ORIGINAL: Orm
So did the Donner Party members kill anyone in order to eat that corpse? I always thought they might have eaten the already dead. Makes a difference.
Lewis Keseberg was thought to have probably killed Tamsen Donner and possibly others but it was never proven.
But to be fair to the man it is also very possible he was maligned by a crooked newspaper and the accounts of the 4th relief are simply fiction:
https://www.geni.com/people/Louis-Keseb ... 8434299950
Either way the man has to have lived one of the most miserable lives ever lived, here's a quote from the linked article:
In any case, Louis Keseberg’s story is a sad one. Despite being apparently well-educated, his life seems to have been one tragedy after another. The Donner Party tragedy took both his children (he had already lost another child prior to 1846), and left him with the reputation of being a thief, liar, murderer, and mindless cannibal. Afterwards, he had eight more children; all but one predeceased him (the last lived to the age of ninety, dying in the late 1940’s). Two of these children were evidently mentally handicapped. He outlived his wife by nearly twenty years. In every new business venture he started, he was vilified and treated as a laughingstock. After serving as the skipper of one of John Sutter’s river supply boats for several years, he was said to have lost his job because the passengers feared he would kill and eat them while they slept. One passenger, in what is no doubt a much more honest account, said that during the night he could hear Keseberg crying out in nightmares. When Keseberg purchased a small hotel in Sacramento, jokes abounded about the dangers of boarding in his rooms. The hotel burned down about a year later. Sometime afterward, he bought a brewery – it was destroyed after several years by a flood. By the time Keseberg died in the late 1890’s, he was penniless and apparently homeless, dying in a hospital for the poor.
Jim
