duties to the dead being performed, the cabins, by order of Major Sword, were fired and, with everything surrounding them connected with the horrible and melancholy tragedy, consumed.

The body of (Captain) George Donner was found in his camp about eight miles distant.  He had been carefully laid out by his wife, and a sheet was wrapped around the corpse.  This sad office was probably the last act she performed before visiting the camp of Keseberg.  He was buried by a party of men detailed for that purpose.

I knew the Donners well; their means in money and merchandise which they had brought with them were abundant.  Mr. Donner was a man of about sixty, and was at the time of leaving the United States a highly respectable citizen of Illinois, a farmer of independent means.  Mrs. Donner was considerably younger than her husband, an energetic woman of refined education.

After Georgia left me, I reopened the book, and pondered its revelations, many of them new to us both; and most of them I marked for later investigation.

Bryant found no human bones at Donner’s camp.  His description of that camp was all-important, proving that my father’s body had not been mutilated, but lay in his mountain hut three long months, sacred as when left by my little mother, who had watched over him to the pitiful end, had closed his eyes, folded his arms across his breast, and wrapped the burial sheet about his precious form.  There, too, was proof of his last resting-place, just as had been told me in sight of Jakie’s grave, by the Cherokee woman in Sonoma.

The book had also a copy of Colonel McKinstrey’s letter to the General Relief Committee in San Francisco, reporting the return of the first rescuers with refugees.  In speaking of the destitution of the unfortunates in camp, he used the following words sympathically: 

When the party arrived at camp, it was obliged to guard the little stock of provisions it had carried over the mountains on its back on foot, for the relief of the poor beings, as they were in such a starving condition that they would have immediately used up all the little store.  They even stole the buckskin strings from the party’s snowshoes and ate them.

I at once recognized this friendly paragraph as the one which had had its kindness extracted, and been abbreviated and twisted into that cruel taunt which I had heard in my childhood from the lips of “Picayune Butler.”

A careful study of Bryant’s work increased my desire to sift that of Thornton, for I had been told that it not only contained the “Fallon Diary,” but lengthier extracts from the Star, and I wanted to compare and analyze those details which had been published as “Thrilling Events in California History.”  I was unable to procure the book then, but resolved to do so when opportunity should occur.  Naturally, we who see history made, are solicitous that it be accurately recorded, especially when it vitally concerns those near to us.