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THE ARTIST / Maggie Anderson Tamsen Donner, laying out her linens in Illinois and packing up the books for the school she would start in California, had no way of knowing if any of the children playing in the red dust by the wagons might be an artist. But eight year old Patty Reed, sitting on the wagon tongue talking to her doll, knew even then what would be required of her on the trail. She knew it would be her own flat insistence and determination—"God has not brought us this far to let us perish now"—that would keep the armed men of the Relief Party to the task of bearing famished children on their backs through waist-deep snow. Patty Reed knew to pack up a satchel to carry out with her, as she'd seen her mother and Tamsen Donner do, before they left the States. She knew enough to hide it from the practical men, risking their lives to take her down the mountains. She carried it with her, underneath her clothing, through the High Sierra snows, away from the yellow light of the fire at Alder Creek, where the dried flesh she had eaten was the mule she had ridden through the Wasatch. She carried out three things: a crystal saltcellar, her black eyed doll, a lock of her dead grandmother's hair. When Patty Reed was safe at last in the warm camp in the foothills, she lifted up her thin dress and unwrapped her little bundle. The men moved away from her and said nothing, as, past her hunger, she brought out these things of beauty and of memory, and began to play. The Missouri Review · Il ...

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