Frequent University of Nebraska Press blog contributor Kate Flaherty recently read The Blue Tattoo by Margot Mifflin and Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton. The two books — both invovling journeys west gone awry — are among her favorite UNP titles this season. Read on:

How to Have a Roadtrip Without Leaving the Couch, by Kate Flaherty

My favorite offerings from Nebraska this spring are The Blue Tattoo by Margot Mifflin and Searching for Tamsen Donner by Gabrielle Burton. While both books are different in scope—the first is a biography, the other more of a biography intertwined with memoir—the similarities between them are striking, and not just because they both look at the role of pioneer women in mid-1800s America. I was particularly captivated by how each author dispels myths and misconceptions in order to better understand the complex realities of these women’s lives in the west.

In The Blue Tattoo, Margot Mifflin deftly traces the amazing history of Olive Oatman, who at thirteen was part of an ill-fated Mormon pilgrimage to California when most of her family, including her parents, were massacred by Yavapai Indians in what is now the American southwest. Taken captive by the Yavapai, Olive was then traded to the Mohave who took her in as one of their own. She lived as a Mohave and spoke their language, ultimately assimilating into the tribe so deeply she was given a chin tattoo just like other young Mohave women and, Mifflin believes, freely underwent a sexual initiation as well. When Oatman is finally “rescued” Mifflin shows how after grieving the loss of her first family following the massacre, Oatman must deal with the loss of her second family, as she is taken from the Mohave and thrust overnight back into the white pioneer world.

Mifflin’s account of Oatman’s life with the Mohave and her subsequent career as a writer and lecturer, touring the country to tell the story of her “captivity,” is fascinating. Mifflin uncovers the ways in which Oatman was convinced by an opportunistic and imbalanced preacher to reinvent her history—excluding her sexual activity and her happy family life with the Mohave in order to fit the religious and political expectations of whites in the 19th century. Oatman had no other choice if she were to survive in the white world as a woman, because she had no husband or parents to care for her, and she had been forever branded as an outsider.

Tamsen Donner, like Olive Oatman, also was part of an ill-fated journey west in the mid-1800s. Wife of George Donner, she was part of the infamous Donner Party that was trapped in the brutal cold of the Sierra Nevada Mountains after taking an ill-advised shortcut. Burton’s research reveals that amidst the sensational tales of thievery, starvation, murder, and cannibalism, Tamsen is usually portrayed as heroic, sending her children on to safety as she remains to tend to her husband before dying herself.

But Burton’s retelling of the Tamsen Donner story is like no other, because she weaves Tamsen’s story with her own story of bringing her entire family on a Donner “research vacation” during the summer of 1977. And Burton doesn’t travel light—her wagon (a station wagon of course) is packed full of tent, sleeping bags, coolers, clothes, pillows, books, camera and journals—enough for her and her entire family—five daughters plus one amazingly supportive husband.

Burton and her family cross the country so Burton can interview writers, librarians, local history buffs, and stop at every point of interest, every gravestone and museum and historical marker, that might have some tangential connection to the Donner party. That premise alone is grand enough, but Burton continually reminds the reader that even though she tells everyone around her that she is, indeed, a writer, and even though she demands the time and respect and consideration due to a writer, she is operating entirely on speculation and chutzpah. She has no publications, no book contract, no paying writing job or grant that might somehow validate her ambitions and her (admittedly) sometimes shaky belief in herself. Burton’s writing career, like her burgeoning feminism, is still new territory in 1977, and the whole family is figuring it out as they go along.

Burton compares her soul-searching with what little she has from Tamsen Donner’s own writing, what few facts she has to go on about Tamsen Donner’s own chutzpah and determination to make a better life for her family. The risks Burton takes might not have been as life threatening as those Tamsen Donner faced, but they were real. By following her own dreams and by insisting on the support of her family, Burton was taking a huge risk. What if she failed as a writer? What if she was wrong about her ambitions, her destiny? What would her family, her daughters, think? In Searching for Tamsen Donner, Burton also is searching for the kind of example she wants to set for her own daughters on what it means to be an independent woman in the modern world, especially when that “independence” does not exclude family, children, and responsibility and care for others.

Both of these stories are amazing on so many different levels; they are terrific reads, imbued with rich details and lively narrative and they also provide a more complex picture of western expansion and the price that women, in particular, paid.

If reading these stories (or this review) makes you pine for more tales of traveling west, here are two more titles from Nebraska that might drive you to hop in the car (or on the bike) for some spring or summer reading and roadtripping:

Why Sacagawea Deserves the Day Off and Other Lessons from the Lewis and Clark Trail by Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs. If you’re asking, “Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs? Is she related to—?” the answer is yes, she is historian Stephen Ambrose’s daughter, and in part these essays are about Stephenie being dragged by her dad on “research vacations” along the Lewis and Clark trail (much like those Burton girls). But Stephenie falls in love with the trail herself—and not just its history, but also its present-time, non-historical people and places—proving that western exploration and discovery is a continuous and ever-changing process.

Another great western exploration tale is Dale Farmer’s memoir Bicycling Beyond the Divide, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. If you’re not a hardcore cycle enthusiast, fear not. When he began his bike trip, Dale wasn’t either—in his early forties and out of shape, he decides to retrace a bicycle trip he’d taken twenty years earlier, riding from Colorado to the west coast, hoping to rediscover the west and reconnect with himself. Does Dale get in shape and buy a top-of-the-line touring bike and fancy bike shorts and one of those Lance Armstrong yellow jerseys? Nope. He will get in shape along the way and do his best to keep his twenty-year-old bike in one piece as well. 

Dale shares the adventures he encounters and the stories he uncovers with such detail and care that we can visualize each small town café he eats in, each campfire he sleeps by, each cold beer that slides down his throat at day’s end. We feel his loneliness on the road and his despair at how much in the west has changed for the worse, but ultimately we also see the hope that he finds in those who help him along the way, proving there is much that hasn’t changed, especially a genuine spirit of freedom—as well as kindness toward strangers (from some people at least)—still alive in the western frontier.

Kate Flaherty is a freelance writer living in Winchester, Massachusetts and editor, with Hilda Raz, of Best of Prairie Schooner: Personal Essays.