• Elijah traveled to Utah as a returning Mormon Battalion veteran. He was the Captain of 3rd Ten in the Jonathan H. Holmes/Samuel Thompson Company of 1848.

  It is likely he returned to Iowa to collect his family and then traveled in the Howard Egan Company (1849) with six people (likely his first 2 wives and 4 living children).

  In the 1850 Utah census he appears in both Great Salt Lake County and Iron County.

  He later participated as one of the rescuers that were sent out in the winter of 1856 to assist the members of the Church stranded in Wyoming.

Jonathan H. Holmes/Samuel Thompson Company (1848)

• Age at Departure: 38

Howard Egan Company (1849)

• Age at Departure: 39
• Head of Household

Rescue Companies (1856)

• Age at Departure: 46

Sources

• 1850 Utah Census.
• "Died," Deseret News, 28 April 1880, 205.
• Elijah Elmer diary in "To the Tops of the California Mountains: The 1848 Carson Pass Diary of Elijah Elmer," edited by Will Bagley, Crossroads Newsletter 4, no. 3 (summer 1993): 5-7.
• Journal History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 7 August 1849, 3.
• Journal History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Supplement after 31 December 1849, 13.
• Norma Baldwin Ricketts, The Mormon Battalion: U.S. Army of the West, 1846-1848 (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1996), 222-23.
• Norma Baldwin Ricketts, The Mormon Battalion: U.S. Army of the West, 1846-1848 (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1996), 23.
• Peter Olsen Hansen papers, circa 1869-1893, Journal, 1849 April-August.