From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Ever since I had that earache, I have to go to bed early. No matter what I am doing, someone always finds me and makes me stop. So last night they did too. Anyhow, there isn’t much more to tell about the Donners, but I better finish….

When they had nothing else to eat, they killed their poor horses and then their poor oxen. It was a very sad and cruel thing to do after the horses and oxen worked so hard for them. Then they saw that there was nothing, nothing, nothing left, and that there wouldn’t be anything until Spring, and that was a very long time away, and then someone said, “Well, we will have to eat one of ourselves.” No one wanted to of course, but the person who said it explained carefully that it would be better for only one or two of them to die, rather than all of them. In that way, someone would get to California. The trouble was that they couldn’t decide which one of them to eat first. Then they decided to draw lots. They put a lot of pieces of paper into a hat and each would take a piece of paper out, and the one who drew the piece of paper with a cross on it was the one to be eaten. Only the children were excused. I guess that was because they were small and there wasn’t so much to eat on them. The person who got the cross was a nice, kind Irish man that no one wanted to eat but he made them kill him, and I think they did eat him.

I don’t know exactly how the story ended, I think everyone died anyhow, but I’m not sure. Grandfather said that the story should teach me not to be a pig because if Mr. Donner hadn’t been in such a rush to get to California before all the other people, and had stayed in line with the rest of the wagons, they wouldn’t have been lost and all would have survived.

There are many places to read about the issue of cannibalism and how the story ended, including Wikipedia and a site called “Legends of America.”