Read Chapter 4 from Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton:

"1841 was the first year that families went on the Oregon Trail. Before that, when men went off alone into the wilderness, it was only adventure, but when men, women, and children went, they were making a civilization. After that first covered wagon went West in 1841, a few more families went every year, but 1846, the year the Donners went, was "the year of the families," with twelve hundred men, women, and children going in wagons to Oregon, fifteen hundred to California.

1977 turned out to be "the year of the family" for me.

Although I still occasionally rode my motorcycle, I had eliminated the cross-country trip from my talk and my possibilities years before. But my desire to check the historical and modern routes for my novel grew stronger. I wanted geographical details. Atmosphere. A sense of the time it took to get from one place to the other. I still felt compelled to retrace Tamsen Donner's steps.

If I was too chicken to go alone on the motorcycle, all seven of us would have to go in Big Red, our nine-passenger Chevrolet Impala station wagon. I never thought of any other possibility. There weren't any other possibilities. Who would take care of the children? If I had gone alone, Roger would have. I couldn't go alone, so everyone had to come with me. But going with my family automatically turned the venture into a different kind of trip and, in my heart, was an admission of personal failure.

Before we started, I made it clear to the children about a hundred times a day that the Oregon Trail trip was a trip for me, my work trip. Some things were givens. They couldn't complain. Bickering wasn't allowed. Flexibility was expected. (I was rigid about that.)

Roger and I laid it all out. It'll be hot, you'll get tired, bored. No No No we won't. You will you will you will, and you still can't complain.

Throughout the preparations, setting the pattern for every future trip we'd take, we went through a solemn, dead-serious, and perfectly ridiculous ritual: if you want to come on this trip, you have to swear to do all the above, and this, and this, and this. . . . They swore. Maria was 14, Jennifer, 12, Ursula, 10, Gabriella, 7, Charity, 5. Surely Maria, Jennifer, and Ursula knew—though they were smart enough not to mention it—that there wouldn't be any trip if they didn't go, because we'd be home taking care of them.

Another equally obvious fact to any sentient being is that with five children along, no trip was going to be just for me. Desire wears thick glasses, and I was determined to make the trip mine, if only by saying it over and over. Even though they were kids, they were going to be the Perfect Invisible Companions. I had facts buttressing my delusion.

I knew they wanted to go and would monitor/police each other.

They knew Roger and I could and would hold their solemn pledge over their heads.

They knew that we asked a lot of them, but always tried to be fair.

Although Charity at age 5 was still struggling with some of the finer points, all the Burton children were feminists and proud of it. They had marched in the great Women's Liberation marches, had stood up in their classrooms for years against sexism. They thought my work, and my right to work, were both important, and they would do their best to respect that. They knew how much the Donner Party and the novel they had grown up with meant to me; "central to you," Jennifer said years later, "it became central to us." They wanted me to be happy. In a very real way, and I don't mean vicariously or altruistically, my happiness was theirs. They shared my disappointments, saw my unacknowledged depression up close, and definitely preferred sharing my triumphs. Except for the feminist philosophy, directly taught, all the rest of this close identification was unspoken, its unhealthy aspects not yet known.

For better and for worse, we were a unit: Roger, the children, I, my work, the Donner Party linked together.

So in the summer of 1977, for less honorable reasons, I started crosscountry the way Tamsen Donner had, with my husband and five daughters. We would be gone from July 2 to September 1. A family of seven in a car for two months covering nearly five thousand miles: not very deep down, I was afraid that, in a less dramatic way than the Donners', the trip would be a disaster."

Gabrielle Burton is a writer whose numerous projects include the film Manna from Heaven, which she wrote and produced, and the novel Heartbreak Hotel, which won Scribner’s 1985 Maxwell Perkins Prize, an award for a first work of fiction. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. She lives in Venice, California.

To read another excerpt or to purchase Searching for Tamsen Donner, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Searching-for-Tamsen-Donner,674054.aspx.