Daniel James Brown

I mean, you'll get me wrong.

Their bodies were wasting away.

They were terribly hungry.

But they believed that their problem was that they were starving to death.

And so that's really, I think, where the rationale for cannibalism began.

was that they literally thought that if they ate something, they would survive.

And you have to remember these people in the snowshoe party, they had a mission.

They all left loved ones back at the lake camp.

They needed to get to California, not just to save their own lives, but to save the lives of their brothers and their sisters and their mothers and their fathers who were still stranded back at the lake camp.

So they were highly motivated to survive and they thought they needed to eat something in order to survive.

Yes, it appears there were.

There were conflicting stories about how they met their end exactly.

William Foster, I'm quite sure, actually shot them.

He claimed later that they, well, there were various versions of the story that they either were already dead or that they were nearly dead.

But they had followed Luis and Salvador's bloody footprints and tracked them down and killed them and then consumed their flesh as well.

I see.

Yes, and that's why it was so important that some of them get through, was that otherwise nobody in California would have known what was happening in the mountains.

So once Sarah Graves and the rest of the Snowshoe Party reached Johnson's Ranch and told the Americans there what was happening, a number of the people they found at Johnson's Ranch were

had traveled with them earlier with the Donner Party, traveling across the plains.

So the Tucker family and the Ritchie family, for instance, they already knew them.