The first time was in mid-March 1847, when she learned that rescuers had abandoned her three youngest children at the lake camp. Tamsen Donner made this walk two times, one of them round trip. There was some communication and traffic between the two campsites, teamsters from Alder Creek going back and forth. Roughly half the party survived, half perished. The 60 other members of the party made it seven miles farther west, to Truckee Lake (now Donner Lake). Twenty-one people made it to Alder Creek, a small clearing in the Sierra Nevada, before early snows trapped them from November 1846 to March 1847. The Donner Party, delayed and weakened by a disastrous “shortcut,” left Truckee Meadows - now Reno - in sections. I added to the agenda a seven-mile hike - a retracing of a walk Tamsen Donner took twice - almost as an afterthought. “I just know I’ll miss something,” she said more than once.
#Tamsen kayzer shot 5 times full
The fifth daughter, unable to rearrange a job commitment, was full of regret. Eventually, four daughters decided to join us, as well as four grandchildren, ages 7, 5, 2 and 1 - the carnival aspect moving toward zoo. Their lives are busy, so I tried neither to encourage nor discourage them. My other daughters started talking about it. Then my daughter, seven months pregnant, and her husband decided to come and help bark too.
#Tamsen kayzer shot 5 times Patch
The plan was to set a borrowed picnic table, umbrella and a dozen lawn chairs on a concrete patch next to the museum parking lot, with my husband and brother-in-law barking for me. There was definitely a carnival aspect to my “event,” which involved reading every hour on the hour from 10 a.m. “It’ll be a hoot,” I kept saying, because that seemed likely, although I deeply hoped it would be more than that. I just knew I wanted to read there, where bodies and souls - especially Tamsen Donner’s - were tested in inconceivable ways. I really didn’t think about why it was important. “This means a lot to me,” I said to my husband on the 10-hour drive. Why go to all that trouble? Sure, I thought I’d sell books, but for the same effort, I could have hustled them a lot closer to home.
You have to write a narrative of purpose list your medical, security, traffic, concession and sanitation plans send the processing fee get a mandatory $1 million rider to your insurance policy and promise 10% of any books sold. If you want to hold an “event” in a California state park - a wedding, a rock concert, a reading - there is a 20-page, one-size-fits-all application. The Emigrant Museum, in a state park, was a particular challenge. This summer, I set up gigs in Truckee, Calif., and Reno, as well as at the Emigrant Museum at California’s Donner Pass, to read “Searching for Tamsen Donner” in the heart of Donner Party country. After 36 years of writing about Tamsen Donner and the Donner Party, I sold two books on her: a memoir, “Searching for Tamsen Donner,” and a novel, “Impatient With Desire.”
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