Elizabeth Graves (1845 - 1848)

Born 1845 in Illinois, United States

Ancestors

Died 1848 at about age 3 in Sacramento County, California Territory

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Elizabeth Graves was involved in the westward expansion of the USA. Westward Ho! Join: Trails and Wagon Trains Project Discuss: wagon_trains_and_trails

Elizabeth Graves was one of 81 pioneers in the Donner Party wagon train to California that became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada in 1846.

Biography

Elizabeth Graves was a member of the Donner Party. See Donner Party.

One of the saddest things I read about the Donner Party was little Elizabeth was found sitting beside her mother’s mutilated remains at Starved Camp, crying for her ma.

J. Quinn Thornton was told of the baby’s death when he gathered the material for his book in the fall of 1847

It was brought safely into the settlements, where its very misfortunes made friends for it. But it drooped and withered away like a flower severed from the parent stem. It now blooms in the paradise of God, in a better and happier clime, where the storms and disasters of life will affect it no more.

Sources

See also:

• Donner Party - Graves
• Find a Grave - Elizabeth Graves
• Dixon, Kelly, Shannon Novak, Gwen Robbins, Julie Schablitsky, Richard Scott , and Guy Tasa (2010), "Men, Women, and Children are Starving: Archaeology of the Donner Family Camp". American Antiquity 75(3):627-656
• McGlashan, Charles (1879). History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra Nevada: 11th edition (1918), A Carlisle & Company, San Francisco
• McNeese, Tim (2009). The Donner Party: A Doomed Journey, Chelsea House Publications. ISBN 978-1-60413-025-6
• Rarick, Ethan (2008). Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-530502-7
• Rehart, Catherine Morison (2000), The Valley's Legends & Legacies III, Word Dancer Press, ISBN 978-1-884995-18-7
• Stewart, George R. (1936). Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party: supplemented edition (1988), Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-61159-8
• Unruh, John (1993). The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60, University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06360-0