Trailing the Donner Party
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This Sunday’s books pages include a review of the memoir ‘Searching for Tamsen Donner’ by Gabrielle Burton. A double narrative, it focuses on Tamsen, wife of the leader of the Donner Party -- the ill-fated caravan that, snowed in and starving in the Sierra Mountains, resorted to cannibalism -- seen through the scrim of Burton’s family taking a road trip to follow the Donner Party’s trail. Reviewer William Deverell writes:
‘Searching for Tamsen Donner’ is a kind of eulogy, one that recounts a trip Burton took in the late 1970s with her husband and five young daughters. An unusual variant of the ‘on the road’ idea, the journey retraced the route the Donner Party took toward its fateful rendezvous with snow and death. Burton wanted to use the trip to research a work of fiction; those plans never came to pass. Instead, all these years hence, we have this odd, unlikely book. History lesson, memoir and intimate family portrait all at once. ... Burton notes the trials of the Donner Party with understandable pathos. She especially grieves Tamsen, a woman whose intelligence comes forth as plainly as her hardscrabble courage.
In a 2006 article exploring recent archaeological discoveries at the Donner campsite -- which did not definitively determine cannibalism or its absence -- the New Yorker explained that Tamsen Donner, and many others in the group, left home with all the trappings of the upper-middle class.
Tamsen planned to start a ladies’ seminary, and took school supplies. An amateur botanist, she packed watercolors and oil paints, along with silver spoons. ... She dressed her little girls in linsey dresses and petticoats; Frances got a blue-and-white patterned cloak with a matching wool hood, and her younger sisters had the same in red.
That perfectly respectable people might be forced into cannibalism to stay alive was a terrifying, cautionary tale (with a lesson: avoid poorly researched shortcuts). The Donner Party quickly moved into legend, particularly as new waves of emigrants headed for California’s 1849 Gold Rush.
Tamsen and George Donner had three daughters together, and he had two by a previous marriage. This was a link across history; following the Donners’ trail, Gabrielle Burton and her husband also traveled with their five daughters. Deverell writes:
....despite its single-minded focus on Tamsen, ‘Searching for Tamsen Donner’ is tinged by nostalgia, if not redemption. As dramatic and tragic as the story of the Donner Party is, it shares space here with the tender reflections of a mother of five daughters -- daughters whose filial companionship on a summer road trip long ago bespoke a very different kind of family journey across the American West.
Tamsen Donner did not survive that terrible winter, but Burton and her family fared better. She now lives in Venice, Calif., and her daughters collectively run a movie production company, Five Sisters.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
