Long Strange Trips

Road trips are tricky. Even when you think you know exactly where you're going, you never know when you'll run into construction or heavy weather, and you can never plan for that moment when the dog has powered through an entire bag of Cheetos and come to digestive grief all over the back seat. A little projectile vomiting may be the least of your problems. Strip the flywheel on your starter and you may be spending the day hanging out at a junkyard in Douglas, Arizona. Drop a piece of clutch linkage and you might be coasting off a cliff right into the Pacific Ocean, or at the very least, hitchhiking to Petaluma for parts.

It's bad enough in a car. Consider the perils of making a Great American Journey pushing a handcart (as some parties of Mormon emigrants did), or even in a well-sprung, fully provisioned wagon. You'd need a lot of company, not just because the locals might not welcome you to their neighborhood, but just to pull and haul over rocks and rivers, to nurse you if everyone in your family was sick, to help bury the dead. Those fellow travelers might pose problems of their own.

Nobody knew that better than Tamsen Donner, wife to the man who would have the bad fortune to lend his name to the most infamous of pioneer picaresques, the Donner Party. The New England-born Tamsen had already followed one husband to North Carolina and buried one family before she ever moved to Illinois and hooked up with a prosperous farmer named George Donner, a widower with a couple of little girls still at home. She would bear him three more daughters before George decided to light out for the territory. They had three wagons pulled by three yoke of oxen each, plenty of food and clothing, and cows to milk, although they did not have as much butter as Tamsen would have liked. "I am willing to go & have no doubt it will be an advantage to our children & to us" (p. 307), she wrote to her sister in May of 1846, as she sat in her tent at Independence, Missouri, the jumping off point for the great westward migration of the mid-nineteenth century.

A month later, at the junction of the North and South Platte Rivers, Tamsen waxed optimistic. Her party had found the roads good, food "plentiful," and she reported that she had no fear of Indians, who had been frequent and friendly visitors to their train. Wood was scarce, but she found buffalo chips an excellent substitute. "We had this morning Buffalo steaks broiled upon them that had the same flavor they would have had upon hickory coals," she wrote jubilantly (p. 308). She was frankly amazed that they had traveled so easily and had found time to "botanize and read some, but cook a 'heap' more" (p. 309). Tamsen marveled at the beauty of the high prairie, festooned with wild tulips and primroses, larkspurs and lupines. But of course, we know what was coming down the primrose path.

Mountain man Jim Clyman warned the Donners and their party: "Take the regular track and never leave it" (p. 130). But did they listen? They were running behind. In a hurry to get to the coast, to California. Thought they'd take the "cut-off" proposed by that fella Lansford Hastings, a decision that ultimately found them snowbound in the daunting pass that forever after bore the Donner family name. They starved and died by the ones and twos until the living began to feed upon the remains of the departed. When they were finally found, the survivors spent the rest of their lives haunted by their guilt and their notoriety. Tamsen Donner was not among them. She passed up a chance at rescue to stay behind with her dying husband, only to succumb to death herself, perhaps even murdered and eaten by her killer.

That compelling story has fascinated...