The emigrants had not yet commenced eating the dead.  Many of the sufferers had been living on bullock hides for weeks and even that sort of food was so nearly exhausted that they were about to dig up from the snow the bodies of their companions for the purpose of prolonging their wretched lives.

Thornton’s work contains the following statement by a member of one of the relief corps: 

On the morning of February 20,[25] Racine Tucker, John Rhodes, and Riley Moutrey went to the camp of George Donner eight miles distant, taking a little jerked beef.  These sufferers (eighteen) had but one hide remaining.  They had determined that upon consuming this they would dig from the snow the bodies of those who had died from starvation.  Mr. Donner was helpless, Mrs. Donner was weak but in good health, and might have come to the settlement with this party; yet she solemnly but calmly determined to remain with her husband and perform for him the last sad offices of affection and humanity.  And this she did in full view that she must necessarily perish by remaining behind.  The three men returned the same day with seven refugees[26] from Donner Camp.

John Baptiste Trubode has distinct recollections of the arrival and departure of Tucker’s party, and of the amount of food left by it.

He said to me in that connection: 

“To each of us who had to stay in camp, one of the First Relief Party measured a teacupful of flour, two small biscuits, and thin pieces of jerked beef, each piece as long as his first finger, and as many pieces as he could encircle with that first finger and thumb brought together, end to end.  This was all that could be spared, and was to last until the next party could reach us.

“Our outlook was dreary and often hopeless.  I don’t know what I would have done sometimes without the comforting talks and prayers of those two women, your mother and Aunt Elizabeth.  Then evenings after you children went to sleep, Mrs. George Donner would read to me from the book[27] she wrote in every day.  If that book had been saved, every one would know the truth of what went on in camp, and not spread these false tales.

“I dug in the snow for the dead cattle, but found none, and we had to go back to our saltless old bullock hide, days before the Second Relief got to us, on the first of March.”

[Footnote 19:  Died while in the mountain camps.]

[Footnote 20:  Died en route over the mountains to the settlements in California.]

[Footnote 21:  Report brought by John Baptiste to Donner’s Camp, after one of his trips to the lake.]

[Footnote 22:  Incident related by William C. Graves, after he reached the settlement.]

[Footnote 23:  Franklin W. Graves and Jay Fosdick perished in December, 1846, while en route to the settlement with the Forlorn Hope.]

[Footnote 24:  One of the stumps near the Breen-Graves cabin, cut for fuel while the snow was deepest, was found by actual measurement to be twenty-two feet in height.  It is still standing.]