esolation was presented to the inmates of Starved
Camp during the next three days! It stormed incessantly. One who has
not witnessed a storm on the Sierra can not imagine the situation. A
quotation from Bret Harte's "Gabriel Conroy" will afford the best idea
of the situation:

"Snow. Everywhere. As far as the eye could reach fifty miles, looking
southward from the highest white peak. Filling ravines and gulches,
and dropping from the walls of canyons in white shroud-like drifts,
fashioning the dividing ridge into the likeness of a monstrous grave,
hiding the bases of giant pines, and completely covering young trees
and larches, rimming with porcelain the bowl-like edges of still, cold
lakes, and undulating in motionless white billows to the edge of the
distant horizon. Snow lying everywhere on the California Sierra, and
still falling. It had been snowing in finely granulated powder, in
damp, spongy flakes, in thin, feathery plumes; snowing from a leaden sky
steadily, snowing fiercely, shaken out of purple-black clouds in white
flocculent masses, or dropping in long level lines like white lances
from the tumbled and broken heavens. But always silently! The woods were
so choked with it, it had so cushioned and muffled the ringing rocks
and echoing hills, that all sound was deadened. The strongest gust, the
fiercest blast, awoke no sigh or complaint from the snow-packed,
rigid files of forest. There was no cracking of bough nor crackle of
underbrush; the overladen branches of pine and fir yielded and gave away
without a sound. The silence was vast, measureless, complete!"

In alluding to these terrible days, in his diary, Mr. Reed says, under
date of March 6:

"With the snow there is a perfect hurricane. In the night there is a
great crying among the children, and even with the parents there is
praying, crying, and lamentation on account of the cold and the dread
of death from hunger and the howling storm. The men up nearly all night
making fires. Some of the men began praying. Several of them became
blind. I could not see the light of the fire blazing before me, nor tell
when it was burning. The light of heaven is, as it were, shut out from
us. The snow blows so thick and fast that we can not see twenty feet
looking against the wind. I dread the coming night. Three of my men
only, able to get wood. The rest have given out for the present. It
is still snowing, and very cold. So cold that the few men employed
in cutting