Transcript

Transcript for Johnson, Sixtus Ellis, [Autobiography], in A Voice From the Mountains: Life and Works of Joel Hills Johnson [1982], 247

I was captain of a company of 60 wagons which crossed the plains in 1861. The company was made up of people from the old country. They had to be taught everything. We certainly had a time when the oxen would stampede, scattering bedding, food and utensils right and left. When we camped at night, we formed a corral of the wagons to keep the cattle in. The bugle for rising sounded at 5 a.m. and the company was moving at 7 a.m. Some of the women gave me the blackest looks as they came running along behind the wagon with their kettles in one hands and their biscuits in their aprons, but I know what it would mean for the poorly clad immigrants to be caught in the mountain snows, so I hurried them along.

We camped on Saturday afternoons to wash and fix up the wagons, and we rested on Sundays. Some evenings after supper a violin was brought out and the time was spent in singing and dancing until the bugles sounded for the people to retire.

Do you suppose those people were unhappy to be going to a desert country, a land where the trapper said nothing would grow? No, they were usually cheerful! But one night some were dissatisfied and quarreling. So, taking a stick, I drew a line on the ground and said, "All who whant to follow me step on the right, and all who don't step on the left." They all stepped on the right. We had only two deaths in our company. A very old woman died and a boy was drowned. We arrived in Salt Lake just in time to escape the snows. Those same women who had given me such balck [black] looks now thanked me with tears in their eyes.