Day 5, my only thoughts at the start of the Donner party trail

 

As we left Independence, Missouri—the jumping-off point for the Reed-Donner Party—and headed toward Gardner Junction and beyond, a journey of almost 90 miles, I found myself wondering what must have been going through the minds of those pioneers 180 years ago.

And then I realized that I already knew.

For mile after mile, I kept imagining those wagons slowly working their way westward over rough, rutted trails, their occupants being bounced and jostled along as the familiar world disappeared behind them. But I suspect that, during those first days at least, the discomfort was overwhelmed by excitement. They were setting out on an extraordinary adventure, heading toward California and what they believed would be a new and better life.

How exhilarating it must have been.

We know their story because we know how it ended. They didn’t. They could not possibly have imagined the hardships, mistakes, quarrels, hunger, snow and tragedy that awaited them many hundreds of miles down the trail. In those first days, the Sierra Nevada was unimaginably far away.

So I prefer to picture them as they were then—not yet as the tragic figures history remembers, but as families beginning the adventure of their lives. I imagine conversation between the wagons, children running alongside them, jokes being exchanged, and laughter around the campfires at night.

For those first few days, at least, the Donner Party had every reason to believe that the best part of their lives lay somewhere ahead of them, just over the western horizon.