"But amid the wreck and ruin that came upon him in cumulative degree, from year to year, Sutter managed to save, for a period, what is known as Hock farm, a very extensive and valuable estate on the Feather River. This estate he proposed to secure as a resting-place in his old age, and for the separate benefit of his wife and children, whom he had brought from Switzerland in 1852, having been separated from them eighteen years. Sutter's titles being generally discredited, his vast flocks and herds having dwindled to a few head, and his resources being all gone, he was no longer able to hire labor to work the farm; and as a final catastrophe, the farm mansion was totally destroyed by fire in 1865, and with it all General Sutter's valuable records of his pioneer life. As difficulties augmented, Hock farm became incumbered with mortgages, and ultimately it was swallowed up in the general ruin." For some years he received a small allowance from the State of California; but after a time this appropriation expired, and was never thereafter renewed. The later years of the pioneer's life were passed at Litiz, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and his time was devoted to endeavoring to obtain from Congress an appropriation of $50,000, as compensation for the expenditures he made for the relief of the early settlers of California. His death occurred at Washington, D. C., on the eighteenth day of June, 1880, and his remains were laid at rest in Litiz, Pennsylvania. The termination of this grand, heroic life, under circumstances of abject poverty and destitution, forms as strange and mournful a story as can be found in the annals of the present age. In concluding this chapter, it may not be inappropriate to quote from a private letter written by Mrs. S. O. Houghton, nee Eliza P. Donner, immediately after the General's death. It aptly illustrates the feeling entertained toward him by the members of the Donner Party. Writing from San Jose, she says: