find assistance able to bury them in the snow.  Some days earlier Milton Elliot, weak and wandering around, had taken up his abode with us.  We shared with him the remnant of our beef hides.  We had had a lot of that glue-making material.  But mark, it would not sustain life.  Elliot soon starved to death, and neighbors removed and interred the body in the snow beside others.

Catherine Pike, my absent sister’s baby, died on the eighteenth of February, only a few hours before the arrival of the First Relief.  Thus the inmates of our shanty had been reduced to my mother, my sister Mary, brother Simon, Nioma Pike, Georgie Foster, myself, and little Jimmy Eddy.

When the rescuers decided they would carry out Nioma Pike, and that my sister Mary and I should follow, stepping in the tracks made by those who had snowshoes, strength seemed to come, so that I was able to cut and carry to my mother’s shanty what appeared to me a huge pile of wood.  It was green, but it was all I could get.

    We left mother there with three helpless little ones to feed on
    almost nothing, yet in the hope that she might keep them alive until
    the arrival of the next relief.

Many of the survivors remember that after having again eaten food seasoned with salt, the boiled, saltless hides produced nausea and could not be retained by adult or child.

I say with deep reverence that flesh of the dead was used to sustain the living in more than one cabin near the lake.  But it was not used until after the pittance of food left by the First Relief had long been consumed; not until after the wolves had dug the snow from the graves.  Perhaps God sent the wolves to show Mrs. Murphy and also Mrs. Graves where to get sustenance for their dependent little ones.

Both were widows; the one had three, and the other four helpless children to save.  Was it culpable, or cannibalistic to seek and use the only life-saving means left them?  Were the acts and purposes of their unsteady hands and aching hearts less tender, less humane than those of the lauded surgeons of to-day, who infuse human blood from living bodies into the arteries of those whom naught else can save, or who strip skin from bodies that feel pain, to cover wounds which would otherwise prove fatal?

John Baptiste Trubode and Nicholas Clark, of the Second Relief, were the last men who saw my father alive.  In August, 1883, the latter came to my home in San Jose.

This was our second meeting since that memorable morning of March 2, 1847, when he went in pursuit of the wounded mother bear, and was left behind by the relief party.  We spoke long and earnestly of our experience in the mountains, and he wished me to deny the statement frequently made that, “Clark carried a pack of plunder and a heavy shotgun from Donner’s Camp and left a child there to die.”  This I can do positively, for when the Third Relief Party took Simon Murphy and us “three little Donner girls” from the mountain camp, not a living being remained, except Mrs. Murphy and Keseberg at the lake camp, and my father and mother at Donner’s Camp.  All were helpless except my mother.