Transcript

We cold [sold] all the grain we had and bought a team and wagon and started for the mountains. When we got onto the bottoms the cholera over took us about four oclock in the afternoon. My brother George died in one hour (June 28, 1850) after taking the disease. My sister Harriet [Paulina Dart] died the next morning about four o’clock, so we buried two, there away from any human habitation, on a little hill on the flat. Then we traveled on until within four miles of Fort Laramany [Laramie] here my mother [Lucy Ann Roberts Dart] died. Three out of our family since we had crossed the river. At the mouth of the Platt[e] river there was a stampede that night, a mule came from the Fort with a chain on or something of the kind so the cattle got scared and ran away and had a stampede, we used the broken chairs for a cover over our mother, she died July 6, 1850. She having been baptized before she died, and at her funeral was sung “And if we die before our journeys through all is well.” There were Elders from the mountains meet us there and administered to her the day before she died. Brother Terry and sister Leva Judd were the only ones that dared to help us an they were afraid of the cholera, our family being the first that took the cholera in our camp, but there was some fifteen that died in our camp after that. Soon after, we came into the bufflo country my father [John Dart] took quite sick and thought he might die and leave us all orphans. Elder [Newman Greenleaf] Blodget and others told him if he got baptized it would heal him, so he was baptized and was healed and came on to the Valley.