As Confederate General Ewell—ultimately, one of our highest-ranking—would put it well over a decade later, "The road to glory cannot be followed with much baggage."

[He raises his tumbler.]

Hear, hear! To traveling lightly!

[He drinks the remainder of his drink and prepares yet another cocktail as the fiddler plays "Loop #7, Tracks."]

† May 31, 1846

The first death was expected—a sort of self-man omen.

Sarah Keyes, Margaret Reed's mother and James Frazier Reed's mother-in-law, succumbed to a lingering illness on this last day in May. With expectations like these, who needs hopes?

The proper Christian burial delayed the Donner-Reed party long enough to allow the Platte to swell, its beguiling ribbons merged to fill the hillocks, as water will surround the body of a bather— or a cadaver, as in the case of Sarah Keyes.

The Donner-Reed Party had grown substantially greater in number when it passed through Independence, earlier in May. However, it reached a new critical mass as the river ran too wild in its course for a number of days, allowing for the addition of both the Murphys and the Breens.

James Frazier Reed, I have not yet had the pleasure of informing you, was of a curious lineage: no Mayflower descendent was he—rather, the man claimed to be dispossessed Polish nobility yet hailed from Belfast and called himself a member of the Church of England. Well, I'll be damned! I'll also be damned confused, but probably less so than was the Breen clan, fresh from County Sligo at Reed's insistence that no Irishman was he!

[Laughs with flippant, yet fiery, hatred—]

One might be positive this denial was issued in the man's attempt at a half-brogue, which remained thicker than the average Irish peat bog, rest assured! I know this because I had the chance to hear it myself, as soon you shall see!

So here you have the wagon train: lace-curtain Irish in a covered palace wagon and the devoutly Catholic shanty wagon behind it! Oh, how it must've burned Protestant Reed to be in such proximity to his popish inferiors! To be reminded of the accent he had so earnestly tried to lose! Such is democracy! Such is the Frontier!

PALACE WAGON!

PALACE WAGON!