“IF WE EVER GET AWAY I’M COMING BACK FOR MORE.”

He had been rescued too late. He made it over the pass on the return with the first relief party, but then exhausted and suffering from malnutrition, John Denton sat down in the snow to rest and have a smoke. He was later found dead. John Denton was twenty-nine years old. He was an Englishman. John had signed on as a teamster for the Donner family. He had no wife; nobody was certain about his family. John is a minor figure in the tragedy of the Donner Party pioneers who became snowbound in the Sierras and, infamously, some of whom resorted to cannibalism. (The image seared into my consciousness is of parents giving human flesh to their children so they could survive.) John Denton would be just a name among thousands of other nameless men who died in an effort to make something of themselves, except as his last act, he wrote a poem:

"Oh! after many roving years,

How sweet it is to come

Back to the dwelling-place of youth,

Our first and dearest home;

To turn away our wearied eyes

From proud ambition's towers,

And wander in those summer fields,

The scenes of boyhood's hours.

But I am changed since last I gazed

Upon that tranquil scene,

And sat beneath the old witch elm

That shades the village green;

And watched my boat upon the brook

It was a regal galley

And sighed not for a joy on earth,

Beyond the happy valley.

I wish I could once more recall

That bright and blissful joy,

And summon to my weary heart -

The feelings of a boy.

But now on scenes of past delight

I look, and feel no pleasure,

As misers on the bed of death

Gaze coldly on their treasure."

For many of us, the pragmatic part of our natures considers art and literature unessential adornments to our lives. However, those adornments are often the only things passed on. I can't think of a better way to put it, so to use a verb awkwardly, art and literature exclaim who we are. The creator says: I was here. I loved. I suffered. I saw beauty. I saw ugliness. I experienced good and evil. I would like to share my experience so you can become acquainted with me.

This poem allows a glimpse of the inner life of this obscure unmarried teamster dying alone in the snow. I cannot help feeling a decent man penned those lines.

There is one other anecdote concerning John Denton.

A survivor of the Donner Party, Virginia Reed Murphy, remembered: "The storm fiends were shrieking in their wild mirth, we were sitting about the fire in our little dark home, busy with our thoughts. Denton with his cane kept knocking pieces off the large rocks used as fire-irons on which to place the wood. Something bright attracted his attention, and picking up pieces of the rock he examined them closely; then turning to my mother he said, Mrs. Reed, this is gold. My mother replied that she wished it were bread."

In California in 1846, two years before the gold rush, John Denton gathered up a teaspoon worth of the metal and tied it into a small piece of buckskin, which he put into his pocket. What did he see in his dreams at that moment? Was that the inspiration for the last two lines of his poem?

"As misers on the bed of death

Gaze coldly on their treasure."

What he said on discovering the metal was, “If we ever get away from here I am coming back for more.”

The gold or what John Denton believed was gold was lost in the snow.