The seventeen refugees whom he and nine companions brought over the summit comprised three weak, wasted adults, and fourteen emaciated young children.  The prospect of getting them all to the settlement, even under favorable circumstances, had seemed doubtful at the beginning of the journey.  Alas, one of the heaviest snow-storms of the season overtook them on the bleak mountain-side ten miles from the tops of the Sierra Nevadas.  It continued many days.  Food gave out, death took toll.  The combined efforts of the men could not do more than provide fuel and keep the fires.  All became exhausted.  Rescuers and refugees might have perished there together had the nine men not followed what seemed their only alternative.  Who would not have done what Reed did?  With almost superhuman effort, he saved his two children.  No one felt keener regret than he over the fact that he had been obliged to abandon at Starved Camp the eleven refugees he had heroically endeavored to save.

In those days of affliction, it were well nigh impossible to say who was most afflicted; still, it would seem that no greater destitution and sorrow could have been meted to any one than fell to the lot of Mrs. Murphy at the lake camp.  The following incidents were related by her son, William G. Murphy, in an address to a concourse of people assembled on the shore of Donner Lake in February, 1896: 

I was a little more than eleven years of age when we all reached these mountains, and that one-roomed shanty was built, where so many of us lived, ate, and slept.  No!—­Where so many of us slept, starved, and died!  It was constructed for my mother and seven children (two being married) and her three grandchildren, and William Foster, husband of her daughter Sarah.

Early in December when the Forlorn Hope was planned, we were almost out of provisions; and my mother took the babes from the arms of Sarah and Harriet (Mrs. Pike) and told them that she would care for their little ones, and they being young might with William (Foster) and their brother Lemuel reach the settlement and return with food.  And the four became members of that hapless band of fifteen.

Mr. Eddy being its leader, his wife and her two children came to live with us during his absence.  When my eldest brother, on whom my mother depended, was very weak and almost at death’s door, my mother went to the Breens and begged a little meat, just a few mouthfuls—­I remember well that little piece of meat!  My mother gave half of it to my dying brother; he ate it, fell asleep with a hollow death gurgle.  When it ceased I went to him—­he was dead—­starved to death in our presence.  Although starving herself, my mother said that if she had known that Landrum was going to die she would have given him the balance of the meat.  Little Margaret Eddy lingered until February 4, and her mother until the seventh.  Their bodies lay two days and nights longer in the room with us before we could