drag our weary feet on, for ten
long miles, when we reached the Jacob Donner wagons. The family were
all asleep inside, so we lay down on the ground under the protecting
shadow of the family wagon. A bitter wind was howling across the
desert, and it so chilled us that we crept close together, and if all
five of our dogs had not snuggled up close to us, warming us with the
heat from their big bodies, we would probably had died from cold.

"At dawn father rushed off to find his cattle, but in vain. He met the
drivers, who told him that as the frenzied beasts were being driven
toward the wells, they had broken loose and been lost in the darkness.
At once all the men of the company turned out to help father to search
for them, but none were ever found except one ox and a cow, and in
that plight we were left stranded on the desert, eight hundred miles
from California! To turn back to Fort Bridger was an impossibility--to
go forward meant such hardship as blanched even my sun-reddened
cheeks, and I shuddered at the thought that mother must live through
greater privations than those we had already encountered. Well it was
that the future was hidden from our eyes on that day in the desert!

"Two oxen were loaned father, which, yoked together with our one cow
and ox, would draw one wagon, but not the family one, which had grown
to be so home-like to us in our journeyings. It was decided to dig a
trench, and _cache_ all of our things except those which we could take
in the one wagon. A _cache_ is made by digging a hole in the ground
and sinking in it the bed of a wagon, in which articles are packed;
the hole is then covered with boards and earth, so they are completely
hidden, and when we buried ours we hoped some day to return and take
them away."

Having _cached_ so many of their treasures, on the party went as
bravely as possible until they reached Gravelly Ford on the Humboldt,
where on the 5th of October there was such a tragic occurrence that
Virginia says, "I grew up into a woman in a night, and life was never
the same again, although for the sake of mother and the children I hid
my feelings as well as I could."

Here her record is detailed, and as concise as possible. She writes:

"I will tell it as clearly and quickly as I can. We had reached a
short sandy hill, and as the oxen were all tired, it was the custom at
such places for the drivers to double up teams and help one another up
the hill. A driver named Snyder,