e we could find
assistance able to bury them in the snow. Some days earlier Milton
Elliot, weak and wandering around, had taken up his abode with us.
We shared with him the remnant of our beef hides. We had had a lot
of that glue-making material. But mark, it would not sustain life.
Elliot soon starved to death, and neighbors removed and interred the
body in the snow beside others.

Catherine Pike, my absent sister's baby, died on the eighteenth of
February, only a few hours before the arrival of the First Relief.
Thus the inmates of our shanty had been reduced to my mother, my
sister Mary, brother Simon, Nioma Pike, Georgie Foster, myself, and
little Jimmy Eddy.

When the rescuers decided they would carry out Nioma Pike, and that
my sister Mary and I should follow, stepping in the tracks made by
those who had snowshoes, strength seemed to come, so that I was able
to cut and carry to my mother's shanty what appeared to me a huge
pile of wood. It was green, but it was all I could get.

We left mother there with three helpless little ones to feed on
almost nothing, yet in the hope that she might keep them alive until
the arrival of the next relief.

Many of the survivors remember that after having again eaten food
seasoned with salt, the boiled, saltless hides produced nausea and
could not be retained by adult or child.

I say with deep reverence that flesh of the dead was used to sustain
the living in more than one cabin near the lake. But it was not used
until after the pittance of food left by the First Relief had long been
consumed; not until after the wolves had dug the snow from the graves.
Perhaps God sent the wolves to show Mrs. Murphy and also Mrs. Graves
where to get sustenance for their dependent little ones.

Both were widows; the one had three, and the other four helpless
children to save. Was it culpable, or cannibalistic to seek and use the
only life-saving means left them? Were the acts and purposes of their
unsteady hands and aching hearts less tender, less humane than those of
the lauded surgeons of to-day, who infuse human blood from living
bodies into the arteries of those whom naught else can save, or who
strip skin from bodies that feel pain, to cover wounds which would
otherwise prove fatal?

John Baptiste Trubode and Nicholas Clark, of the Second Relief, were
the last men who saw my father alive. In August, 1883, th