“And it was at Johnson’s Ranch that late on the afternoon of January 17, fifteen-year-old Harriet Ritchie saw two figures coming slowly down the flood-swollen Bear River, approaching her family’s cabin. She studied the men approaching her. One was an Indian, and he was holding up the other, a white man–a gaunt figure with rags hanging from his shoulders. The white man’s feet were bloody; his eyes were sunken into his pale, bearded face. He was bent over as if by great age. He stank of sweat and blood. When he got to the door he peered into Harriet’s face and whispered, “Bread.” She burst into tears.
Matthew Ritchie and his wife, Caroline, ushered William Eddy into the cabin and laid him out on a bed. Eddy croaked out that he was of the Donner Party and that there were six more like himself, dying or dead, some miles back up the trail. Caroline Ritchie brought him food, and as she spooned it into his mouth, she, too, began to sob.
Harriet ran from cabin to cabin informing the other families. Nineteen-year-old William Dill Ritchie helped his father to rustle up some supplies. Men and women came running, converging on the Ritchie cabin carrying bread, coffee, tea, sugar, blankets, whatever they could think of. Five men–Reason Tucker, John Howell, John Rhoads, Pierre Sicard, and the Maidu guide who had brought Eddy in–hastily gathered together all the goods they could carry, strapped them on their backs, and set out on foot among the leafless oaks, following the turgid river back into the dark hills.”