Can you not see it now? The palace wagon? The prairie schooner doubled in size so as bear forth the Great American Sisyphus of the Rockies, furniture poking out at every conceivable angle! A pair of mother-daughter invalids—one real, one imagined—languishing in the claustrophobia of all their minimally vetted earthly possessions!

And the Donners were just as bad! On top of their three ox-drawn wagons loaded with farming equipment, Tamsen Donner had been a schoolmistress before she was married and fancied opening a female seminary upon her arrival out West. That means one of those wagons doubled as...A LIBRARY! Better, yet, Tamsen fancied herself both an amateur botanist and painter—a regular goddamn amateur Da Vinci—so she had her hired teamsters haul art supplies and some "scientific" knickknacks, too!

What else, what else...Ah, yes: Silver spoons! Family china! Feather beds! Petticoats! Corsets! Lamps! Cameos! Lace! A cast-iron stove! A Dutch oven! A reflector oven! Copper pots! Seasoned skillets! Family portraits! Five little girls, three too young to walk in matching blue and red, perhaps to make of them the gaudiest, easiest targets! Bolts of fabric to trade en route! Mirrors! Jewelry! Casks of fine brandy and a lame dog named Uno!

About the only things they had which I had recommended were ammunition and livestock.

[Somewhat shakily he drinks. Once he calms down a bit, he resumes:]

To be perfectly honest with you, Dear Reader—and, indeed, I strive to be nothing less—the temptation to lug all of life's accoutrements across an entire Continent can be all too great; it is a temptation to which even I once yielded, though, in point of fact, my moment of weakness came to pass merely in transit from our little white adobe down to Monterey for the Constitutional Convention.

That was the Fall of '49, a year into my marriage.

I lost that trunk of mine...

Of ours...

What a foolish newlywed I was, forgetting all he'd learned in the mountains and on the range when faced with his impossibly pretty bride, overwhelmed by the desire to give her every comfort he could in a half-savage land! It was her native one, but still!

Oh, I shouldn't put it that way, I suppose; I cannot blame Charlotte, but—but—I can blame what she stirred in me, especially in those earliest days.

In the Summer of '48, we made our home in a humble, yet fine, adobe halfway between Sutter's Fort and the sea at San Francisco. From that location, I kept my promise to Charlotte easily. I had built this house with my own two hands a year earlier; from it, Sheriff George McKinstry and I surveyed the land. I had done so in my capacity as attorney for Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—whose spiritual leader was lately slain and whose members were looking for safe harbor out West. They sought the religious freedom they were denied in New York and then Missouri and, as we have established already in my tale, California has always taken, ahem, ALL types.