Searching for Tamsen Donner

Tamsen Donner. For most the name conjures the ill-fated Donner party trapped in the snows of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 184647. Others might know Tamsen as the stoic pioneer woman who saw her children to safety but stayed with her dying husband at the cost of her own life. For Gabrielle Burton, Tamsens story, fascinating in its own right, had long seemed something more: the story of a womans life writ large, one whose impossible balancing of self, motherhood, and marriage spoke to Burtons own experience. This book tells of Burtons search to solve the mystery of Tamsen Donner for herself. A graceful mingling of history and memoir, Searching for Tamsen Donner follows Burton and her husband, with their five daughters, on her journey along Tamsens path. From Tamsens birthplace in Massachusetts to North Carolina, where she lost her first family in the space of three months; to Illinois, where she married George Donner; and finally to the fateful Oregon Trail, Burton recovers one womans compelling history through a modern-day familys adventures into realms of ultimately timeless experiences. Here Burton has also, for the first time, collected and published together all seventeen of Tamsens known letters.