Transcript

The next day we left for Liverpool, Mother, Father, Catherine and I. My brother and one sister remained in Sweden and were opposed to Mormonism. I was thirteen years old. . . . We came to St. Louis, then by steamboat to Florence and waited two weeks for the ox-teams to get ready for our long journey. The captain of our company was Brother Murdock. We prayed night and morning and were told to go to bed early. This we were glad to do as we were tired after our long day's travel. We always had a short service on Sunday. Another family shared our wagon. One old couple and a young woman with dropsy were allowed to ride, but the rest walked every step of the way. We had fairly good food and saved a small piece of dough which we would wash out and use as yeast to rise the next batch. We mixed every night and baked in the morning. The last part of our journey we passed graves almost every day and one day we passed eleven all in a row. We often saw wagon trains of people going to Calif. for the gold.

Once a terrible wind storm came up in the night and we held fast to our bedding and tents. Another day the rain soaked us and our clothing which we tried to dry at night by campfire. It was hard to find wood as many trains had taken the wood close by. A few owned their own outfits. Our wagon had two teams of oxen on it. Annie, a twenty year old girl, was a great companion of mine. We would often walk together and one day we stopped to pick some flowers that grew in a hollow and were left a long distance behind. We saw several Indians riding toward us and one shot an arrow at us but it did not hit us. We hid, lying flat under the bushes and grass. The Indians looked everywhere for us and then rode away.

We passed a camp of soldiers before we got to Echo Canyon. I remember Devil's Gate. We passed Fort Douglas and soon after was in Salt Lake City. It was early autumn in 1862 [1863] and saints were harvesting their crops. We stayed in the tithing yard three days then moved to Logan in the company of Hogensens to our relatives living there.