ished facts and figures. These
latter data, for the sake of brevity, are in somewhat statistical form.
A few further incidents, which I did not learn of or understand until
long after they occurred, are also related.

The accounts of weather conditions, of scarcity of food and fuel, also
the number of deaths in the camps before the first of March, 1847, are
verified by the carefully kept "Diary of Patrick Breen, One of the
Donner Party," which has recently been published by the Academy of
Pacific Coast History.

The following article, which originally appeared in _The California
Star_, April 10, 1847, is here quoted from "The Life and Days of
General John A. Sutter," by T.J. Schoonover:

A more shocking scene cannot be imagined than was witnessed by the
party of men who went to the relief of the unfortunate emigrants in
the California Mountains. The bones of those who had died and been
devoured by the miserable ones that still survived were around their
tents and cabins; bodies of men, women, and children with half the
flesh torn from them lay on every side. A woman sat by the side of
the body of her dead husband cutting out his tongue; the heart she
had already taken out, broiled, and eaten. The daughter was seen
eating the father; and the mother, that [_viz._ body] of her
children; children, that of father and mother. The emaciated, wild,
and ghastly appearance of the survivors added to the horror of it.
Language can not describe the awful change that a few weeks of dire
suffering had wrought in the minds of the wretched and pitiable
beings. Those who one month before would have shuddered and sickened
at the thought of eating human flesh, or of killing their companions
and relatives to preserve their own lives, now looked upon the
opportunity the acts afforded them of escaping the most dreadful of
deaths as providential interference in their behalf.

Calculations were coldly made, as they sat around their gloomy camp
fires, for the next succeeding meals. Various expedients were
devised to prevent the dreadful crime of murder, but they finally
resolved to kill those who had least claims to longer existence.
Just at this moment some of them died, which afforded the rest
temporary relief. Some sank into the arms of death cursing God for
their miserable fate, while the last whisperings of others were
prayers and son