"Feb.9.Mrs.Pike's child all but dead; Milton is at Murphy's, not able to get out of bed; Mrs.Eddy and child buried today;wind southeast.
"Feb.10.Beautiful morning; thawing in the sun; Milton Elliott died last night at Murphy's cabin, and Mrs.Reed went there this morning to see about his effects.John Denton trying to borrow meat for Graves; had none to give; they had nothing but hides;all are entirely out of meat, but a little we have; our hides are nearly all eat up, but with God's help spring will soon smile upon us."There was one survivor of the camp at Donner Lake, a man named Lewis Keseberg, of German descent.That he was guilty of repeated cannibalism cannot be doubted.It was in his cabin that, after losing all her loved ones, the heroic Tamsen Donner met her end.
Many thought he killed her for the one horrid purpose.Many years later (1879) Keseberg declared under oath to C.F.
McGlashan that he did not take her life.See "History of the Donner" Party, pp.212, 213.
Such then is the story of one of the great emigrant parties who started West on a hazard of new fortunes in the early days of the Oregon Trail.Happily there has been no parallel to the misadventures of this ill-fated caravan.It is difficult --without reading these, bald and awful details-- to realize the vast difference between that day and this.Today we may by the gentle stages of a pleasant railway journey arrive at Donner Lake.Little trace remains, nor does any kindly soul wish for more definite traces, of those awful scenes.Only a cross here and there with a legend, faint and becoming fainter every year, may be seen, marking the more prominent spots of the historic starving camp.
Up on the high mountain side, for the most part hid in the forest, lie the snowsheds and tunnels of the railway, now encountering its stiffest climb up the steep slopes to the summit of the Sierras.The author visited this spot of melancholy history in company with the vice-president of the great railway line which here swings up so steadily and easily over the Sierras.Bit by bit we checked out as best we might the fateful spots mentioned in the story of the Donner Party.A splendid motor highway runs by the lakeside now.While we halted our own car there, a motor car drove up from the westward--following that practical automobile highway which now exists from the plains of California across the Sierras and east over precisely that trail where once the weary feet of the oxen dragged the wagons of the early emigrants.It was a small car of no expensive type.It was loaded down with camping equipment until the wheels scarcely could be seen.It carried five human occupants--an Iowa farmer and his family.They had been out to California for a season.
Casually they had left Los Angeles, had traveled north up the valleys of California, east across the summit of the Sierras, and were here now bound for Iowa over the old emigrant trail!
We hailed this new traveler on the old trail.I do not know whether or not he had any idea of the early days of that great highway; I suspect that he could tell only of its present motoring possibilities.But his wheels were passing over the marks left more than half a century ago by the cracked felloes of the emigrant wagons going west in search of homes.If we seek history, let us ponder that chance pause of the eastbound family, traveling by motor for pleasure, here by the side of the graves of the travelers of another day, itself so briefly gone.
What an epoch was spanned in the passing of that frontier!
