Gordon Young

“ Burton, in the very gesture of doling out food, threw the food on the ground and cursed them. They shrank from him. He was dangerous. They tried to explain. What could they do? How help? There was no food. The oxen had been only skin and bones, and there was no food for anybody. They now, said these wretched men, could hardly walk. How help other people? And why merely stay by them to die and watch them die?
Burton would not listen to explanations. He cursed them with deep-throated sullenness, jammed food into his saddle bags, mounted his mule. ”

“ Thus it was that men who two or three years before had hardly known there was such a country as California were being called Californians, as if they were a new, recently found race; and they were, in a way, being of a race that had found new and unsuspected strength, generosity, courage within themselves after entering a far country. ”

“ Burton and Hales pushed clear to the desert of the Humboldt Sink. They could have walked that desolate area by stepping from one dead mule or oxen to another.
There were whole families on foot, with hardly clothing on their backs and no food; men were living on the flesh of long dead mules; children were without water. Provisions were doled out by the scouts, government mules and oxen put to the wagons, and the emigrants sent on. When they reached mining camps, miners gave them money, merchants gave them food. ”