hts are
a o;reat deal better, and the brains make good soup." When accused of the murder of Mrs Donner, he said that Mrs Donner, in attempting to cross from one cabin to another, had " missed the trail, and slept out one night ; that she came to his camp the next night very much ftitigued; he made her a cup of coffee, placed her in bed, and rolled her well in the blankets, but the next morning found her dead. He ate her body, and found her flesh the best he had ever tasted. He further stated that he obtained from her body at least four pounds of fat."
A.t the close of a general summary of the affair, the California Star of the 10th of April 1847, says: "After the first few deaths, but the one all-absorbing thought of individual self-preservation prevailed. The fountains of natural affection were all dried up. The chords that once vibrated with connubial, parental, and filial affection were rent asunder, and each seemed resolved, without regard to the fate of others, to es- cape the impending calamity. Even the wild hostile mountain Indians, who once visited their camps, pitied them ; and instead of pursuing the natural impulse of their hostile feeling to the whites and destroying them as they could easily have done, divided their own scanty supply of food with them. So changed had the emigrants become, that when the party sent out arrived with food, some of them cast it aside, and seemed to prefer the putrid human flesh that still remained."
On his return to the east. General Kearney passed by the scene of these tragical occurrences, and halted there on the 2 2d of June, 1847. He ordered the re- mains collected and buried in one of the cabins ; some of the bodies presented a mummy-like appearance, the flesh having remained undecayed in the dry at- mosphere. Fire was then set to the cabin, and so was consumed as far as possible every trace of the melan- choly occurrence. Of the eighty persons originally composing the party, thirty-six perished
