Impatient With Desire (2 page)

1846

T
here are twenty-one of us here at Alder Creek in three shelters.

T
he second time I saw George Donner, he walked into my classroom with two other gentlemen. My thirty students, ranging in age from 6 to 12 years old, were reciting their times tables or working industriously on various projects. I was at my desk knitting. Mr. Donner, a step behind, looked reluctant, a little embarrassed; the other two men bustled with self-importance. The School Board Members. I had been waiting for them ever since my landlady told me that slanderous gossip about me was going around town.

“Children, we have visitors.”

My students stood up. “Good morning, sirs.” They sat down, folded their hands, and waited expectantly. I continued knitting.

The two officious school board members looked at each other with smug satisfaction. A smile played on George Donner’s face.

“Is there anything you’d particularly like to see, gentlemen?”

Mr. Greene, a gentleman originally from the East who puts on airs and generally makes himself ridiculous, stepped forward and said, “We have heard that you knit during school hours, Mrs. Dozier.”

“Well, now you can trust your eyes as well as your ears,” I said pleasantly. “Please ask the children anything you wish. 13 times 7. The capital of Delaware. The inventor of the cotton gin. The main export of Brazil, the author of
The Last of the Mohicans,
the process of photosynthesis—”

Mr. Donner put on his hat and tipped it to me. “Thank you, Mrs. Dozier. Sorry to have taken up your time. Good day, children.”

He steered the flummoxed board members out. Later, he
told me that he said to them, “I told you hounds you were howling up the wrong tree. I think she deserves an increase in salary, and I’m going to propose it next board meeting.”

And he did. The first of many promises he has kept. George Donner is a man of his word, I was told by more than one person in Springfield before I even met him.

J
ean Baptiste came back from the lake camp last night. He had been gone so long we thought he might have been lost. He said that when he arrived, a group of fourteen were just starting out to cross the pass and he joined them. They had to turn back at the end of the second day. He was very disappointed that they didn’t even reach the end of the lake. He said it’s much more difficult to walk in deep snow than he imagined.

They had more time to build their shelters so they’re better housed than we, but other than that, Jean Baptiste says their situation is pretty much the same as ours. He says that everyone is confident that James Reed and “Big Bill” McCutchen will lead rescue to us soon. Their wives and children wait anxiously for them.

At the lake camp, there are sixty in three shelters.

The Breens moved into an existing cabin where an emigrant from the Stevens Party of ’44 spent the winter. Jean Baptiste said that Mr. Breen calls it their “shanty.”

About 150 yards away, Jean Baptiste said the Murphys and Eddys built a cabin against a large rock. In this cabin

A third cabin was built a half mile away, a double cabin for

Altogether, eighty-one of us are trapped in the mountains. Here at Alder Creek, we are six men, three women, and twelve children. At the lake camp shelters, there are seventeen men, twelve women, and thirty-one children.

George and I have often talked about how the explorers went westward for knowledge or glory, the missionaries for converts, and the mountain men for adventure and fortune, but we of ’46 have thought of ourselves from the beginning as bringing a civilization. We are the first year of the families on the Trail: a responsibility and a privilege that we have borne eagerly, indeed with pride.

When we were trying to hack our way through the Wasatch Mountains, we became aware of the liabilities of so many children, but that fact remained unspoken. Here in our grim shelter, the numbers laid out starkly on the page, there is no denying or ignoring their heart-sinking reality. As George and I worked out the ages of each for this list, we exchanged more than one look of dismay.

Sister,

Let me describe our shelter as for years I always described my current surroundings to you, Betsey, faithful to your instructions to “be particular with detail.” We are in a clearing, three shelters in all, each at roughly the point of a triangle. When the storm forced us to seek cover, we put our largest tent against a great lodgepole pine to form the west side of our shelter. Then we drove posts into the ground and covered them with oxen hides. Erected in haste, it has served us remarkably well.

Inside at one end, we scooped a hollow in the ground, which serves as our fireplace. An opening at the top vents the smoke, but never all of it. There’s always a smoky haze, and we’re growing accustomed to our chronic throat clearings and coughs. It’s night now, but night or day, along with the smoky haze, there are shadows, silhouettes, dark corners. When we go outside, the light hurts our eyes at first; then when we come back, we squint for a few moments until things become clear again.

At the other end of our shelter, posts and poles hold up crude wooden platforms we built out of weathered wagon boar. These platforms lift us off the wet earth, and we covered them with pine branches and blankets.

We divided one platform into two by hanging a blanket in the middle to give Mrs. Wolfinger privacy. Doris Wolfinger is a young German widow we took into our wagon after her husband disappeared in the second desert. She may as well be a hermit in a remote cave for all she is with us.

We made a rough table and two benches from wagon boards
and put them close to the fire. We eat there, I lave and dress George’s wound there, Elitha sometimes reads her Dickens there. I sit there now, and most nights, writing. A giant pinecone, lit, is my “lamp.”

Around the edges of the shelter we have several bowls filled with melting snow for our water. Close to the door, we have our slops and empty it outside daily except in the worst weather.

We almost always wear our coats inside over many layers of clothes, which I’m sorry to say, have not been washed for some time, a state I fear will continue. I suppose we are fortunate that it is too cold to sustain vermin.

Jacob and Elizabeth’s shelter across the clearing is pretty much the same as ours except smokier and more pungent, although Jean Baptiste and I do our best to keep the vent open and empty the slops.

