Starvation at Donner Lake Preparing Rawhide for Food Eating the Firerug Shoveling Snow off the Beds Playing they were Tea-cups of Custard A Starving Baby Pleading with Silent Eloquence Patrick Breen's Diary Jacob Donner's Death A Child's Vow A Christmas Dinner Lost on the Summits A Stump Twenty-two Feet High Seven Nursing Babes at Donner Lake A Devout Father A Dying Boy Sorrow and Suffering at the Cabins.
How fared it with those left at Donner Lake? About the time the fifteen began their terrible journey, Baylis Williams starved to death. Such food as the rest had was freely given to him, but it did not is satisfy the demands of his nature. Quietly, uncomplainingly, he had borne the pangs of famine, and when the company first realized his dreadful condition, he was in the delirium which preceded death. What words can portray the emotions of the starving emigrants, when they saw one of their number actually perish of hunger before their eyes! Williams died in the Graves cabin, and was buried near the house by W. C. Graves and John Denton.
All the Donner Party were starving. When the cattle were killed the hides had been spread over the cabins in lieu of shingles. These were now taken down and eaten. All the survivors describe the method of preparing this miserable substitute for food. The narration by Mrs. J. M. Murphy (Virginia E. Reed), of San Jose, is among the most vivid. She says the green rawhides were cut into strips and laid upon the coals, or held in the flames until the hair was completely singed off. Either side of the piece of hide was then scraped with a knife until comparatively clean, and was placed in a kettle and boiled until soft and pulpy. There was no salt, and only a little pepper, and yet this substance was all that was between them and starvation. When cold, the boiled hides and the water in which they were cooked, became jellied and exactly resembled glue. The tender stomachs of many of the little children revolted at this disagreeable diet, and the loathing they acquired for the sight of this substance still exists in the minds of some of the survivors. To this day, Thomas K. Reed, of San Jose, who was then a tiny three-year-old, can not endure the sight of calf's-foot jelly, or of similar dishes, because of its resemblance to the loathed food which was all his mother could give him in the cabins at Donner Lake.