Sarah Bigler

Oscar Lyon’s autobiographical sketch indicates that the Lyons family traveled to the Salt Lake Valley in the Edward Hunter Company in 1850.  The family consisted of their mother, Sarah Bigler, and her children Oscar Fitzallen, Amanda Fitzallen, Caleb Washington, Jr., and Sarah Bigler.  According to a biography written about Caleb Washington Sr., he was killed in the explosion of the “Edward Bates” steamship while on the Mississippi River, where he was working as a deck hand, on 12 August 1848.  He was one of about 40 people who died in the accident.  Without her husband, Sarah traveled with her four children across the plains to the Salt Lake Valley.

Her birth date is confirmed by the record of her first rebaptism, which took place in Salt Lake City on 28 October 1850, and  in Salt Lake Seventeenth Ward records at the time of her later rebaptim on 21 March 1857.