In the spring of 1846, about 100 members of the Donner and Reed Wagon Train were stranded for several days by flood waters on the bank of the Big Blue River while waiting for the runoff to subside. Traveling with them was Sarah Keyes, James Reed's feeble and ill mother-in-law, who hoped to see her only son, Cadden Keyes, again at the Hudson's Bay Company trading post at Fort Hall on the Snake River after he had gone to Oregon several years earlier. Knowing she was failing and unlikely to survive the journey, she died in the dark morning hours of May 29, 1846, casting gloom over the camp. The men quickly made a coffin, dug a grave, and shaped a large gray stone into a tombstone engraved with her name, age, and date of death. Sarah Keyes died without fulfilling her hope, but she came to symbolize the pioneer spirit of America's westward movement, in which historians estimate that one in ten emigrants died en route as they faced a long, tedious, and sometimes dangerous journey into a wilderness with no hospitals, no grocery stores, no towns, and no second chances.