Impatient With Desire (15 page)

O
ut of the corner of my eye today, I saw a shape move behind the trees.

I stopped.

It stopped.

I stood still for a long time. I could see something there motionless.

Then the shape moved in front of the tree. It was an Indian.

I walked to the line of trees. Our eyes met. He held out his hand and gave me two large acorns.

He vanished so swiftly that were it not for the acorns in my hand I would have thought I imagined him.

I boiled the acorns until I could crack them with a rock, then boiled them again for hours to take the bitterness out. I pounded them into a mash for the three littlest children. Georgia and Eliza gobbled theirs. Frances let her tiny bit lie in her mouth until it dissolved into nothing.

His face was so sorrowful it seemed to me that he knew of our suffering. His sympathy seemed as much of a gift as the acorns, and it comforted me.

G
eorge and I were two days ahead so we weren’t witness to our third death, John Snyder, nor his burial, “wrapped in a shroud, a board below, a board above,” James Reed told us.

John Snyder. That handsome young man full of charm and confidence and life waiting to be grabbed.

I remember well the day I met him, Betsey.

August 10th 1846, the Graves Family join us. The Donner Party is now eighty-six.

On the third day waiting by the Weber River for Mr. Reed, Mr. Stanton, and Mr. Pike to come back with Lansford Hastings to lead us, nerves raw and fear building, the campfire deserted, we heard a clatter, everyone instantly appearing from their wagons to watch—unbelieving—three wagons tear down the hacked out trail toward us with whoops and shouts.

“Hallo! I’m Franklin Graves, Sr., from Illinois. We started out for Oregon but changed our minds. We heard about you at Fort Bridger and came to join up.” He waved a hand at his wife and the raucous group tumbling out behind her. “This is my wife, Elizabeth, our eight unmarried children, our newlyweds, and our teamster, the finest on the road. Thirteen in all, and a luckier bunch you’ll never meet.” The newlyweds held hands, the bridegroom carrying a violin in his other hand.

How the merry, boisterous group distracted us from our fears and raised our spirits.

“Come with me,” I said, “I’ll write down your names.”

The teamster jumped down, removed his hat with a flourish, and bowed to me. “John Snyder, 25, Driver par Excellence, at your service, ma’am.”

W
hen Jean Baptiste finishes marching Frances, Georgia, and Eliza around the clearing, I sit them on a log and, like times tables twice a day, I drill:

“What lies beyond those snowy peaks?”

“California.”

“Go on.”

“There we will be safe, and have food, and our sisters are waiting for us.”

“If Father or I are not with you, what do you say when people ask who you are?”

“We are the children of George and Tamsen Donner.”

“Eliza, I can’t hear you.”

“We are the children of George and Tamsen Donner.”

“Very good.”

L
ater on, it seemed so clear that we should have gone back and wintered in Truckee Meadows. But then, to go back nearly fifty miles, to slog through that newly fallen snow, George’s hand bleeding through the bandages, the oxen barely able to drag themselves along, our wagons rickety and in tatters, to turn back after all the wandering and the quarrels and the deaths, would have been to admit no miracle was going to happen, to admit that we were not going to reach California this year. I can write it even simpler: We could not bear to go back.

“W
ell-seasoned wood and flawless,” George says. “We don’t want to break an axle a thousand miles out.”

A cascade of coffee beans pouring into coarse sacks. Sugar pouring, “we’re taking ten pounds apiece,” Elizabeth says, “take twenty, I say, take salt, and cornmeal, and baking soda, and rice and beans and bacon and lard and spices and dried fruit and a keg of pickles…”

“We can count on antelope and buffalo,” George says.

Elitha sits at a barrel with a pad and pencil. The other children help me scoop and ladle flour into large burlap sacks. “If we take a hundred and fifty pounds of flour for each adult, half ration for children,” I ask, “how many pounds will we need?”

“Do Leanna and I count as adults or children?” Elitha asks.

“You barely eat, but count both of you as adults,” I say.

Elitha figures madly. Leanna, who has marshaled Frances and Georgia into a team and challenged me to a race—Who can fill a sack the fastest?—scoops faster than I do. Eliza covers her face with flour. “Eliza’s a ghost,” Frances says, laughing wildly.

