Catherine Pike (1846 - 1847)

Born 1846 in St. Louis, Missouri, United States

Ancestors

Died 20 Feb 1847 at about age 1 in Truckee Lake, Nevada Territory

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

Biography

Catherine Pike was a member of the Donner Party. See Donner Party.

This profile is part of the Pike Name Study.

Catherine Pike was born 1846, the daughter of William M. Pike and Harriet F. (Murphy) Pike. She was the sister of Naomi L. (Pike) Schenck. Little Catherine was reported named after her father's sister, who had died in 1843, at the age of 22 years.^[1]

Catherine's family was part of the infamous Donner Party that was trapped in the Sierra Nevada Mountains by snow storms in 1846 while emigrating to California. Just as they were beginning to realize their predicament, her father, William Montgomery Pike, was accidentally shot and killed by his best friend and brother-in-law, William Foster. This happened in October.^[2]

By mid-December, disparate to reach help, Harriet Pike left her two small daughters behind at the lake camp to travel with "The Forlorn Hope" in an attempt to seek relief for the stranded company. Mrs. Murphy, the grandmother, was left in charge of the Pike daughters. The only sustenance that was available to feed little Catherine was a gruel made from snow water and a slight sprinkling of course flour. Her grandmother kept a small stash of flour hidden, lest other members of the starving group might take the treasure. Every day she gave Catherine a few teaspoons of the gruel. The meager rations were not enough to sustain the poor infant.^[3]

On February 22, 1847, Patrick Breen recorded in his diary, "I buried pikes child this morning in the snow it died 2 days ago." ^[4]

Sources

1. ↑ Donner Party - The Murphy Family
2. ↑ McNeese, Tim (2009). The Donner Party: A Doomed Journey, Chelsea House Publications. ISBN 978-1-60413-025-6
3. ↑ McGlashan, Charles (1879). History of the Donner Party: A Tragedy of the Sierra Nevada: 11th edition (1918), A Carlisle & Company, San Francisco
4. ↑ Patrick Breen Diary Original at OAC,

See also:

• 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

• 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