donners did and said similar things. I might have completely rewritten those words into my own fictional versions, but I preferred to keep versions of the original, often heroic, words and deeds alive.

Wherever I could, I used Tamsen’s actual words and phrases, such as the description of flowers she saw on the trail, and so on, as drawn from her letters in the following collections: the Sherman Houghton Papers and the Eliza Poor Donner Houghton Pappers, at the Huntington Museum, San Marino, California. The description of the Indians is from the only known letter written on the Trail by George Donner. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who married one year after Tamsen married George, told the minister to leave out the word “obey” in her vows—I think Tamsen would have approved.

Little is known about Tamsen’s childhood. Dorothy Sterling’s evocative description in
Lucretia Mott: Gentle Warrior
of Lucretia Mott’s childhood nine years earlier in a seafaring community, nearby Nantucket, was a particularly useful source. Frances Bond, Tamsen’s niece, told Georgia and Eliza that Tamsen came from illustrious people, but their futures depended upon their own efforts and merits.

For histories and scholarly analysis, I refer the reader to several outstanding current sources to find what facts are now known and continue to be discovered about the Donner Party.

Some may think it’s wrong to fictionalize real people. But the saga of the Donner Party, a real historic event, became embellished and distorted almost immediately, passing into social and cultural
myth. Why are we so drawn to it? Because it’s the American dream turned nightmare? Because we wonder what we would have done had we been there? We make up stories to try to find explanations for mysteries.

If this fiction upsets any descendants or readers, that’s the opposite of my intention. To me, almost all the members of the Donner Party, and the California and Oregon emigrants in general, are heroes, even if they didn’t always behave heroically. They had strengths and failings because they were complex humans. Every American is indebted to them for opening up the way before us.

Houghton, Eliza P. Donner.
The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate.
Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1911. Reprint, Los Angeles: Grafton, 1920, and Sacramento: Sierra District of California State Parks, 1996.
     Tamsen’s baby daughter Eliza, 3 at the time of the emigration, published this book when she was 68. She interviewed many survivors for their versions of what happened in the mountains and has many touching stories about the five Donner sisters after their rescue. I found this book invaluable for tone. Some of Eliza’s quotes and two of her stories appear in slightly changed form in the novel. The miniature chair that George made for Georgia was actually made for Eliza by a sympathetic “Mr. Choreman,” who expressed his pleasure (159–60) in the words George says. The doll Elitha made for Georgia was made for Eliza, who thought it “perfection” (157). Details of Tamsen’s butter molding are from Eliza’s description of the butter molding of her caretaker after rescue, “Grandma” Brunner (242). Her husband, Christian Brunner, said that Eliza was his “comfort child” in his troubles (329).

Murphy, Virginia Reed.
Across the Plains in the Donner Party
. Olympic Valley, CA: Outbooks, 1977.

See the following current books and website for the latest Donner Party research and extensive bibliography.

Brown, Daniel James.
The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride.
New York: William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2009.

Burton, Gabrielle.
Searching for Tamsen Donner
. Lincoln, NE, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Contains all of Tamsen Donner’s seventeen known letters.

Johnson, Kristin, ed.
“Unfortunate Emigrants”: Narratives of the Donner Party
. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996.
Also see: www.utahcrossroads.org/DonnerParty: “New Light on the Donner Party,” the Donner Party historian Kristin Johnson’s exhaustively researched and frequently updated website.
Also Johnson’s blog: http://donnerblog.blogspot.com.

Rarick, Ethan.
Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West
. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.