[He paces about and then resumes in a forced, almost professorial manner—]

It is nearly 250 miles from those portions of central Illinois to western Missouri: the Donners left about when they should have, when the spring rains had given way to sunny breezes and the grass was the finest an ox could hope to eat.

By all accounts I have gathered, George Donner was cut of that quotidian Old Testament patriarch farmer cloth in which success on the middle frontier seems swath a man. He was on his second marriage, both fecund, and his brother Jacob was similarly bearded and robed. Jacob, as I earlier mentioned, had purchased my illustrious volume, but that was only upon the recommendation of his sister-in-law, George's wife, Tamsen Donner, to whom I am indebted for multiple sales, as she put The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California on the reading list for her pie-oh-neeeeer literary salon. That would be SAH-lon to you.

Even from the earliest stages of their planning—which were not quite so early at all, when one considers this journey was undertaken not quite one year following my book's publication—the Donner ranks swelled with neighbors, employees, and other hangers-on possessed of various motivations but mostly some degree of financial means—save those hired teamsters for the wagons.

On April 14, 1846, the party traveled due Southwest from Illinois; meanwhile, I made my way East with all due haste, yet leaving California with all the reluctance a man who leaves his dearest might. I was, in point of fact, a man who had already seen his love so, so many times, but she was at a distance. She was hardly aware of me, of my desperation to know her before all other men who might stake their claims...

[The fiddler readies his instrument tentatively, as though—for once—unsure of Hastings' line of argument.]

...Charlotte and I knew one another in passing and I took those precious few opportunities to make my interest in her known as best I could. Our acquaintance hardly scratched the flimsiest surface, but I lingered in San Francisco whenever business called me there just so I could chance to meet her again. Finally, I felt confident enough to call on her, but her adoptive mother had little interest in Charlotte's marriage prospects—about as little as Charlotte had in her own looks—so my presence was treated with indifference.

I could not be sure what Charlotte thought of any of this; the very vagueness of the pursuit only increased the firmness of my resolve—as my visions of California crystallized in the mist of those morning rides—so I boldly asked her when she might have some time to slip away, one day when I saw her by the post office (the town's newest building). She informed me I was in luck, for the end of that week would be one of examinations and she could surely beg off of work.

[The fiddler plays soft strains of "Charlotte."]

That Friday, with school in session and not a soul on the Pacific Coast to chaperone, we wandered down to the water's edge and she let down her long, red hair so it fell to her waist and bounced up again in the breeze, without a thought to gravity. With arms outstretched she wove her fingers through the wind and swooped them down to the water, wide open as the wings of an albatross, to splash the sea salt on her face and comb it through the tendrils at her forehead—this, the first time I had ever seen them hang loose.