Transcript

We camped out about twelve miles from the river, on a place they called Sugar Creek. We camped there about three weeks, waiting for the rest of the Saints to come so they could organize the companies. Then President Young organized the companies, and we started on. The traveling was awful. On account of the mud and storms, we sometimes could not travel more than a mile or two in a day. We had ox-teams, some had horses. We came as far as the Missouri River and there we stayed all winter. They called this place, Winter Quarters. There, my whole family was sick with the chills and fever, and there, my mother died in a wagon-box on the ground. There were hundreds of people camped at Winter Quarters.

Our supplies that we brought from Nauvoo became very scarce so that everybody donated everything that they could spare. Mother donated two feather beds; Father [Charles Shumway] donated his best suit of clothes and a chest. This chest was filled with donations from the compnay, and it was sent to Missouri to buy corn. They ground the corn and we live on cornmeal all that first summer. That is what caused so much sickness, not having any vegetables, nothing but corn meal and cornbread to eat. That was the hardest time we had coming to Utah. We didn’t even have such a hard time coming across the plains.

Father was called to go with the First Company with President Young, and he had had the chills all winter. President Young came past our camp one day while we were in Winter Quarters, in his carriage, and told Father he wanted him to go with him, but father was too weak to harness his team and said he would have to take his son along to help him, but if he did that, there would be nobody left to take care of his family, and get them on the way, west. Father found a man whose named was Byrd who wanted to go West, but had no way of transporation. When Byrd found that we had no driver for our wagon, he offered to drive our team of oxen. Father and brother Andrew, left with President Young’s company for the West, leaving his second wife, Louisa Minerly [Shumway], my youngest sister, and myself [Mary Eliza Shumway] to follow with the man, Byrd. One week after my father left us, my younger sister died of Black Canker.

Part of the time while crossing the plains, we traveled four wagons abreast for protection from the Indians. There were one-hundred and forty-four people in the first company of pioneers, and they reached Salt Lake Valley on the 24th of July and commenced plowing.