Gabrielle Burton dies at 76; feminist writer shed new light on the Donner Party

Gabrielle Burton, a feminist writer whose work shed new light on Tamsen Donner, a leader of the ill-fated Donner Party, has died at her home in Venice at the age of 76.

The cause of Burton’s Sept. 3 death was pancreatic cancer, her family said in a statement.

Burton was so intrigued with the Donner Party that she traced the group’s path with her husband and children in 1977. Their road trip started in Springfield, Ill., ended on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada and resulted in a piquant 2009 account called “Searching for Tamsen Donner.”

The next year, Burton came out with “Impatient With Desire” — the fictional memoir of Tamsen Donner based on her 17 surviving letters and accounts by the expedition’s survivors.

Notorious for eating their dead to fend off starvation, the tattered Donner Party was rescued in 1847. Tamsen stayed behind with her dying husband, George Donner. Her body was never found.

Maureen Corrigan, a book reviewer for NPR, called Burton’s two Tamsen books “a very good novel and an extraordinary, must-read memoir.”

In interviews, Burton said she felt a kinship with Tamsen, who also had five daughters and was restlessly independent. In “Impatient With Desire,” Burton painted her not as an obedient wife but as a pioneer driven by her own wanderlust.

“Most of all,” she told the Buffalo News, her novel is “a love story about two people who, as much as possible in an unequal world, achieve a ‘marriage of equals.’”

Born in Lansing, Mich., on Feb. 21, 1939, Burton attended Marygrove College in Detroit and was an early advocate for the women’s movement. In 1972, she published a book about consciousness-raising called “I’m Running Away From Home but I’m Not Allowed to Cross the Street.”

Burton’s daughters formed a film production company called Five Sisters, and in 2001 they produced their mother’s screenplay “Manna From Heaven.” The low-budget film, about a family’s struggle with unexpected good fortune, attracted Hollywood veterans Jill Eikenberry, Cloris Leachman and Louise Fletcher.

Burton’s survivors include Roger, her husband of 53 years; daughters Maria, Jennifer, Ursula, Gabrielle and Charity; and eight grandchildren.

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