Итан Рарик - Desperate Passage

Eventually she fled the South and its personal ghosts, taking a job as a schoolteacher in Illinois. "Think you that my wandering feet will rest this side the grave?" she wrote. Her health was improving, and she had even regained a sense of humor: "You need not fear having a brother in law, for I know not a man old enough for me in the county." Not completely healed, she had at least found an equilibrium. "To say that I have any particular source of anxiety or cause of unhappiness I cannot. To say that I have any particular pleasure I cannot. Life moves on as smoothly and quietly as a summer stream." She loved the prairie. The broad vistas—the wildflowers, the grasslands, the sunsets that spread a swath of crimson across the skyline—gave a sense of possibility. "I stop, I gaze and am awestruck."

In time, she was ready again to consider courtship. In Springfield, Illinois, she met a local farmer, George Donner, a man in some ways her opposite. If she was the lettered Yankee, he was the garrulous southerner. Born in North Carolina in the years just after the Revolutionary War, Donner had traveled through Kentucky, Indiana, even Texas, settling finally in Illinois. He was the kind of man people liked, a big fellow known around Sangamon County as "Uncle George." The nickname fit. He was more avuncular than firm, a friendly presence who was neither a natural-born leader nor merely a face in the crowd. Almost two decades older than Tamzene, he had been widowed twice and had ten children from those first two marriages.

They courted, then married in 1839 and soon began a family of their own that would eventually grow to include three daughters. It was a comfortable life. They owned 240 acres in two parcels, including their home, sixty acres of planted fields, and an orchard of apple, peach, and pear trees. "Our neighbors call us rich," Tamzene admitted. As a wife and mother she gave up teaching but indulged her intellectual bent by starting a "reading society," an antebellum version of a book club.

By 1842, ten years after the death of her first family, Tamzene Donner had started anew. With her baby daughter asleep in a cradle beside her, she paused on a spring day, the window open to the scent of apple blossoms, to write yet again to the sister who had so often received letters of woe. "Things have turned around very much to my satisfaction," she wrote. Her husband was kind, her children a constant delight. A decade after a calamity that would have destroyed many people, Tamzene Donner was a woman at peace with the vagaries of life: "I am as happy as I can reasonably expect in this changing world."

THE DONNER FAMILY'S relative affluence was not atypical of those who made the great westward migration. Reaching the Pacific Coast was an expensive proposition. Months of travel that produced no income, then the cost of establishing a new home in a new place—these were not expenses to be borne by the destitute. The very rich were rare in the wagon trains, but often the families heading for Oregon and California were substantial people, with established and successful lives. The Donners' departure from Springfield had been announced in the local paper, and they had hired younger, stronger men to go along on the trip and do the hard work of driving the teams. George Donner had been able to afford a recruiting advertisement touting the fact that his jobs offered the chance at a trip to California for free. "Who wants to go to California without costing them anything? . . . Come, boys!" People even said later that the Donners were carrying ten thousand dollars, some of it sewn into a quilt for safekeeping.

But for all their money, the Donners and their traveling companions, the Reeds, were just unremarkable families from Illinois, ready to join the great migration to the west. The problem was that they were late. James Reed had been told repeatedly to reach Independence by the first of April, or the middle of the month at the latest. The advice was needlessly extreme; nobody "jumped off" that early. Emigrants had to wait for spring grasses to grow so the animals would have forage. But if the Donners and Reeds had reached the town by late April or May 1, they would have had a chance to rest both themselves and their animals, to "recruit" their strength, as they would have put it. For some reason, however, the two families did not leave Springfield until mid-April and reached Independence only on May 10. The bulk of the California-bound emigrants were already out on the trail. The Spring-field families took but a day to rest their oxen and other livestock, then hustled out of town in hopes of catching up. It was less obvious at the time than it would be later, but the sad fact was that the journey had barely begun, and the core of what would become the Donner Party was already lagging behind.

Margret Reed fretted. It had been a week of hard travel since they left Independence, but at last they had caught the main body of California-bound emigrants, a sprawling company led by a slightly pompous Kentucky lawyer named William Henry Russell. The extent of Russell's domain—nearly fifty wagons and 150 adults—offered a safety-in-numbers bulk that appealed to the Reeds and the Donners. But camp gossips spread the word that past applicants to the party had sometimes been rejected, and Margret feared that she and her family would also be turned aside.

Once, Margret had been a high-spirited young woman, dashing around on horseback with reckless abandon and proving herself an independent soul. Engaged at eighteen to an older man, she fell for one of her fiance's younger friends, a would-be groomsman named Lloyd Backenstoe. Margret broke off the engagement and transformed Backenstoe from a groomsman to a groom, marrying him and having a daughter, a girl they named Virginia. But in 1834, just four days before their second wedding anniversary, Backenstoe died in a cholera epidemic, leaving Margret alone with a young child just months after her twentieth birthday. Widowhood stole her youthful zest, and when she married James Reed a little more than a year later, she was still bedridden with grief and sickness. During the ceremony, he stood next to the bed holding her hand. The ensuing years did little to improve her health. She suffered from "nervous sick headaches," migraines that debilitated her for days on end, and sometimes from fever and chills as well. The move to California was, in part, an effort to find a gentler climate.

Risking the venture was typical of her husband, a man with a full head of hair and a bit of a smirk and iron convictions, others be damned. James Reed liked the people he liked, despised those he didn't, and struck some as haughty, perhaps the legacy of the Polish nobility from which he supposedly was descended. He had made a success of himself under difficult circumstances. Born in Northern Ireland, he was brought to Virginia as a child by his widowed mother, a fatherless boy in a new country. As a young man he moved to Illinois and later served with Abraham Lincoln in the Black Hawk War. At home in Springfield after the war, he hustled through a series of businesses: furniture manufacturing, a sawmill, the railroads.

By the time he decided to go west he was a man of means, and he did not mind if others knew of his status. Reed would never sew his money into a quilt, as George Donner did. Reed put his wealth to use, perhaps even flaunted it. Before leaving Illinois, he corresponded with a friend in Independence, picking up tips on what to bring. Reed's friend warned against skimping—"Don't be puny, get a good outfit"—and Reed heeded the advice. He had a special wagon built with an entrance on the side, like a stagecoach, and high-backed seats with handy storage areas beneath the cushions. Extensions built out over the wheels added room. A small stove, vented by a pipe running through the canvas top, provided heat on cold mornings or at night.