Yet, after those 72 hours, the showshoers played a sort of thought game in their time of hunger...What if...What if they drew straws? What if, as one survivor put it years later:

One might die so that the others might go on?

[The fiddler begins "Loop #11, Weeping & Gnashing."]

It was a vile, vile notion!

But, perhaps it could work...

And, in their time of indisposition,

Without so much as a fire,

When no one could move,

When they survived on the heat of their own wasted bodies,

They did it:

They drew straws.

An Irish bachelor named Patrick Dolan lost.

Patrick! Oh, Paddy! No one could bear to see him go! He was, by all accounts, a kind-hearted man and one who remained calm and even affable through the most blistering, trying sections of Weber Canyon! He had that twinkle in his eye even at Iron Point! He could fiddle finely, sing like an angel, and knew a thousand songs! Surely, they could not slaughter Patrick Dolan!

The weather only grew worse.

Franklin Graves died in his grown daughters' arms. A Mexican ranch hand and handyman named Antonio was next.

When one dies of starvation, death is apathetic—and so it was with the young Mexican. William Eddy, an Illinois blacksmith—and by some accounts the most capable hunter and physically robust of the entire Donner Party—whose wife and child were still by the lake in Truckee, pulled Antonio's hand twice from the flickering fire he had just again started before he realized it did not matter at all.