Surely, no!

...These are a few among the many dangers, to which foreigners are exposed, in traveling by this route, as well as a few, among the numerous instances, that might be given, of the enormous evils and oppressions, which necessarily arise, from unrestrained priestcraft and religious intolerance.

Hear, hear!

[He slams down one hand and raises the other in a toast:]

To the First Amendment!

[He drinks.]

Don't you see, Dear Reader? I needed a villain for my book, just as the Donners needed a villain for their difficulties, just as the public needs a villain to understand the tragedies it perceives, and each half of the country would need a villain a few years down the road when the immigrants revealed themselves to be a mere distraction from our Constitutional misunderstandings and started to look more useful in uniform.

[He raises his glass bitterly:]

Ah, yes: to Rebellion! The very thing even Milton could not make look bad on Satan—losing Paradise in the process! Let us raise that Rebel Yell!

[He throws back his cocktail and makes another—more out of need than earlier.]

† August 25, 1846

Six hundred miles from his destination, a bachelor named Luke Halloran died. He had begun to seriously fail after Fort Bridger, so much so that the George and Tamsen Donner took him into their wagon when he could no longer ride his horse. The mark of consumption was upon him and he began to cough up blood.

Upon his passing, he left all his worldly possessions—which, excepting his horse, were contained in a single trunk—to George and Tamsen Donner.

That trunk contained a fairly large amount of Masonic paraphernalia and $1,500 in coined gold. [The fiddler reprises "Loop #7, Tracks."]

Meanwhile, I had left them another note—though the crows had gotten to it first. Tamsen Donner had to work to piece my writing back together:

"2 days—2 nights—hard driving—cross—desert—reach water"

Some of my words had been lost in the breeze, but I had already made it across, which should have been reassurance enough! Bridger had mentioned this "exception" of a mere 40 miles without grass and water: I told them honestly and plainly that it would be more when they needed that news most.

Furthermore, I had placed it prominently enough for even the simplest infant or Irishman to see!

[The fiddler abruptly ceases his fiddling.

Perhaps because he has revealed the rhetorical purpose of such comments, they no longer possess the power to allay his emotions. He cracks a bit:]

Tamsen Donner found that note in the tumbleweed, pecked apart by crows. It was said she quilted the note back together as the children fetched her the pieces that littered the chalky ground that scraped their soft, little fingers. Her three little daughters: