The evenings, at the Truckee camp, were passed around a huge fire, singing songs and spinning yarns. One night Doc. Sieberst produced a huge roll of paper, and, with a voice containing as much music as the screech of a jackass, sang a parody on the song “Two little girls in blue,” entitled: “Few little boys in blue.” It contained thirty-two verses; but, ere he had waded through half of it, his audience had stolen away, and, deep in the seclusion of their bunks, with heads buried beneath blankets, tried to shut out the sounds of his voice, at last falling into a sleep, visited by frightful dreams and distorted visions.
The Doc. was the originator of our famous Truckee war cry, which commends itself for its brevity.
“Hoopla! Hooplo! Hooplee!
We were lucky,
We went to Truckee.
Not! what! A and B; don’t you see?”
The tide of travel east and west was daily becoming greater—huge freight trains slowly rolled in, and rolled away again. Their favorite stopping-place was the sidetrack adjoining the one on which our cars stood. They were a nuisance by night and by day—by night disturbing our slumbers, by the never-ending sounds of escaping steam and throbbing machinery; and by day a great annoyance to both officers and privates, particularly to the officers, who, on the approach of a passenger train, were compelled to climb through the vulgar freight train in order to see, and more especially to be seen, by the fair sex traveling in the Pullman cars.
We were now out nearly three weeks, and the majority of us were longing to get back to ’Frisco; particularly as now all danger seemed to be passed, the report that the strike was off being verified by the employees of the railroad company who had returned to work. The men began to worry about the security of their positions in town, and the business and professional men connected with the company, feeling that their business interests were receiving serious injury by their prolonged absence, were impatient to return.
Time hung heavily on the hands of all, and, as no one had yet been to Donner lake, Monday afternoon, of July 23d, Corporal Burtis and private Hayes decided to take to themselves the distinction of being the only members of the company to visit that beautiful sheet of water. Forgetting to ask permission, they quietly meandered out of camp unobserved, and made for the high road that led to the lake.
This lake, glimpses of which were caught from the many bends of the road, the beautiful little stretch of country approaching it, now green with luxuriant verdure, in which mild-eyed cattle cropped the plentiful fodder, and the hills to the right upon which sheep are now feeding, were, one winter many years ago, the natural theater of a sickening tragedy, the horror of which thrilled all the country at the time. It was here that, after many wanderings, a party of emigrants, who had left their eastern homes early in the spring of ’46, and, taking a new route which led through the Great Basin—lying between the Rocky mountains and the Sierra Nevadas—found themselves stalled in the impassable snows of these mountains which reared themselves like a white wall on all sides. Out of the party of eighty, thirty-six perished. A cross now marks the last resting-place of the unfortunate ones.