Transcript

...On Jan. 20, 1849 I and my brother William and the lady who later became my wife and her sister left our fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters and friends and started for Utah.

On Feb. 3, 1849, the ship Henry Ware moved out of Liverpool docks with between 225 and 250 passengers. As we started out of the docks we all joined in singing, "Yes My Native Land I Love Thee, All they scenes I love them well." We then moved into the river and cast anchor and ate a good dinner at about 2 o'clock. Then the tugboat took us up the river into the Irish Sea and left us about 4 o'clock. [p.1] At that time a two cent loaf of bread would have served us all for supper.

Then for a week they were all sick but two of us, Thomas Harward and myself. As soon as our president got around to it he organized the company and put me in as head teacher and also to assign me to attend the commissary to deal out sugar, flour, and tea. Berry Bucket and Walter James were my helpers.

On Feb. 18, 1849 I was married to Mary Ann Beard. Robert Martin, the president married us. After a very rough voyage we landed at New Orleans on the 8th of April 1849. During the voyage we had one death, one birth and one marriage. The child was named Henry Ware Combs. But of all places to act as a teacher it is on board a ship.

The next day I and my brother William went to work on a steamboat, "The Grand Turk," and worked our passage up to St. Louis where we stayed until 1851. As soon as I got there I began acting as a teacher. N.H. Felt was president of the St. Louis branch.

On the 19th of May 1850 there was the most destructive fire I ever saw. Millions of dollars worth of property was destroyed.

As soon as I got settled down, which was in three days, I went to work at the gas light works. Here I worked with five other men for over a year. In March 1850 I sent money to help father, mother and brother John and they came over that spring in June. We went to Council Bluffs. Then we went to farming like all the other Englishmen. We got along some way and raised some corn. In the fall I and my brother William went over the Missouri River to work for Mr. McKinney, who kept prospecting school for Indians. We worked there all fall and chopped cord wood and split rails all winter.

In the winter of 1851 or 52 Brother Ezra T. Benson, one of the twelve apostles, came and counseled all to get together to move to Salt Lake the next spring. So father and I went to work to get our, but it looked rather gloomy as we had nothing to start with, but we went to work and asked the Lord to help us and by the last of June we were ready to start. There were some ten or twelve families around where we lived and we all started to Ether and crossed the Missouri River on July 4th 1852.

On the 8th of July we organized into a company of 64 wagons with Henry Miller as our captain and Apostle Orson Hyde as president of the company in all things... [p.2]

...We arrived in Salt Lake City Sept. 28th 1852... [p.3]

[Transcript originally found on the Saints by Sea database]