Book Review

I am halfway through the book, The Indifferent Stars Above, the depressing but fascinating,well-written account of a new bride, twenty-one year old Sarah Graves, a member of the wagon train led by George Donner in 1847. Here's an excerpt from page 80:

Increasingly, the emigrants' worries and arguments concerned grass. Grass was the gasoline of the mid-nineteenth century. It fueled the engines that propelled them forward, their oxen. As the country dried out, it was harder and harder to find sufficient grass for pasturage every night. As the grass grew sparser, it became ever more important to conserve what energy the oxen had, and the only way to do that was to lighten the loads they had to pull. All along the trail, people started to throw things overboard--things they had thought essential when they'd packed their wagons back home or in St. Joe or Independence. Among the first to go were the heaviest things--cook stoves, extra pots and pans, iron tools, and hardware. Then furniture was thrown overboard--chest of drawers, rocking chairs, bed frames, and tables. Finally, as the oxen began to heave and strain on the longest, driest hills approaching the South Pass, even smaller items had to go--extra clothes, books, linens, nonessential food items.

The sacrifices were often hard to make, not always logical, and not always voluntary. An Oregon-bound emigrant of that year, eleven-year-old Lucy Ann Henderson, watched in amused astonishment as one of the adults in her party was told he had to part with a rolling pin.

I shall never forget how that big man stood there with tears streaming down his face as he said, "Do I have to throw this away? It was my mother's. I remember she always used it to roll our her biscuits, and they were awfully good biscuits." He had to leave it, and they christened him Rolling Pin Smith, a name he carried to the day of his death.