The language employed in description seemed to us so coarse and brutal that we could not forgive its injustice to the living, and to the memory of the dead.  We could but feel that had simple facts been stated, there would have been no harrowing criticism on account of long unburied corpses found in the lake cabins.  Nor would the sight of mutilated dead have suggested that the starving survivors had become “gloating cannibals, preying on the bodies of their companions.”  Bare facts would have shown that the living had become too emaciated, too weak, to dig graves, or to lift or drag the dead up the narrow snow steps, even had open graves awaited their coming.  Aye, more, would have shown conclusively that mutilation of the bodies of those who had perished was never from choice, never cannibalistic, but dire necessity’s last resort to ease torturing hunger, to prevent loss of reason, to save life.  Loss of reason was more dreaded than death by the starving protectors of the helpless.

Fair statements would also have shown that the First Relief reached the camps with insufficient provision to meet the pressing needs of the unfortunate.  Consequently, it felt the urgency of haste to get as many refugees as possible to Bear Valley before storms should gather and delays defeat the purpose of its coming; that it divided what it could conscientiously spare among those whom it was obliged to leave, cut wood for the fires, and endeavored to give encouragement and hope to the desponding, but did not remain long enough to remove or bury the dead.

Each succeeding party actuated by like anxieties and precautions, departed with its charges, leaving pitiable destitution behind; leaving mournful conditions in camp,—­conditions attributable as much to the work of time and atmospheric agencies as to the deplorable expedients to which the starving were again and again reduced.

With trembling hand Georgia turned the pages, from the sickening details of the Star[18] to the personal observations of Edwin Bryant, who in returning to the United States in the Summer of 1847, crossed the Sierra Nevadas with General Kearney and escort, reached the lake cabins June 22, and wrote as follows: 

A halt was called for the purpose of interring the remains.  Near the principal lake cabin I saw two bodies entire, except the abdomens had been cut open and entrails extracted.  Their flesh had been either wasted by famine or evaporated by exposure to dry atmosphere, and presented the appearance of mummies.  Strewn around the cabins were dislocated and broken skulls (in some instances sawed asunder with care for the purpose of extracting the brains).  Human skeletons, in short, in every variety of mutilation.  A more appalling spectacle I never witnessed.  The remains were, by order of General Kearney, collected and buried under supervision of Major Sword.  They were interred in a pit dug in the centre of one of the cabins for a cache.  These melancholy