To my speeches late that spring and early that summer, I added my assurance—based on calculations I made from my previous, glacial crossing with a giant caravan—that the trip West would take 70 to 80 days in total. My guide alluded to the season fitting for such a crossing as my first, but surely a small group of hearty men on competently cared-for horses, could make the journey in another season—in—in.

[He sighs horribly.]

In almost any season, I said. Going so far as to declare, "The Plains could be crossed at any and every season of the year," in a speech given at Independence, Missouri on August 8, 1845.

[Gazing down.]

The group dwindled to ten and we departed exactly a week later on the ides of August.

[Looking up,]

And, what to say of it, Dear Reader? I am still here, it seems. Stubbornly alive, some might say.

The first time I crossed the Plains, I had yet to write a book that would earn the choicest place in the Donners' library, snugly among Henry Clay's Speeches, Pilgrim's Progress, and the family Bible. I first went West in 1843, a full two years before Tamsen Donner would select my guide for her book club's winter list, so that they might dream of California by the fireside. That first-edition copy of The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California would travel 2,000 miles overland with what came to be known as the Donner Party.

But write that book I did, and I set out to cross the Plains once more and—though an author of no mean abilities—how could I possibly have possessed the imagination to glean what would become of those who followed me? The mind that could belongs to the kind of man I care to never meet.

Here I was, fool that I was, fool that I am, going out West once more. Oh, but I was the fool that time not for following my destiny back over the Hundredth Meridian, but for daring to think I knew what that destiny held. Yet, follow it, I did: it's all a man can do.

[Pause.] Please—

[Chokes a bit.]