I get asked often why I chose Mary Ann Graves as my main character in the novel I wrote about the Donner Party. I knew right away that unlike in Caminar, I wanted to use an actual person. I didn’t want to make up any characters in this book. In my early perusings of Donner Party material, I read that Mary was called “the belle of the Donner Party.” And then I saw her photo.
It’s haunting and captivating and mesmerizing. There was something about her eyes that pulled me in; something about her eyes that looked a little…off.
I read that she suffered from “snow blindness” after the winter of 1846. It was difficult for her to read and write after that. Her eyes were never the same. She could never again make tears.
She could never again make tears.
That is so powerful both physically and emotionally.
I read more about her family and found them all so interesting. Her brother-in-law who chose to follow a girl, make her his bride, and move west, leaving his family behind. Her father. Adventurous, preferer of his own space, liked to go barefoot, big messy beard. Her mother—tough as nails. Smart. Generous. I knew the Graves’ family was it for me.
And the “belle of the Donner Party.” I had so many questions about her. Why would they call her that? Surely not just because she was pretty. I feel like there would have been more to it than that. Something in her personality to have earned her that name. People who risked their lives and journeyed west in 1846 to emigrate to a brand new place wouldn’t have considered the prettiest girl to necessarily be the most eligible bachelorette. Was she flirtatious? Hard-working? Capable? Coy? Witty? A fantastic cook? What caused her to have this reputation?
Did she have some kind of romance going on with John Snyder? Well, even if she didn’t, it’s the kind of thing people would assume. He’s not far from her age; she’s of marriageable age; they’re traveling together…
What about Charles Stanton? On the one hand, we have no “proof”, but realistically, what kind of proof could we have anyway? The fact that he, a bachelor, came all the way back with help and supplies would suggest he was a super honorable man or that he has some attachment to someone in the group. Possibly both.
I didn’t write about other characters—other possible romances. But there were certainly lots of possibilities. The Graves family traveled with another large caravan from St. Joseph to Ft. Laramie. Many young men were around her age. And it was during a less stressful part of their journey. No one was starving or dying. There were group campfires at night with music and celebration. She surely had many a flirtatious conversation, more than one dance around a fire. Who knows.
I spent a lot of time thinking about Mary Ann and her romantic possibilities. To be called the “belle” of the party would suggest she was a catch—which begs the question at age nineteen, Why hadn’t she already married?
In early drafts of the story I decided perhaps she’d had a beau, an offer, back in Lacon. But unlike Jay, this guy didn’t want to head west. And Mary couldn’t say good-bye to her family or the promise of California or possibly both.
That may have happened. Who knows.
But, if I’m being honest, what solidified my choice to go with her as a main character was really this one interesting part of her story that doesn’t even make it into my novel. After she’d recuperated at Sutter’s Fort for a few months, she married a young man by the name of Edward Pyle. Pyle was one of the many men that made rescue trips into the mountain that winter to bring people out to the fort. A year after their marriage, Edward went missing. He was missing for a full year before his body was found. A year later, his murderer was caught and arrested. Mary is said to have cooked meals for him while he was awaiting execution. When asked why she was doing that, she reportedly answered, “So that he will live long enough to be hanged.”
Well, I couldn’t not write about her after reading that.
Mary Ann Graves was an intriguing person, a captivating character. The mystery if her intrigues me still.