Upon entering the desert, one's only companion is the incessant crunch and echo of the tall, desiccated grasses—the chattering of the dead left to wander an empty earth—that evokes a fear only to be surpassed when that chattering ceases. For what could possibly follow a silence such as that?

The Dry Drive began simply enough: following the tracks of the wagons I had personally guided, in the barren bowl of barren mountains, with a floor as white as Death itself—white as the absence of all life, though perversely, brutally flooded by the white of the light that gives it.

In the Great Salt Desert, the sky is blue, the ground is white, and you lose yourself between them; there is nothing else between them but obscene temperature and unthinkable time.

During the day it was well over 100 degrees; in the dead of night, they may as well have been on the dark side of the moon.

[He stares into the middle distance and then says almost too abruptly:]

Charlotte was not my first wife. Yes, surely you might have seen this coming, surely you judge, surely you cast the first stone, but I will say this in my defense: Charlotte was the first wife I chose.

You will perhaps recall that I said I had seen Death's hand upon my own family prior to my inaugural journey West. My second eldest brother, Joseph, was taken by a gruesome accident as a young man. You see, one day...His horse startled and simply dragged his leg away. Our own father had to complete the amputation and watch his most beloved son slip away.

Joe was 33 at the time and very recently re-married. Catherine was his second wife: his first, Priscilla, had passed away a few years prior after a lingering illness, leaving him in care of their only child, a little girl. Upon my brother's death, my distraught family—generally so blessed by health and good luck in our own Hastings blood and so thoroughly shocked by the occasion—decided it was of paramount importance to close ranks in the face of tragedy.

He was ripped from us so suddenly—Priscilla had given ample warning and Joe had married her despite her weak constitution, despite our warnings that it should surely end in sorrow. So, when Joe followed her, we naturally decided that the family could be sundered no further; I concurred with this sentiment emphatically.

It was promptly decided that one of my elder sisters, a favorite aunt, would take her orphaned niece in to raise as one of her own alongside kin the girl had known and loved her whole, young life. Given all the trauma, the girl could be asked to do little more than move across the street, which was all this adoption entailed. I thought the arrangement splendid, as did we all.

This left the matter of Catherine, my brother's young widow. The marriage was scarcely five months old; Catherine returned from their honeymoon expecting, but she miscarried due to the stress of her husband's abrupt passing. The event was mourned as though my brother had died yet another death.

Perhaps some women would have desired nothing more than to strike out toward a new life after such compounded tragedy, but not Catherine. Even if Catherine were desirous of such a new chapter, it would have been impossible in one respect: her much older sister, Eleanor was married to my eldest brother, Waitstill, Jr. The McCords—Eleanor and Catherine's family—were early settlers of Mount Vernon, Ohio along with my own family, and the dearest of friends. If Catherine were to remain in the company of her own family in her time of sorrow, she would invariably remain in the company of mine.

Furthermore, Catherine and I were the same exact age, 21. I had recently completed my legal studies and, by any measure, had prospects for a promising career. In November of 1840, we were wed.