Lewis Keseberg

It is not entirely unbelievable that human beings who go off the grid for a long time might come back and be different.

It's genuinely a very possible thing, and we've seen situations such as the Donner Party with, uh, I believe it was Lewis Keseberg, who, he was out on his own for just a couple of weeks and committed acts of cannibalism, and it took him a long time to reintegrate into society.

So if somebody can go mad that quickly, it's believable that several generations could see distinct changes from normal human social codes.

Now, the problem with the feral people explanation is that it, it would usually show signs of a struggle.

The winter recorded as the worst ever in the Sierra Nevada mountains is making it almost impossible for the rescue teams to operate.

The very last rescue finds a delirious Lewis Keseberg alone, surrounded by the half-eaten dead.

No one else was alive.

George Donner's body is found, skull split open, brain removed.

Jay Fosdick died.

Lewis Keseberg, who would become the most controversial figure in the Donner Party's subsequent history, was injured and confined to bed, dependent on the charity of the other survivors for the food he could not obtain himself.

The specific texture of daily life in the lake cabins during those months is almost impossible to reconstruct fully from the accounts that survive.

Because the accounts were written later, filtered through the specific memory-altering effects of extreme trauma and starvation, shaped by the social pressures of what people could and could not admit to having done.

The crossing of the mountains with the first relief was its own ordeal.

Another storm caught them on the summit.

A child named Ada Keseberg, the daughter of Lewis Keseberg, died in the storm.

Two of the Donner children became too weak to continue and were left with a small camp and a fire and the promise that another relief party was coming.