The action takes place at Sutter's Fort, in northern California,
in 1847. Lewis Keseberg, a German emigrant and survivor of the
tragic Donner Party expedition, has brought a suit for slander
against several other survivors, who have accused him of being
a grave robber and murderer. As the trial testimony proceeds
the awful facts of the expedition's demise are revealed—the
heavy snows which trapped them in the mountains; the starvation
and death of women and children; the desperation which drove
the few survivors to cannibalize the corpses of the dead. Keseberg
does not deny the horror of what occurred, or the madness which
made him a party to it, but he cannot live with the accusation
that he deliberately killed for food and that he robbed the graves
of the deceased. Ultimately he wins his case, but not before
it is made eloquently clear that all involved will be burdened
until the end of their lives with the terrible, numbing anguish
of what they went through.
