Impatient With Desire Read Online Free

true that some women went only to keep their families intact, I was not the only wife and mother who thought emigration was the opportunity of a lifetime for the whole family.
     
    The gentlemen got their eight young men, and a month later, we left Springfield, three family groups and our employees, in a little caravan of nine wagons.
    George was a hale 60, I was 44. Elitha was 13, Leanna, 11, Frances, 5, Georgia, 4, and Eliza, 3.
    George’s brother, Jacob, 58 and in poor health ever since I’ve known him, hoped to spend his last days in sunshine. His wife, Elizabeth, was 38, and although I thought she was willing to go, I have come to wonder since. They took seven children: Solomon Hook, 14, and William Hook, 12, Elizabeth’s children by her first husband, and George, 9, Mary, 7, Isaac, 5, Samuel, 4, and Lewis, 3.
    Between us, we had six wagons and twenty people.
    Our neighbors, the Reeds, had three wagons and twelve people. James Frazier Reed, 46, was a prosperous furniture maker; his wife, Margret, 32, suffered from migraines that James was certain California would cure. James claims to be descended from Polish nobility and more than a few people felt he was forever acting like it, but I always thought James knew his worth. (It’s true that he might have been less generous in sharing that knowledge with others.) They took their four children, Virginia Backenstoe Reed, 13, Margret’s daughter by her first husband and loved by James the same as Martha, 8, James, Jr., 5, and Thomas, 3, and Margret’s mother, Sarah Keyes, 70. Mrs. Keyes was in poor health but refused to be separated from her only daughter, and James had his furniture factory build a special two-story wagon to make her comfortable. “Who will take care of her?” the tongues clucked right up to the day we left. “Not Mrs. Reed in her darkened room with her sick headaches. Not the cook, Lizzie, or her brother Baylis, the handyman, they’re a fine pair,she’s deaf and he’s half blind, who else but James Reed takes servants to California?”
    Thirty-two of us left Springfield that fine day, April 16th 1846, seven and a half months ago. One of our drivers, Hiram Miller—who is now one of our hopes—left the party in July to pack-mule to California. Surely he is there and has heard of our plight from James Reed, our biggest hope.
    In high spirits, our little caravan headed toward the “jumping off place,” Independence, Missouri, where we joined a large wagon train California bound. The expected time of arrival after leaving Independence was four months. We thought we would be in California before the leaves changed color back home. And now the leaves have changed and fallen, the winter wheat seeded, turned brown, and already dormant.
    Two months after leaving Springfield, I wrote a letter to my good friend Allen Francis, the editor of the Sangamo Journal . Allen was publishing my letters for those contemplating the trip, and saving them for the book I am planning to write.
    “I never could have believed we could have traveled so far with so little difficulty,” I wrote. “Indeed if I do not experience something far worse than I have yet done, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started.”

December 3rd 1846
    Dear Betsey,
    Georgia Ann Donner turned 5 today.
    George told her five stories, plus one to grow on, and each of her sisters and I gave her six kisses.
    Elitha also gave her a doll. Frances has had a doll, Dolly, since she was a baby, and Georgia has never paid one speck of attention to it until last week. “I want a doll too,” she said and carried on about it until Elitha said, “Hush, Georgia. I’ll make you a doll.”
    Had she had access to more varied material, I know Elitha’s nimble fingers would have produced a prizeworthy doll. She singed and then scraped the hairs off a little piece of oxen hide, wrinkling her nose in distaste through the whole process, and fashioned it into a doll. She inked in hair, but the leather took