Some days we could not keep a fire, and many times, during both days and
nights, snow was shoveled from off our tent, and from around it, that we
might not be buried alive. Mother remarked one day that it had been two
weeks that our beds and the clothing upon our bodies had been wet. Two
of my sisters and myself spent some days at Keseberg's cabin. The first
morning we were there they shoveled the snow from our bed before we
could get up. Very few can believe it possible for human beings to live
and suffer the exposure and hardships endured there."

Oh! how long and dreary the days were to the hungry children! Even their
very plays and pastimes were pathetic, because of their piteous silent
allusion to the pangs of starvation. Mrs. Frank Lewis (Patty Reed), of
San Jose, relates that the poor, little, famishing girls used to fill
the pretty porcelain tea-cups with freshly fallen snow, daintily dip it
out with teaspoons and eat it, playing it was custard.

Dear Mrs. Murphy had the most sacred and pitiful charge. It was the wee
nursing babe, Catherine Pike, whose mother had gone with the "Forlorn
Hope," to try, if possible, to procure relief. All there was to give the
tiny sufferer, was a little gruel made from snow water, containing a
slight sprinkling of coarse flour. This flour was simply ground wheat,
unbolted. Day after day the sweet little darling would lie helplessly
upon its grandmother's lap, and seem with its large, sad eyes to be
pleading for nourishment. Mrs. Murphy carefully kept the little handful
of flour concealed - there was only a handful at the very beginning -
lest some of the starving children might get possession of the treasure.
Each day she gave Catherine a few teaspoonfuls of the gruel. Strangely
enough, this poor little martyr did not often cry with hunger, but with
tremulous, quivering mouth, and a low, subdued sob or moan, would appear
to be begging for something to eat. The poor, dumb lips, if gifted with