Gabrielle Burton has a bit of an obsession with Tamsen Donner, who was the wife of George Donner and a prominent member of the eponymous and tragic Donner Party of 1846. In 1977, as part of her research for a novel she plans to write, Gabrielle packs her husband and five daughters into their station wagon and sets off from Illinois to retrace the steps of Tamsen Donner on her fateful journey West, passing the same landmarks, sleeping where Tamsen slept, and attempting to view the landscape, over 100 years later, through the eyes of those early pioneers.

I especially enjoyed the Burton family's own travelogue chapters, reminiscent of some other travel adventure memoirs I've read, but I think I wished that it the rest had been fleshed out more, and for that reason I struggled with whether to rate it three or four stars. Regardless, it sounds like Gabrielle Burton has an amazing family dynamic and five strong, confident, incredible, kick-ass daughters. ( )

"Travel. An accumulation of mysteries, small and large. Glimpses into people's lives that sometimes . . . rock your world violently, more often shift it ever so slightly." Clearly, Tamsen Donner's journey west with her husband and five daughters was a far more violent rocking than Gabrielle's Burton retracing of her path 130 years later, with her own husband and five daughters. But Burton’s journey is a pilgrimage, and her recounting of it and the years that surrounded it, some 30 years later, weaves the histories of two women who embraced their roles as wives and mothers, and also asked far more of themselves and their worlds.

Burton recreates Tamsen Donner’s extraordinary life before and during the tragic wagon trip that resulted in the death of her husband, herself, and several other members of their party, legendary for the cannibalism that ensued when the stranded company was on the verge of starvation during heavy snows in the Sierra Nevada. Tamsen Donner could have survived; she sent her daughters ahead with a rescue party while she stayed with her husband, mortally wounded by an infection from an earlier cut to his hand. She stayed with him until he died, then frantically made her way on foot to her children. She died on the way, after encountering another member of the party. Her decision not to leave her husband to die alone seems less foolhardy when you know, as Burton recounts, that Tamsen Donner had already lost one entire family – husband, young son, unborn daughter – to illness.

No less significant of a trek is Burton's own journey through the personal and political aspects of the 1960s and 70s, from an Easter Sunday epiphany in 1967 that the Viet Nam war was wrong and must be opposed, to her participation in women’s liberation meetings and demonstrations, to her acceptance of herself, finally, as a writer. “I kept writing one thing or another day after day, until some unnoticed day when I automatically identified myself as a ‘writer’ without feeling a poseur about to be unmasked or laughed at. Had I thought of writing as a profession . . . I might have saved myself and my family a lot of grief; instead I flogged myself from paragraph to paragraph, always feeling I should have been further along than I was.”

Burton writes about the roles of her daughters and husband in her literal and metaphoric travels. She notes that on the Oregon Trail trip (and on other family trips), the entire family kept journals; it would have been fascinating to include some entries from the daughters’ journals to understand the journeys from their points of view. But the strength of the Burton family and their support for Gabrielle's explorations, as well as the centrality of her husband's and daughters' involvement in Gabrielle's life, is truly inspiring.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. When I heard this book recommended, I wasn't sold on the idea of intermixing the story of Tamsen Donner (of Donner Party fame) and the author's recreated trip across the Oregon Trail with her family in the 70s. But I found it completely engrossing. ( )

I read this based on a friend's recommendation. As a working mother, I struggle every day with trying to keep a sense of myself, of adventure, and of keeping a family thriving all together and individually. Most of the time, I feel like I'm barely treading water. And that's pretty much every mom's feeling I know (whether they work in a job outside the home or only at home). It's really tough for women, and on one hand, I found it so inspiring and moving that Burton is able to capture that struggle in a way that is completely relatable, and also sympathetic. At the same time, I found it sobering/depressing that she struggled with the same issues 20+ years ago... That said, she writes beautifully and eloquently with a simplicity of style that felt like the pages were breathing. The space of the west opening up as she and her family followed the Donner trail also opening on the page as I read along. I don't really understand HOW she and her husband did it with FIVE kids. (!) And it's a great parallel to follow the Donner Party, with Tamsen Donner's five kids also. The history is so interesting, it doesn't feel like a history book, but that's really what this is. A history of the U.S. expansion of into the west by pioneer settlers, and a history of modern American women. The parallel struggles are fascinating, and the capturing of a part of America in the 1970s -- and its pre-strip-mall history -- is also a lovely achievement. ( )