song of hope, and within the first milestone of the promised land ended
it with a prayer for help. "Help for the helpless in the storms of the
Sierra Nevada Mountains!"

And I, a child then, scarcely four years of age, was too young to do
more than watch and suffer with other children the lesser privations
of our snow-beleaguered camp; and with them survive, because the
fathers and mothers hungered in order that the children might live.

Scenes of loving care and tenderness were emblazoned on my mind. Scenes
of anguish, pain, and dire distress were branded on my brain during
days, weeks, and months of famine,--famine which reduced the party from
eighty-one souls to forty-five survivors, before the heroic relief men
from the settlements could accomplish their mission of humanity.

Who better than survivors knew the heart-rending circumstances of life
and death in those mountain camps? Yet who can wonder that tenderest
recollections and keenest heartaches silenced their quivering lips for
many years; and left opportunities for false and sensational details to
be spread by morbid collectors of food for excitable brains, and for
prolific historians who too readily accepted exaggerated and
unauthentic versions as true statements?

Who can wonder at my indignation and grief in little girlhood, when I
was told of acts of brutality, inhumanity, and cannibalism, attributed
to those starved parents, who in life had shared their last morsels of
food with helpless companions?

Who can wonder that I then resolved that, "When I grow to be a woman I
shall tell the story of my party so clearly that no one can doubt its