“The Indians do it this way,” Jean Baptiste told George, and he instructed the men in making the teamsters’ shelter, a kind of tepee, by covering triangulated poles with hides. Jean Baptiste is a godsend, and as good to the girls as if he were their brother. When the weather permits, he takes Georgia and Eliza outside and spreads out “Old Navajo,” his colorful Indian blanket, on the ground. Eliza plops down and grabs one side, Georgia the other, and they begin rolling inward until they meet in the middle like two sausages. Jean Baptiste picks them up and props them against a log, where they watch him probe the snow looking for cattle or climb a tree looking to the west for the rescuers to come or simply talk to themselves in a private language they have made up. I could not manage without him. He finds firewood for all three shelters. He’s of short stature, only five inches taller than I, but very strong. Jean Baptiste Trudeau is his full name. He is not sure where he was born. His father was French Canadian, a trapper, who was killed by Indians. His mother was Mexican and apparently
died when he was very young. He says he doesn’t remember her. I feel very tender toward him. He is a good boy, and his eagerness makes him seem younger than his 21 years—“almost 22,” he said at Fort Bridger, where he begged George to hire him. “A dollar a day,” George said, “and all the food you can eat.”

Your sister

W
e give thanks that we are alive and together. It stormed all day. We ate boiled oxen hides for supper. We have a little bit of meat left that I dried and parcel out every few days. I kept the children in bed almost all day because of the cold.

I
was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on November 1st 1801, the seventh child, the baby, of William Eustis and Tamesin Wheelwright Eustis. Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the sixteen states.

I was named after my mother, Tamesin, a feminization of Thomas, a name that, for some curious reason, lent itself to fanciful variations, Tamazin, Thomasin, Thomazine, Tamzine, Tamzene…Long ago, I gave up correcting people—even my first husband, Tully, spelled it Tamsan. I sign my name Tamzene, but most people have called me Tamsen, which was fine with me because it’s what my father called me.

In fifteen years, my mother bore four daughters and three sons: Tamesin, Molly, John, Elizabeth, William, William, Tamesin. It was commonplace to give the name of a deceased child to a later child, as happened with my brother William and me. Some people believed we carried the spirits of our deceased siblings along with their memory, that we’d live their lives as well as our own. It is curious that William and I are the only travelers in our family, that we have never been content to stay put. Do the spirits of our older sister and brother, deprived of their own experience, drive us on to seek their adventures as well as our own? Or were we just born with wanderlust?

At the time of our emigration to California last April, only two of my siblings were still alive: Elizabeth (Betsey) Eustis Poor, nine years older than I, and William Eustis, two years older.
Betsey, my dearest only sister, has always been my confidante, unfortunately most of the time by letter. In the past William and I had our moments of contention—though I’m not sure he noticed—but we are on excellent terms now. When I left Springfield, he said, “Illinois is overcrowded and unhealthy. Don’t be surprised if I show up at your door sometime.” “That would give me a great deal of pleasure,” I said from my heart.

I’m writing all this down, because today Frances asked, “What was Illinois like?” I was taken aback, but I spoke matter-of-factly about George’s grown children back home, who were like indulgent uncles and aunts to them, the Sunday picnics, swimming in the creek, our farm when the fruit trees were in bloom. She and her sisters listened as if I was telling them stories from some book they’d read long ago and, worse yet, one they no longer had much interest in.

But why was I shocked? Each day, my former life seems more a dream to me too. I feel bonds loosening. I strain to hold on to my stepchildren in Illinois, Allen Francis, the editor of the newspaper, and my other friends we left behind, and most of all my dear sister, Betsey, willing myself to write letters I fear she will never read. The truth is it’s difficult for me to hold on to anyone outside this wretched dwelling. The rest of the Party, seven miles to our west, might as well be seventy miles or seven hundred miles, although Jean Baptiste goes back and forth and brings us the latest dispiriting news. Even my blood relatives across the clearing require a bottomless attention I’m increasingly reluctant to give. Every day the weather permits, I force myself to walk across the clearing with Leanna to encourage my sister-in-law, Elizabeth, and my niece and nephews to gather firewood, to pray, to get
up
off their platforms. Every time we’ve been there this week, my brother-in-law, Jacob, was slumped at the table, his head in his hands.

Newburyport, Massachusetts, is a seaside town, and I grew up in a world that revolved around the sea. On the Trail every time a breeze moved the prairie grass someone would speak of it as waves. I can see they might think that, especially if they had never seen
real
waves. Prairie grass undulating is a pleasing sight, but it’s to the great Atlantic as a minnow is to a Blue Whale.

My father was a sea captain, and he and my uncle and the other men in Newburyport were often at sea for a year or two at a time. My mother and the other women were in charge of home, money, and business. If the money Father left home ran low, Mother and later my stepmother made the long, difficult trip to Boston to sell whale oil used to light lamps, or barter it for goods we couldn’t make at home. I begged and begged, and shortly after my 9th birthday, my stepmother and aunt let me go with them. I had imagined Boston many times, and though I was often teased for my runaway imagination, this time it had lagged far behind the reality. Immediately, the vibrant energy of Boston coursed through me. Everything was in primary colors, the sounds a thrilling jangle and din, and it seemed that everyone we passed hurried on her way to perform an important task. I saw that we were crossing Salem Street and turned with only one thought: Christ Church, Old North, where Father was a sentinel when he was only 15. I had only gone a block or two when it came into view, and though still some distance away I ran to greet it. And there it was, exactly as Father had described it so many times. As if happening that moment, I saw the two lanterns blinking from the steeple, One if by land, two if by sea, the horse’s hooves slapping the ground, its mouth frothing, pealing church bells and town hall chimes, drumbeats and gunshots, carrying Paul Revere’s warning from town to town: The Redcoats are coming, the Redcoats are coming. I climbed 154 steps to the top of the
steeple and, when I looked out the window, was completely surprised to see my stepmother and aunt in the street below hurrying this way and that in agitation. I was sorry for the concern I had caused, but not at all for my adventure, and Father later whispered in my ear that he would have done the same thing.