blic examination of Jefferson Grammar School with the following
statement: "Among Mr. White's pupils are two young ladies, survivors of
the terrible disaster which befell the emigration of 1846 among the
snows of the California mountains."

Even this cursory reference was a matter of regret to Georgia and me.
We had entered school silent in regard to personal history, and did not
wish public attention turned toward ourselves even in an indirect way,
fearing it might lead to a revival of the false and sensational
accounts of the past, and we were not prepared to correct them, nor
willing they should be spread. Pursued by these fears, we returned to
the ranch, where Elitha and her three black-eyed little daughters
welcomed our home-coming and brightened our vacation.

Almost coincident, however, with the foregoing circumstance, Georgia
came into possession of "What I Saw in California," by Edwin Bryant;
and we found that the book did contain many facts in connection with
our party's disaster, but they were so interwoven with wild rumors, and
the false and sensational statements quoted from _The California Star_,
that they proved nothing, yet gave to the untrue that appearance of
truth which is so difficult to correct.

The language employed in description seemed to us so coarse and brutal
that we could not forgive its injustice to the living, and to the
memory of the dead. We could but feel that had simple facts been
stated, there would have been no harrowing criticism on account of long
unburied corpses found in the lake cabins. Nor would the sight of
mutilated dead have suggested that the starving survivors had become
"gloating cannibals, preying on the bodies of their companions." Bare
facts would have shown that the living had become too emaciated, too
weak, to dig graves, or to lift or drag the dead up the narrow snow
steps, even had open graves awaited their coming. Aye, more, would have
shown conclusively that mutilation of the bodies of those who had
perished was never from choice, never cannibalistic, but dire
necessity's last resort to ease torturing hunger, to prevent loss of
reason, to save life. Loss of reason was more dreaded than death by
the starving protectors of the helpless.

Fair statements would also have shown that the First Relief reached the
camps with insufficient provision to meet the pressing needs of the
unfortunate. Consequently, it felt the urgency of haste to get as many
refugees as poss