A note to our listeners, this episode contains scenes that depict racist attitudes and language.

Please be advised. Tamson Donner tiptoes across the dirt floor of her family's cramped frigid shelter trying not to wake her husband and five children who are sleeping all around her.

In the dim pre-dawn light, she saw a mouse poke out of a hole in the shelter's corner, and she's determined to catch it, and to eat it.

She crouches down in front of the hole.

For five long minutes, she waits. She feels her legs

cramping and blows on her fingers to warm them. It's freezing cold away from the

fire pit.

The shelter was thrown together after Tamsin.

Her family and about 80 other pioneers

got stranded here in the Sierra Nevada mountains a month ago in November

1846. Knowing they'd be trapped for the winter, the Donners wanted to build a

proper log cabin, but they only got the walls partially erected before a blizzard tore through,

one of the several massive snowstorms that prevented them from completing their journey across the mountains.

As the snow dumped down, they were forced to abandon the cabin and hastily put up a large makeshift tent instead.

Now, this crude shelter has become Tampson's entire world.

She spends most days huddled inside with her children,

shivering beneath blankets.

But however bad the cold is, the hunger is worse.

Their journey from Illinois took much longer than expected,

and their food supplies are almost all gone.

As fall turned to early winter, the deer and the other game disappeared.

They've been reduced to eating cow skins and moldy ox hides just to keep starvation at bay.

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