l flow,
and infant lips had drawn blood from maternal breasts.

The first nursling's life to ebb was that of Lewis Keseberg, Jr., on
January 24, 1847.[21] His grief-stricken mother could not be comforted.
She hugged his wasted form to her heart and carried it far from camp,
where she dug a grave and buried it in the snow.

Harriet McCutchen, whose mother had struggled on with the Forlorn Hope
in search of succor, breathed her last on the second of February, while
lying upon the lap of Mrs. Graves; and the snow being deep and hard
frozen, Mrs. Graves bade her son William make the necessary excavation
near the wall within their cabin, and they buried the body there, where
the mother should find it upon her return. Catherine Pike died in the
Murphy cabin a few hours before the arrival of food from the settlement
and was buried on the morning of February 22.[22]

[Illustration: Photograph by Lynwood Abbott. ALDER CREEK]

[Illustration: DENNISON'S EXCHANGE AND THE PARKER HOUSE, SAN FRANCISCO]

Those were the only babes that perished before relief came. Does not
the fact that so many young children survived the disaster refute the
charges of parental selfishness and inhumanity, and emphasize the
immeasurable self-sacrifice, love, and care that kept so many of the
little ones alive through that long, bitter siege of starvation?

Mrs. Elinor Eddy, who passed away in the Murphy cabin on the seventh of
February, was the only wife and mother called by death, in either camp,
before the arrival of the First Relief. Both Patrick Breen's diary and
William G. Murphy, then a lad of eleven years, assert that Mrs. Eddy
and little Margaret, her only daughter, were buried in the snow near
the Murphy cabin on the ninth of February. Furthermore, the Breen Diary
and the death-list of the Donner Party show that not a husband or
father died at the Lake Camp during the entire period of the party's
imprisonment in the mountains.[23]

How, then, could that First Relief, or either of the other relief
parties see--how could they even have imagined that they saw--"wife
sitting at the side of her husband who had just died, mutilating his
body," or "the daughter eating her father," or "mother that of her
children," or "children that of father and mother"? The same questions
might be asked regarding the other revolting scenes pictured by the
_Star_.

The seven men who first braved the dangers of the icy trail in the work
of rescue came over a tr