Frances.

Georgina.

Eliza.

She quilted this note as she quilted the amenities that swaddled her freezing, starving children. It would not be long before those soft, little fingers would grasp at boiling animal hides in the pot that all their lives had cooked them food. Tamsen Donner reached into a pile of paper scraps to find a pile of bones.

All for a shortcut! A shortcut! I had to ask to be overtaken and they were suffering so for a shortcut! Did our forebears teach us to so lean on such crutches? Did the Puritans preach such measures at the first Thanksgiving? Did they teach us to spurn and resent the helping hand of Squanto?

NO!

And, yet, as Sisyphus so pushed his rock, the Donner-Reed Party dragged every goddamn molecule they had known back East down canyons and across deserts! What, might I ask you, is the goddamned point of trekking across a Continent to merely recreate—nay, retain—the same existence? How warped can one's idea of HOME become?

Perhaps the Puritans did not these suffer these dilemmas because an oceangoing vessel puts more finite limitations on what can be carried! However, I think it is something deeper than that:

Industry is innate, God-given, and utterly alien to the Catholic hordes that have lately polluted our proud shores. These barbarian invaders were one in the same with those weaned from the fungal blight of a famine for perhaps the singular purpose of getting shot by our boys down South and floated back up North in pine boxes until Dixie ran out of metal to make more bullets. That was when yet that other Tecumseh—my dinner guest, you'll recall—figured that if the City Upon a Hill could not be erected, a misdirected apocalypse might suffice.

Only those who might so recklessly drift from founding principles might so recklessly travel across a goddamned Continent with the family and the family farm in tow! Paradise—I can assure you—is a project that must be started from scratch, not from the heaps of everything that failed back East, no matter which side of the Atlantic! How else to become a pie-oh-neeeeer? How else to forge America?

[The fiddler reprises the "Loop #5, Sisyphus."]

The party next reached a spot they called 20 Wells, which were exactly that: 20 of the most perfectly circular pools containing the clearest, coldest, most beguilingly still waters that any of the party had ever seen. A 75-foot rope would not reach bottom and no matter how much water was taken from within the well, it would remain perfectly filled to its brittle, stony, perfectly round rim. Some of the wells were a few feet across and others were mere inches—all possessed these properties. They were the pools that would not be emptied, and the final moment of rest before the Dry Drive I had promised.

At this juncture, it might be prudent to return to what I called in my book "a consideration of paramount importance"—PACKING! Dear God, in my mind's eye I can see them, not casting off a kettle! Let alone a chest of drawers! A clock! An extra stove!

The misery of objects is endless! And, yet, it is a misery I, too, endured—when I lost that trunk on the way to the Constitutional Convention of 1849. Of all of the horrid, ghastly coincidences, I lost exactly $1,500 in gold—the same exact amount of money Luke Halloran bequeathed to the Donners...a sum that would—that would—well, my story will arrive at it soon enough, but it was number I'd already woken up in cold sweats recounting. It was the unluckiest number I've ever known.