he urged:  “What is the use of making a statement?  People incline to believe the most horrible reports concerning a man; they will not credit what I say in my own defence.  My conscience is clear.  I am an old man, and am calmly awaiting my death.  God is my judge, and it long ago ceased to trouble me that people shunned and slandered me.”

He finally consented to make the desired statement, and in speaking of your family he continued:  “Some time after Mrs. George Donner’s death, I thought I had gained sufficient strength to redeem the pledge I had made her before her death.  I went to Alder Creek Camp to get the money.  I had a difficult journey.  The wagons of the Donners were loaded with tobacco, powder, caps, school-books, shoes, and dry goods.  This stock was very valuable.  I spent the night there, searched carefully among the bales and bundles of goods, and found five hundred and thirty-one dollars.  Part of this sum was gold, part silver.  The silver I buried at the foot of a pine tree, a little way from camp.  One of the lower branches of another tree reached down close to the ground, and appeared to point to the spot.  I put the gold in my pocket, and started back to my cabin; got lost, and in crossing a little flat the snow suddenly gave way, and I sank down almost to my arm-pits.  After great exertion I raised myself out of a snow-covered stream, and went round on a hillside and continued my journey.  At dark, and completely exhausted, and almost dead, I came in sight of the Graves’s cabin, and sometime after dark staggered into my own.  My clothes were wet, and the night was so cold that my garments were frozen stiff.  I did not build a fire nor get anything to eat, just rolled myself up in the bed-clothes, and shivered; finally fell asleep, and did not waken until late in the morning.  Then I saw my camp was in most inexplicable confusion; everything about the cabin was torn up and scattered about, trunks broken open; and my wife’s jewellery, my cloak, my pistol and ammunition was missing.  I thought Indians had been there.  Suddenly I heard human voices.  I hurried up to the surface of the snow, and saw white men approaching.  I was overwhelmed with joy and gratitude.  I had suffered so much and so long, that I could scarcely believe my senses.  Imagine my astonishment upon their arrival to be greeted, not with a ‘Good-morning’ or a kind word, but with a gruff, insolent demand, ‘Where is Donner’s money?’

“I told them they ought to give me something to eat, and that I would talk with them afterwards; but no, they insisted that I should tell them about Donner’s money.  I asked who they were, and where they came from, but they replied by threatening to kill me if I did not give up the money.  They threatened to hang or shoot me.  At last I told them that I had promised Mrs. Donner that I would carry her money to her children, and I proposed to do so, unless shown some authority by which they had a better claim.