Daniel James Brown

But Franklin Graves, the father of that family, is a particularly independent-minded man.

So he builds his cabin off about a mile or so from where the others are.

So we now have the Donners living in brush shanties at a place called Orla Creek.

We have the Graves living in their cabin a mile or so away, and the rest of them encamped at the eastern end of the lake in these log cabins.

Yeah, actually, the Graves cabin, they built a partition in the middle.

So the Reed family moved into one half of it.

and the Graves family moved into the other half of it.

But they were just square or rectangular log structures covered with hides.

One of the things they did when they realized they were trapped was they began to slaughter their oxen.

For one thing, oxen were wandering around getting lost in the snow, and they couldn't find them.

So they lost a number of potential meals in that way.

But the oxen that they still had, they slaughtered for the meat.

Then they used the hides to cover these cabins.

So the roof structure of these cabins was composed largely of the hides of their slaughtered oxen.

It's impossible to move around in.

And as I say, one of their principal problems was the mules that Stanton had brought, the oxen they'd been driving, cattle and horses they'd been driving all the way across the country were wandering around, dying, and then getting buried in the snow.

And they had no idea where they were.

Yeah, I think it was named a little later by a guy named Charles Lashen who wrote the first history of the Donner Party.

But this is actually the focus of my book.

I was very focused on the Graves family partly because this was the idea of Franklin Graves, the father of that family.