While I had come from the mountains remembering most clearly the sufferings from cold, hunger, thirst, and pitiful surrounding, I had also brought from there a child’s mental picture of tenderest sympathies and bravest self-denials, evinced by the snowbound in my father’s camp. . . Vain, however, my efforts to speak in behalf of either the dead or the absent; every attempt was met by the ready assertion, “You can’t prove anything; you were not old enough to remember or understand what happened.”
As an armchair historian and one who shares Eliza Donner’s acute memory of early childhood, I found this memoir to be both illuminating and dry: illuminating for its depictions of the quotidian in the extraordinary circumstances of being stranded in the high Sierra’s worst winter, and dry for its subsequent focus on her fraught relationship with her foster parents. Little wonder that she harbored lingering fantasies of reuniting with a miraculously saved mother, despite sensitive assurances of her dignified death and cruel rumors to the contrary.
Eliza Donner penned her recollections in 1911, at age sixty-nine, following a life rich in adventure and advantage as the wife of the Honorable Samuel Houghton, U.S. Representative. It is the considered voice of this politician’s wife that the reader hears in her crusade to prove the unproveable, that no members of the Donner party willingly partook in cannibalism or ate family members—a claim contradicted by the firsthand account of at least one girl who was tortured by the memory of being given her mother’s flesh for sustenance, as recounted at the 41 minute mark of this documentary, Death in the Sierra. Nevertheless, the most interesting nuggets of Eliza’s account come in the accumulated testimonies of the Appendix, many conflated with sensational detail, and ending with her private interview with the Lewis Keseberg—the man whom legend accuses of eating her mother and trying to steal the family fortune. She absolves him of all wrongdoing.