hitch, hammered home a final repair. Mounds of supplies vanished as crates and trunks and burlap bags disappeared into the wagon beds, stowed in precise array. Flying pans and tools and overalls succumbed to a final cleaning. Oxen and mules and horses grazed in the warmth of the sun, their tails flapping against ever-present flies. Children capered at play. The sounds—the edge of a tent flapping in the wind, the neighing of horses, the barking of dogs, greetings and farewells and talk of the trail ahead—mixed with the smell of sod and manure and campfires and freshly laundered calico. 'I can give vou no idea of the huny of this place at this time,' Tamzene wrote.
Tamzene and her husband, George, were going west with five children, their own three young daughters and George's two older daughters from a previous marriage. George's brother Jacob and his wife, Betsy, had come too, with their seven youngsters. So too had the Reeds, James and Margret and four children, another family from the Donners' hometown of Springfield, Illinois. Together, the three families had left Springfield a month earlier, but the trip thus far had been an easy prelude, an undemanding ramble through farmland and towns. The real voyage to California began here, at Independence, a boomtown at the edge of the frontier.
Tamzene had tried to write her sister once before, but the letter had been laid aside, perhaps because the preparations for the trip had left no time, perhaps because it was simply too hard to say goodbye. The old letter had been soiled—she rued the waste of a nice sheet of pink paper—and so now she was starting again. One of her children played with 'an old indiarubber cap'; another pestered her with questions.
The children were the reason for the move, or at least part of the reason. A new life in the West would be 'an advantage to our children and to us,' Tamzene insisted, yet there was a hint in her letter of the anxiety anyone would have felt. 'I am willing to go,' she wrote. Willing, not eager.
As if to reassure herself as much as her sister, she outlined their ample gear and provisions: three wagons, each pulled by three yoke of oxen, food, clothing, even a few head of dairy cows for milk and butter along the trail. She added news of another family member, then closed with a promise to write that was really an acknowledgment of just how difficult, perhaps impossible, that might be. 'Farewell, mv sister, you shall hear from me as soon as I have an opportunity . . . . Farewell.'
AMERICA IN THE 1840s hummed with energy and growth and ambition. The summer of the Donners' journey, the country turned seventy years old—an adolescent age for a nation—and its youthful vigor was unmatched. Since the turn of the centuiy, the population had tripled. The geographic size of the nation had quadrupled. The gross national product had increased sevenfold. The United States was, in the words of historian James McPherson, 'the
Technology seemed to be conquering everything. Since the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, the country had been laced with man-made waterways. Steamboats, still a relatively new invention, plied the rivers carrying freight and passengers. Even the earliest railroads were belching along. Textile factories had supplanted individual weavers, rolling out affordable fabric by the ton. Inventors fashioned wonder after wonder: Samuel Colt the revolver, John Deere the steel plow, Charles Goodyear a vulcanized rubber that withstood heat and cold. The electric motor had been invented. America had the world's first dental school, and an American doctor had performed the first operation using general anesthetic. In 1844, Samuel Morse had sent the first telegraph message: 'What hath God wrought?'
Yet beyond Independence, this cacophonous modern world faded to a hush. To pioneers, Independence was the 'jumping-off point,' a phrase that rightly suggested the dramatic abandonment of safety, and to the men and women about to undertake the journey, it was a dividing line between civilization and wilderness. To the west, boundless grasslands stretched toward the sunset, an ocean of grass streaked here and there with the trees of a river bottom. There were no great cities. There were no cities at all. The largest community of the west was Santa Fe, with perhaps a few thousand residents, and that was far to the south of the intended path. Where American settlers were headed, there were only a few small settlements—and those were two thousand miles away in California and Oregon. In between, there was nothing save Indians and a handful of trading posts. On many maps the vast expanse was labeled as the 'Great American Desert.' In the parlance of the day, those who made the trip were invariably 'emigrants,' people leaving their countiy for an unknown shore.
Some had personal reasons for going: a broken heart or a run of bad luck. Others were escaping hard times. An economic crash in 1837 had briefly halted the boom, touching off a painful depression. And yet the economy had started to grow again by the mid-i840s. Agricultural prices still had not rebounded fully, but the worst of the crisis was over.
The more common reason for starting the journey was simply the continual theme of America: going toward the sunset in search of a better life. Almost from the day the United States bought its way into the western half of the continent, with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Americans began to dream of using their newly acquired land as a highway to the Pacific. The hard and barren prairies seemed beyond the hope of cultivation, but they could still serve a purpose: access to the rich river valleys of Oregon and California. To go by sea was a grueling prospect— months of churning through the
South Atlantic, then battering around Cape Horn, then sailing up through the whaling waters of the South Pacific and at last to California. Typically the trip took longer by sea, at least five months compared to perhaps four by going overland. And it was often more expensive, especially since the overland migrant's costs might be recouped at the journey's end if he sold his oxen or wagon. It is no surprise that Americans wondered if the overland alternative might not be better.
No one knew with certainty, because for the better part of four decades after the purchase, almost no Americans save a few hardy mountain men and a few inflamed missionaries dared venture into the Far West. The lack of experience did not, however, quiet a vigorous debate about the practicality of overland travel. The exploration party led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark endured countless hardships in reaching the Pacific, dragging a boat up the Missouri River for much of the trip, but after their return it was not long before Americans were being told that repeating such a trip might actually become routine. Lewis and Clark arrived back in St. Louis in 1806, yet as early as 1813 the
Skeptics, on the other hand, decried the idea as madness. The trip was compared to a journey to the moon. Livestock would starve along the way. Indians would kill the pioneers. Women and children could not conceivably survive the rigors. Horace Greeley, the famous editor of the
But the westward urge could only be contained for so long. The middle of the continent, which not so long ago had itself been wilderness, was starting to fill up and settle down, losing the edge that attracted a certain kind of man. Missouri joined the Union in 1821, Arkansas in 1836, Michigan the year after that. The result, by the 1840s, was a decade of expansionist fever. In 1844, James K. Polk won the presidency by promising to annex Texas in the south and Oregon in the north, in the latter case vowing a war if the British didn't abandon their claim as far north as Alaska. The following year, a New York journalist named John O'Sullivan coined a term for America's grand ambitions: It was the country's 'manifest destiny' to occupy the continent from sea to sea, no matter that the British still claimed Oregon and that California was part of Mexico.
By that time, western settlers had already started fashioning a continental country. They crafted new lives at the edge of the Pacific, assuming more or less that if Americans forged ahead, America would follow. The first wagon train went west in 1841, the brainchild of a twenty-one-year-old Missouri schoolteacher named John Bidwell. His Missouri land stolen by a claim-jumper and his imagination fired by tales of a California paradise, Bidwell organized the Western Emigration Society and drew pledges of commitment from more than five hundred would-be followers. When fewer than a hundred people showed up at the May rendezvous to start the trip, Bidwell plunged ahead anyway. Merely setting out on the journey was a remarkable display of courage. 'We knew that California lay west,' Bidwell wrote later, 'and that was the extent of our knowledge.' By luck, the emigrants encountered a party of Jesuit missionaries guided by Thomas Fitzpatrick, an Irishman who had already spent a quarter-century in the West and was a legendary mountain man. Fitzpatrick led them all to the vicinity of Fort Hall, in present-day Idaho, where they split into three groups.
