Transcript

My mother joined the church in 1851, a year before I was born. We left England in April 1856 for Utah. I was then four years old and only a few outstanding incidents of the trip and our trek across the plains stand out in my memory.

The members of our family who made the journey were my father and mother and my sisters Mary, Sara and myself. Also my grandfather David Reeder, my uncle Robert Reeder and his [sister] Caroline. We sailed from Liverpool on May 4 1856 on the ship "Thornton." There were 764 saints on this ship and we were under the direction of James D. Willie. We arrived in New York on June 14, 1856.

While crossing the plains, I distinctly remember my father giving us rawhide to chew and we thought it was delicious. I also remember my older sister Mary, then eight years old, freezing her legs so badly that all the flesh came off and the bones were bandaged with raw buffalo meat which saved her legs, although she was always partially crippled. There was a doctor, not of our faith, who looked at her frozen feet that had carried her over a thougsand mile trail, pulling a hand cart in the James G. Willie Company and he said shaking his head: "I will take her feet off, one above the knee and one below - then she will live for a little while. That is all I can do with feet frozen as black as that." When she cried, being young and tired and sick, her mother stood up straight and said,. "If she dies, she dies with her feet on." She lived to be in her eighties and walked on those fee serving everyone and endured to the end.

Our little company of 100 kept dying of cholera. At one time 13 were buried in one grave. They dug a large round hole, put them in with their feet to the center and covered their faces with cloth and covered them with dirt. I remember my father lifting me up to look in the grave. Before they were out of sight of the grave the wild animals were howling over there [sic] graves. My grandfather died October 1, 1856, shortly before we reached the Salt Lake Valley. I remember Claudius Spencer as one of the company of men sent out to meet our wagon train. They insisted that mother and the other women burn practically everything we owned, including bedding, in order to make the loads lighter. We reached Salt Lake on November 9, 1856 after great suffering from exposure and lack of proper provisions.