It is unfortunate that some people who crossed Donner Summit did not particularly notice the fact in their writings.  For example, Hattie Boyer McIlrath was 22 when she and her husband, H. Darwin McIlrath (Around the World on Wheels, 18998) rode partly around the world and went over Donner Summit in 1895.  Hattie noted that they left Truckee and rode 160 miles to Sacramento, “We left Truckee July 23 in the morning, making the 160 miles to Sacremento [sic] shortly after dusk.”  It’s really inexcusable even though the McIlraths were going pretty fast and diligently.

Mr. Fraser and his friends, however, did pay attention to their crossing of the Sierra a couple of years later.

They’d arrived in San Francisco from Asia.  Mr. Fraser thought San Francisco a “disappointing town, and the killing of Bret Harte is necessary to soothe my feelings.” Knowing that 5% of the “folks died from heaven-provided causes, and the others died from differences of opinion” he cleaned and loaded his six-shooter and practiced on beer bottles.  A fellow passenger had told him, “I’ve seen a man short stark dead every morning before breakfast for a fortnight in ‘Frisco, and two on Sunday. Never put your hand under your coat-tail when talking to a man. The other may be quicker’n you.”  Fraser went on for a paragraph describing what he “knew” of ‘Frisco.

It turned out that San Francisco was “much too respectable.”  There were frock-coats and silk hats not red shirts.   There were manners, no one broke the necks off bottles before swigging at the bar.  No one was killed.  No one was lynched.  Fraser had “learned” about ‘Frisco from Bret Hart’s stories.

They left San Francisco for Sacramento accompanied by “boys” (slang for wheelmen) and then met more wheelmen in Sacramento.    The road got too bad and hilly so they “took to the railway.” Their travel in Western America was the “durnedest, blamedest, cussedest… bit of riding in the world, the worst in the world.” Fraser was trying out American language.

They med “lanky=cheeked goat-bearded farmers, gangs of Chinese coolies, and tramps.  Their ride over the Sierra was tough and hard. One day they “wheeled fifty miles… and rose 4000 feet.”

“High we got among the pines, jolting and bumping over those railway sleepers. We climbed from the warm, sensuous valleys into the hills where snow lay. Where the precipices were ledges we wheeled through small snow sheds. So we reached the heights where the snow was one, two, and three feet deep.
 
“We entered the shed that climbed to the summit of the Sierra Nevada and ran down the other side, a shed forty miles long. It was some time before our eyes were accustomed to the gloom. There was a cold, vault-like air. The shed closed over darkly. Little streams of snow had forced a way through
the chinks and lay blackened with engine smoke. The drift on the roofs was thawing, and there was constant dripping. Often the shed top leaned against the rock face. When a stone was dislodged and clattered down, the noise that echoed through the wooden cavern was like an impatient horse prancing in the stall. Water from melted snow had streamed down the rocks and frozen. For miles while on one side were the boards of the shed and the slushy, grimy snow, and above the teeming
water, making the track a mass of slush, on the other side was a wall of knobby, rotten ice.

It was dark. Sometimes the silence was awful. The stillness was accentuated by the dribble from the icicles.

Suddenly there would be a roar. Off our machines we jumped, splashed into the foul snow, and crushed ourselves against the massive chunks of ice, squeezing into the smallest limits to escape the coming train. However, it was only the wild roar of a mountain torrent.

In time we differentiated between a torrent and a train. When a train did come there was an exciting twenty seconds. There was only a single line. The sheds are narrow. A passenger could easily touch the walls from one of the cars.

Therefore conceive one's predicament. Imprisoned in a narrow, dark tube, plodding on diligently, riding fifty yards, walking ten, wet and dirty, there booms on the ear a thunderous uproar, like the rending of hills. The roar comes like an avalanche. You feel the earth is shaking. Round a curve
surges the train. You notice the surge in those five seconds. The engine isn't running as a respectable engine should do. It is jumping and swaying, hanging over on one side, then on
the other, and then springing forward, with the great lamp glaring frightfully, and the cow-catcher coming straight at you.

What a mighty, air-tearing, earth-crashing din ! There is a sensation of pieces of sharp stick probing into your ears.  A kind of kinetoscope panorama of all your wrong-doings sweeps through your mind, and you wish you had been a better man. Then with a lurch backwards you make a dent in the ice, and, being an arrant coward, you close your eyes as the proper way to meet your fate. There is a hot rush of air, oily and sickly ; you know you are being choked, that an earthquake is on,
that the end of your small strut on this earth's stage is near.

Gingerly you raise your eyelids. The air is full of sulphur and small stones. The cars are tearing and rumbling by with deafening din. You realize how perilously near they are. Also you notice that the rail metals sink beneath the weight of every wheel. You are certain that it takes three-quarters of an
hour for that train to roll past. You wonder why you have not been killed.

Then through the murky, smoky atmosphere you crawl, splash through the dirt, and ride gently till a big sleeper pitches you into the mire, and so on hour by hour.

Now and then we climbed outside the sheds. The great silent hills lay wrapped in snow and sunshine. The only vegetation was the sullen pine. The stillness was absolute. The great white silent world was very beautiful.

That first afternoon in the sheds we raised our altitude thousands of feet, and we stopped for the night at a town called Cisco. It consists of a station, a telegraph office, and one house. We were over 6000 feet up. The snowfall in Cisco in the winter months varies from fourteen to nineteen feet.

Early in the -morning we went back- to the shelter of the snowsheds. Between the metals was ice, and riding was done cautiously. It was cold. Right on- the top of the Sierra Nevada is a station appropriately called Summit. Here the snow was three feet.  Men were wrapped in furs and going
about on snow-shoes.

We went' on, but slowly. The caked ice was treacherous, and there were one or two nasty spills. From the roof the water spurted in torrents, drenching us.

Worst of all was nearly three miles of tunnel. As a matter of fact, there were seven tunnels in this short distance, and they nearly all curved. We went through them in pitch darkness. The horrors of the snowsheds were increased a hundredfold. Before entering we waited a second, listening for a coming train. As there was no sound, in we went. The understanding was that if a train came along we were to throw ourselves on one side and lie down. Of course we walked. It was impossible to see. We knew where we were by progressing with one foot on the metals.  No trains, however,
worried us.

Reaching the sheds again, we could tell by the way our bicycles ran that we were spinning downhill. Soon we left the ice. The air became warm. Then out into the open we bumped, the beautiful open air with the country around still cloaked in snow, but the railway track clear and dry. And we had finished our forty miles' ride through the snowsheds. It was something.

All the rest of the day we rode over the railway track winding among the mountains and by the side of the noisy Truckee river. It was a gaunt land. Night saw us in a tiny French colony called Verdi. The little inn was French, even to having no spoons to the salt-cellars ; and the emigrant sons
of Normandy and Brittany were sitting round little tables playing dominoes and drinking absinthe.

A rough and dusty wagon road, running through a country that appeared to grow nothing but sagebrush, led us early the next day to Reno. It was just what a far western Nevada town should be. It was a jumble of wooden shanties in all stages of prosperity and decay planted on an immensity of
sand. There was a general appearance of makeshift about the buildings; they were just boards knocked together anyhow. What streets there were wide and fearfully dusty. The sun beat down with a white heat, and all the world around was parched. There wasn't a linen collar in the town.

Everybody wore flannel shirts, not red, but dark blue or black. The slouch hat was universal, not dented i la Hamburg, but high-crowned and perched far back on the
head. The young men swaggered about and blasphemed and chewed tobacco and salivated ; the old men, droop-shouldered and bearded, ambled about on sorry little horses, looking as
though the sun had baked all the life out of them.