Respectable people with duties, we bore our obligations in mind, Betsey, and made solid plans.

T
oday, Frances, Georgia, and Eliza sprawled limply on their platforms, looking so much like my niece Mary and my nephews across the clearing it gave me a start. I cut three tiny squares of tallow, the last in the pan, and gave them each one. Without getting up, Georgia and Eliza ate theirs in one gulp. Frances sat up, nibbled the tiniest crumb from hers, wrapped the rest in a little cloth, put it in her pocket, and lay back down.

Jean Baptiste scraped the last scrap of the last hide.

“Girls, Jean Baptiste is nearly finished,” I said. “Get ready to go outside.”

Nobody moved.

“Frances.”

“Don’t want to.” Frances started crying.

She has not cried once, and I had to tell her, “Frances, please don’t cry. I need you to help me with your sisters. I’ll get you some water, but then you must go out. You must be ready for the rescuers.”

I turned to ladle water and suddenly realized the fire rug, a partial hide that catches the sparks, had nearly disappeared. “What happened to the fire rug?” I asked. I bent to examine it, turned back to the children. Frances’s face was so guilty, I knew immediately. “You ate it, didn’t you?” I said. “You’re very clever girls.”

Frances stopped crying and smiled in relief. “We cut it in little teeny pieces and toasted them,” she said. “They were very tasty. We ate Georgia’s doll too.”

I thought my heart was beyond breaking. I put another log on the fire, took the last strips of hide, and put them in the pot to boil.

“When is Elitha bringing my bread?” Georgia whined for the hundredth time.

Leaving Independence, Missouri, the “jumping-off place,” as our wagon passed the American Tract Society, a missionary reached up and handed pamphlets and a Bible to the children. “Give the tracts and Bible to the heathens,” he said.

“What are heathens, Mother?” Frances asked.

“They mean the Indians,” Elitha said, when I didn’t answer.

“And anyone else who has a thought different from them,” I said.

June 1846

At daybreak at our campsite on the Plains, Frances in her nightgown went out of our tent pitched at the end of the wagon train. She rubbed her eyes, headed for a tree, saw two Indians watching her, and turned around running for her life. Big-eyed, scared witless, she burst into the tent, yelling, “The heathens, Momma!”

Everybody tensed. George reached for a pistol, I got the rifle. George, his hand on the pistol in his leather vest pocket, went outside. I watched through the tent flap, my rifle ready.

The Indians, one young, one older, perhaps father and son, looked at George solemnly. George stood very still.

Suddenly the older one smiled and handed George a freshly killed rabbit.

George turned around and called, “We’re having guests for breakfast.”

I put the rifle down.

George, the five girls, the two Indians, and I having breakfast in our
tent was more than friendly, Betsey, it was antic. They examined the presents with delight, stacking the bolts of bright cotton, beads, and a spy glass next to them.

The younger Indian, fascinated by Grandmother’s hand mirror, could not stop admiring his countenance. Both he and the older Indian wore ornaments tastefully arranged, consisting of beads, feathers, and a fine shell, various colored bark, and the hair from the scalps they have taken in battle.

The older Indian pointed to the mirror and said, “Solid water.” Then he hit his chest, and said, “Chief.”

George and I nodded vigorously.

He pointed to the young Indian, and said, “Chief.”

We again nodded vigorously.

He pointed to George and said, “Chief.”

“Well, in our country, we’re all chiefs—” George began.

The young Indian cut George off, hit his own chest, “Chief,” pointed to the older Chief, and the round began again, the chiefing and nodding continuing until little Eliza hit her chest and piped up, “Chief.” Everybody laughed, and Eliza was so pleased she did it again, and then the younger Chief held up the mirror and pointed to his image, “Chief.”

Frances whispered to me, “Shall we give them the Bible?”

“They have their own religion,” I said. “They don’t need ours.”

Feb 25th 1847, evening

I sliced the Bible’s leather cover into strips and crisped them on the fire. They provided us sustenance.

T
he minute Jean Baptiste left with the children, George said, “I want you to write something down in your journal.”

He waited until I got my pen, then he dictated:

“This great move west could not be stopped. If soldiers stood on the prairie with cannons, they could not have stopped it. It is too big, too deep. Its time has come. Yearning has met with opportunity.”

