[Illustration:  Photograph by Lynwood Abbott.  ALDER CREEK]

[Illustration:  DENNISON’S EXCHANGE AND THE PARKER HOUSE, SAN FRANCISCO]

Those were the only babes that perished before relief came.  Does not the fact that so many young children survived the disaster refute the charges of parental selfishness and inhumanity, and emphasize the immeasurable self-sacrifice, love, and care that kept so many of the little ones alive through that long, bitter siege of starvation?

Mrs. Elinor Eddy, who passed away in the Murphy cabin on the seventh of February, was the only wife and mother called by death, in either camp, before the arrival of the First Relief.  Both Patrick Breen’s diary and William G. Murphy, then a lad of eleven years, assert that Mrs. Eddy and little Margaret, her only daughter, were buried in the snow near the Murphy cabin on the ninth of February.  Furthermore, the Breen Diary and the death-list of the Donner Party show that not a husband or father died at the Lake Camp during the entire period of the party’s imprisonment in the mountains.[23]

How, then, could that First Relief, or either of the other relief parties see—­how could they even have imagined that they saw—­“wife sitting at the side of her husband who had just died, mutilating his body,” or “the daughter eating her father,” or “mother that of her children,” or “children that of father and mother”?  The same questions might be asked regarding the other revolting scenes pictured by the Star.

The seven men who first braved the dangers of the icy trail in the work of rescue came over a trackless, ragged waste of snow, varying from ten to forty feet in depth,[24] and approached the camp-site near the lake at sunset.  They halloed, and up the snow steps came those able to drag themselves to the surface.  When they descended into those cabins, they found no cheering lights.  Through the smoky atmosphere, they saw smouldering fires, and faced conditions so appalling that words forsook them; their very souls were racked with agonizing sympathy.  There were the famine-stricken and the perishing, almost as wasted and helpless as those whose sufferings had ceased.  Too weak to show rejoicing, they could only beg with quivering lips and trembling hands, “Oh, give us something to eat!  Give us something to drink!  We are starving!”

True, their hands were grimy, their clothing tattered, and the floors were bestrewn with hair from hides and bits of broken bullock bones; but of connubial, parental, or filial inhumanity, there were no signs.

With what deep emotion those seven heroic men contemplated the conditions in camp may be gathered from Mr. Aguilla Glover’s own notes, published in Thornton’s work: 

    Feb. 19, 1847.  The unhappy survivors were, in short, in a condition
    most deplorable, and beyond power of language to describe, or
    imagination to conceive.