Yeager Timbimboo

Historical sources are unclear as to when or where Yeager Timbimboo was baptized. George Washington Hill recorded the name “ag gy” (which Hill later revised to Yag-y in 1876) in his list of Shoshone baptized in the Bear River on 5 May 1873, possibly an early example of the name Yeager. However, when Yeager received his endowment in 1875, the Endowment House clerk wrote that Yeager had been baptized in 1874. When Yeager addressed General Conference on 6 April 1926, he recalled: “In my younger days I was sent with others to this country towards the west in search of a Great Spirit. But I have found that the Spirit of the Lord is among this people. While in search of the Great Spirit, the company of Indians traveled by foot day and night, and endured hardships, hunger and thirst. When we did reach our destination in the West, we found it was the elders of this Church, and we were baptized by those elders.” Yeager's granddaughter Mae Timbimboo Parry later suggested that “the West” was Ibapah, a Goshute community near the Utah-Idaho border and that Yeager's journey took place after three spiritual beings visited Sagwitch and Echupwy (John Moemberg) in 1872. It is possible that Yeager was baptized at Ibapah and then rebaptized--a common nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint practice--with his people in the Bear River.