He looked at me and added, “If you and I had not come, it would not have affected the Great Migration one iota. It would only have affected us.”

Then he got up from the table and lay down on his platform.

Did he mean we wouldn’t be here starving? Or did he mean we would have missed being a part of it? Even if I weren’t afraid to ask him the question that fills my mind, the solemnity and urgency of his tone forestalled any question or comment.

Y
esterday and the day before we had nothing but water.

Last night I turned the page of my journal, and there was a dried flower. “To preserve their form and color, Tamsen,” my stepmother said, “specimens collected in the field are spread flat on newspaper and dried between blotters.” I idly picked the flower up; it was tiny and delicate and had retained its bright purple color.

“Look at this, children,” I said, mainly to distract them from hunger. “Do you remember? Out on the prairie?”

Out on the prairie on a golden summer day, Charles Stanton botanizes with Frances, Georgia, and Eliza, and my niece Mary. They turn over stones, scrape out crevices, gather moss, roots, and flowering plants. Nearby, I kneel close to a tiny purple wildflower, sketching it, then I press it on my journal page. I hear Mr. Stanton say, “Look, children, it’s the lupine! Go show your mother.” I look up as sun-browned Frances and Georgia run to me, their chubby fists stuffed with purple lupine. Their little legs seem to pump in slow motion as if the shimmering day will go on forever.

Shewy Delphinium

I turned the pages of my journal for the children, showing them the pressed form or watercolor sketch of each flower. The vivid
colors contrasted cruelly with the girls’ pallor and our stark surroundings. “Remember, we found the wild tulip,” I said. “The primrose.”

Frances pointed to one and said, “Mr. Stanton found the lupine.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Here’s the eardrop. The larkspur. This, why this one is edible, and so is this—” My fingers trembling, I peeled the dried flower off the page and put it on Frances’s tongue like communion.

“Look, Mother,” Georgia said. “It left its shadow on the page.”

She and Eliza stuck out their tongues for their flowers.

H
ardcoop’s body was left to be rifled by Indians or animals or both, his bones bleaching in the sun.

Mr. Wolfinger’s body had to meet a similar fate.

William Pike, our sixth death, was our fourth burial.

It was our second day in Truckee Meadows, our eyes darting to the snowy mountaintops above, as we rested the jaded oxen for the long pull up. A gray day, we were awakened with honks. “Geese,” George said, springing up before he remembered that his shooting arm was out of commission.

Lewis Keseberg heard the honks too, slipped on the soft moccasins Philippine had traded a silver pitcher for at Fort Bridger, hurried quickly across the ground, suddenly felled by pain as a charred willow stub pierced his heel.

“Bad luck,” Lewis Keseberg was saying again to Philippine and me as I cut out the stub when we heard a commotion outside.

George came in just as we finished bandaging Lewis’s heel. “There’s been a bad accident. William Pike’s dying.”

William Pike was with the Murphy clan, Levinah Murphy’s son-in-law, Harriet’s husband, Naomi and Catherine’s father. At the Weber River, he had volunteered with Charles Stanton and James Reed to go after Lansford Hastings. He was rarely seen without Mrs. Murphy’s other son-in-law, William Foster. Foster and Pike, Pike and Foster: we often said one name with the other. So like brothers were they, always joking and joshing in shorthand, good-naturedly competing in even the tiniest task, their wives joked they had a hard time telling them apart.

At the campfire, William Pike was cleaning a pepperbox rifle, William Foster next to him, saying, “You’re not doing that right, Will, I better show you how.”

“We need some wood, boys,” Mrs. Murphy said.

Pike got up, handed the rifle to Foster, said, “Try to do a better job than you usually do,” and turned to get wood. The rifle discharged, striking Pike in the back. He died after a half hour of terrible suffering.

No coffin, no boards for William Pike, there were none to spare. There were no buffalo robes, sheets, blankets, tarps. The men could barely scrape out a depression in the hard ground. All the Murphys dazed, Foster sobbing, Pike’s little daughters trying to hug their father, George said a prayer and we laid Pike in a hole barely deep enough to contain him.

From Sarah Keyes’s casket lovingly hewed from a cottonwood tree, carved stone, wildflowers planted in the sod, to this in five months.