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Something Like a Woman. In February seven men of the First Relief got over the divide. The huts in the first camp were buried so deep the seven men could not see them. They called. "Something like a woman came up out of a hole in the snow." Others "crawled up the ramp of frozen snow to mew at the seven men from beyond the mountains. . . . They looked like mummies."
The First Relief took back 21 survivors, many of them children. On the way down the divide, they met the Second Relief. Outside one hut, the Second Relief found a dismembered body. There was an entry concerning it in the diary of one of the travelers, Patrick Breen: "Mrs. Murphy said here yesterday that [she] thought she would commence on Milt and eat him." She had. At the Donner family huts, Tamsen Donner had just sent a man to beg Elizabeth, Jacob Donner's wife, for a meal. The man was just returning with a leg of Elizabeth's husband. "At the sight of the rescuers, he tossed the now unneeded leg back on the butchered corpse." Jacob Donner's children "were sitting upon a log, with their faces stained with blood, devouring the half roasted liver and heart of the[ir] father. . . ." None of the elder Donners touched it.
Sac of Bestiality. Possibly the most horrible episode was discovered by the Fourth Relief. Lewis Keseberg, a German, had been left by his own request in the camp with Tamsen Donner and her dying husband. The Fourth Relief found a kettle full of pieces of George Donner, but there were legs of oxen which were lying around uneaten. Keseberg avoided the rescuers. He had long been suspected of stealing from the other members of the party. At last the rescuers cornered him "lying down amidst the human bones, and beside him a large pan full of fresh liver and lights."
They could not find Tamsen Donner. Keseberg later denied that he had killed her. But there in the camp he told the rescuers that "he ate her body and found her flesh the best he had ever tasted." They took Keseberg, "now a mere sac of bestiality," over the great divide down into California which had become America while he was developing his taste.
Historian DeVoto justifies his detailed retelling of the Donner story by saying that "it is as the commonplace or typical just distorted that the Donners must be seen." The emigrant train was "the village on wheels," the U.S. in miniature. So, like the reader, Author DeVoto goes on & on in a sick fascination, unable to free himself from the sense that the Donners are simply an extreme case of any society that has lost the will to get its members over one of history's divides.