Impatient with Desire: The Lost Journal of Tamsen Donner

The Donner Party

You know how some died.

Here’s how some lived.

“My heart is big with hope and impatient with desire.”

—Tamsen Donner, a letter to her sister

In the spring of 1846, Tamsen Donner, her husband, George, their five daughters, and eighty other pioneers headed west on the California-Oregon Trail in eager anticipation of new lives in California. Everything that could go wrong did, and an American legend was born.

The Donner Party. We think we know their story—starving pioneers trapped in the mountains performing an unspeakable act to survive—but we know only that one harrowing part of it. Impatient with Desire brings to stunning life a woman—and a love story—behind the myth. Historians have long known that Tamsen kept a journal, though it was never found. In Impatient with Desire, Burton imagines this lost journal—and paints a picture of a remarkable heroine in an extraordinary situation.