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A footbridge connected the house to a similarly designed circular tower atop one of the region’s natural oddities: the Rocking Stone, a sixteen-ton, delicately balanced boulder famous for tipping back and forth at the slightest push. In decades past members of the Washoe Indian tribe had stored food at the base of the boulder, whose motion frightened scavenging animals.
    The tower sheltered McGlashan’s extensive collection of twenty thousand butterflies, Indian curios, and artifacts from one of the nation’s most infamous tragedies. During the winter of 1845–1846, several families migrating west got stuck in a blizzard and had to spend months in the freezing mountains near Truckee. Many in this group, known as the Donner Party, died, and before the rest were rescued, the starving survivors resorted toeating the corpses of their family members. McGlashan spent years collecting remnants from the group’s campsites in the nearby mountains and built his house just three miles east of Donner Lake, the scene of the worst months of the tragedy. The museum tower on the Rocking Stone housed many gruesome artifacts, such as the little toe bone of one of the casualties, scavenged from one of the party’s fire pits. Nothing like this incongruous pair of buildings existed anywhere else in the Sierra Nevada.
    For years McGlashan, an imposing figure with a nobly receding hairline and an aggressive stare, had roamed the region on horseback, stopping to chase butterflies for his collection. “Give me a mountain meadow and you can have the metropolises of the world,” he once told a friend. “I would rather chase butterflies on the Truckee meadows than compete for position and fees and fame in any city. Big frog in a little pond? That suits me.”
    However, Charles McGlashan couldn’t help seeking fame and controversy. As a reporter he traveled to Utah to follow up the threads of the much-disputed Mormon Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857. Two decades later he met James F. Breen, a Donner Party survivor, and that encounter set him upon an obsessive, lifelong pursuit of the story of the tragedy, which many in the region considered better forgotten. Lewis Keseberg, the villain of Donner Party lore who had allegedly hastened the deaths of other members of the group, especially intrigued him. Was this man as evil as many people believed?McGlashan tracked down Keseberg in Sacramento, interviewed him, and became convinced of his innocence.
    McGlashan took responsibility for locating the rotted cabins of the Donner Party families. At age thirty-one he wrote History of the Donner Party , an authoritative work based on scores of interviews with the survivors, which remains in print to this day.In the decades that followed, he took charge of an enormous and ultimately successful effort to build a large monument to the Donner victims at the site of one of the cabins. Others may have seen the Donner tragedy as a horror story that leant no distinction to the Sierra region, but to McGlashan it was something more personally important. To him, restoring the sad events of the migrants tocontemporary memory brought distinction to himself and his family, and he took ownership of that calamitous winter. He came to view his research on the events of the Donner Party not just as a groundbreaking interpretation of a human disaster, but as proof of his own worth and achievement. And McGlashan’s descendants accepted this view. Their family’s distinction was wrapped up in the grisly facts of the human catastrophe that had happened so close to their land. The McGlashans ensured that the Donner Party would never be forgotten. In turn, the Donner Party became a foundational element of the McGlashan family identity. It was a powerful, strange, mutual dependence.
    This all-consuming project took a toll on McGlashan’s family. His wife, Nona, disliked his frequent absences and his attachment to his work, which made him distant and tense even when he was home.