Transcript

In the spring of 1857 we sailed up the Missouri river to Florence Nebraska. We stayed there a short time untill we started for Utah with the Christian Christiansen's hand cart company. When we had traveled a distance of about a hundred and twenty miles, to Loup Fork river we crossed over and camped on the west side in a cottonwood grove. The river was about a quarter of a mile wide at the ford, with quicksand bottom. If we stopped in the river the handcarts began to sink and was hard to get loose. That night step-mother [Karen Gottfredson] gave premature birth to a girl baby. The baby was blessed and named Platine [Gottfredson], for the Platte river of which the Loup Fork is a tributary. The baby died and was buried there. The company went on and lefy [left] us there. We placed step-mother on the hand-cart and pulled her back over the river and up north about a mile to a small settlement called Genoa. It was located near Beaver Creek where it empties into the Loup Fork river. Genoa had been settled that spring by a few "Mormon" families. There father [Jens Gottfredson] staked off a quarter section ofland joining the settlement. It was prairy [prairie] land, covered with buffalo grass about a foot high with hard stiff stems. In the side of a hill father built a dugout and covered it and left us there, and with the hand-cart went back to Omaha to get work. He had no chance to send us food and we got without. The people raised a little frosted com and some buckwheat which ripened. We got a little of that which we ground in a coffee mill and mixed with wild plums and sour grapes that grew plentiful along the Beaver creek and the Loup Fork river. We did hot see bread for more than a month. Later father sent us a sack of flour and some bacon which tided us over till we could get back to Omaha. In November mother hired a man with an ox team to take us back to Omaha. We were there till spring. There we heard of Johnston's army going to Utah to fight the "Mormons" The neighbors were kind to us and tried to persuade us from going to Utah.