Again, I know I should have been delighted and of course I was, but something seemed oddly compensatory about our growing family.

I left Monterey reaffirmed in my conviction that I had neither the talent nor the desire to enter politics, yet with nothing but appointments—minimally paying ones that sounded so wonderful on paper that they only committed me to more minimally paying ones, but never the exact connection I needed at the exact right point in time—and, on top of that, I was run out of the house I'd built by a country rube!

Charlotte gave birth to our first daughter, Isobel, around the time of California's admission to the union as the 31st state.

I still had nightmares about Salem: rock upon rock upon rock upon rock gathered ever higher on top of my chest.

Isobel was Charlotte's spitting image in every possible way: now I had two of them telling me it was all fine and that all things must pass when all was most certainly not okay! How dare they imply by way of that assertion's converse that all I was going to do for them would just rot away at some point—decompose just like the sphagnum Isobel would harvest so that her mother could dress the other children's cuts and wounds? How dare they both imply that the good earth would simply evolve past my every exertion to do right by my family?

When a man feels irrelevance looming and his youth slipping away the last thing he needs to hear is "All things must pass." The disappointments came faster and faster so that I hardly had the chance to breathe—the hopeful part of the cycle was now so brief as to not be worth mentioning!

The last thing I needed from my wife and my eldest daughter was some kind of palliative, philosophical drivel! I cared not for some ersatz brand of stoicism from the wrong side of the Pacific! "Do not fret, Lansford: even if you had succeeded and provided the slightest shred of stability, it all would have been ephemeral and meaningless in the face of geological time, anyway!" Oh, good, Charlotte! Thank you! What a lovely comfort to take!

Ever more, I felt consumed, consumed...consumed out of the land whither we were a-going, as an ancestor of mine might have put it.

Our only unmitigated success came in family planning: we wanted a huge family and that much we got. After William Waitstill Hastings and Isobel Hastings came Henry Clay Hastings, Irving Hastings, and Amelia Hastings!

Amelia was the last of our brood to be born in California: Henry Thomas Hastings and, finally, Charlotte Hastings—Jr. if you will—were born in Yuma, Arizona, where we moved in 1858. Oh, surely Charlotte objected! Finally, she had a normal reaction to something I'd proposed! However, she had picked the wrong fight.

No, Charlotte, Yuma was nowhere near the ocean, but—I stoically reminded her—all that wanes must in time wax.

Besides, geologically speaking, Charlotte, Arizona was a raging sea not three weeks ago!

[With no small amount of shame and self-hatred, he retrieves himself from this sneer before continuing.]

† August 29, 1846

The Donner Party's Dry Drive commenced.