Pioneer Faith & History

A child looks up as the adults sing. Worn clothing and muddy ground tell of a difficult day; their gathered voices offer companionship before another morning on the trail.

William Clayton wrote the hymn in April 1846 during the exodus from Nauvoo. Listen to its words beside the accounts of hardship on the trail. How can a song give people courage to continue together?

Read Doctrine and Covenants 136:28–29. The Lord’s counsel at Winter Quarters gives a place to singing in joy and praying in sorrow. What song helps you turn toward Him?

A mother and child share a glance as their family walks beside the wagon. The road still stretches ahead.

In Ether 12:4, faith in God opens a hope that steadies the soul. As you listen, remember both the people who reached a new home and those whose journeys ended along the way.

Consider one small way to strengthen someone who is still in the middle of a hard journey. Continue with faith in trials and Elizabeth’s story.

Cold water surges around the handcart as weary travelers climb toward the bank. The Savior bends to help push, His attention on the man beside Him; heavenly helpers share the effort. Consider the love and strength we seek from Him in suffering.

The Martin and Hodgetts companies crossed the North Platte on October 19, 1856, as the first winter storm struck. Read the official timeline for their journey. This devotional picture invites us to reflect on the Savior’s sustaining love.

Dallyn Vail Bayles sings Orson F. Whitney’s hymn text in Rob Gardner’s musical setting, with violinist Jenny Oaks Baker and the Lyceum Philharmonic. The published hymn pairs Whitney’s words with a different tune by Harry A. Dean. This recording is offered here as a devotional companion to the pioneer stories.

Read Matthew 25:35–40, the Savior’s teaching about feeding, clothing, and welcoming people in need. Then read Mosiah 24:14–15, where He strengthens a people to bear their burdens.

As you listen, consider where you need the Savior’s healing and how gratitude might shape your next act of kindness. Continue in the Atonement of Jesus Christ study.

The departure from Nauvoo began with wagons ferried across the Mississippi on February 4, 1846. Families gathered at Sugar Creek in Iowa, carrying provisions and belongings into an uncertain future. When the camp moved west on March 1, the journey was only beginning: the Missouri River, not the Salt Lake Valley, would become that year’s stopping place.

Leaving home is more than a line on a map. Consider what a family could carry, what it had to leave, and the help it would need from its neighbors.

Rain, flooded streams and deep mud slowed the companies across Iowa. A wagon could carry a household’s necessities and still become a burden in a difficult crossing. Reaching the Missouri River took months; the hoped-for journey west unfolded through delays, illness and repeated work.

Faith did not make the mud disappear. This scene invites us to notice patient effort and the ordinary hands that keep another family moving.

At Garden Grove and Mount Pisgah, pioneers established farms and stopping places to help later travelers. Some stayed to plant while others continued. Their service reached beyond their own immediate company: shelter and food prepared today could sustain a family arriving later.

At Winter Quarters, the revelation now recorded in Doctrine and Covenants 136 joined the practical organization of travel with care for people in need. Read Doctrine and Covenants 136:8–9 and consider whose journey your preparation might lighten.

For Elizabeth Crook Panting, the plains came after an Atlantic crossing. She sailed on the Thornton with Christopher and Jane. Her brother Samuel Lane Crook was also aboard; Peter Madsen’s diary records his marriage to Sarah Haines during the voyage. Samuel and Sarah stayed in the East and did not make the Willie company’s overland journey with Elizabeth.

The family also remembered a fire aboard ship: Elizabeth alerted the captain and prayed with her children. This episode comes through the family history gathered in Tell My Story, Too, rather than a ship’s log examined for this page.

The Willie company journal records making tents, building carts, preparing wagons and weighing luggage. Its July entries also record births, deaths, worship and ordinary tasks such as washing clothing. Emigration was already demanding before the company began its passage across the plains on July 15.

The same journal makes daily travel tangible: an early bugle, breakfast, prayers, greasing carts, packing tents and another stretch of road. These were people meeting practical needs while caring for one another.

Handcarts offered a less expensive way to reach Utah, with emigrants pulling limited belongings in wooden carts. Ten companies traveled this way from 1856 through 1860. Most did not suffer the catastrophe of the late Willie and Martin companies. Their experience should not be confused with every handcart journey.

At Florence, the question of continuing so late in the season was serious. The dated rescue overview below includes Levi Savage’s warning and the companies’ separate departures. Families listen together beside a waiting cart during a camp discussion.

Elizabeth Crook Panting began the overland journey with Christopher, five, and Jane, one. Christopher turned six on the way west; Elizabeth turned twenty-nine in October. Their names give the migration an intimate scale: a mother, a young boy and a baby, traveling toward a hoped-for home. The Church’s historical database records all three in the Willie company.

Christopher later recalled that his father, Frederick, opposed Elizabeth’s Church participation, threatened her and hid her shoes. He remembered her borrowing shoes for worship and leaving with the children; on a train, another woman exchanged clothing with her to help her avoid recognition. These details survive as his family recollection.

As food dwindled on the trail, the family account remembers Elizabeth going out to gather buffalo chips for fuel. She had nearly filled her apron when an unfamiliar man approached and asked about her situation. She told him of the hunger in camp. He offered help and led her over a small hill.

The remembered encounter begins with ordinary work for a family’s survival. Neither an exact date nor a securely identified cave location is supplied by the principal family account.

Elizabeth followed the man to a cave where dried buffalo meat was hanging. He filled her apron with meat and instructed her to share it with others in need. After showing her the direction back to camp, he was gone. When she turned to thank him, she could no longer find either the man or the cave. The meat remained in her apron.

This is the miracle as the family remembered it. The illustration leaves the stranger unidentified, as we do here. The account does not establish that he was Christ, an angel or a particular scriptural person.

Elizabeth returned and distributed the meat to people who needed food. In the family’s telling, the blessing reached beyond her own children. Jennie Edith Bell Mason’s later biography, preserved in the Church History Library, also records the cave, the dried meat and her return to the company.

Her journey still required endurance. The family remembered Jane becoming dangerously ill in the handcart. Mason’s biography describes the children sheltered in a rescue wagon during the Rocky Ridge ordeal while Elizabeth walked. Mother and children reached Salt Lake City with the Willie company on November 9.

On October 5, Brigham Young called for teams, wagons, flour and men to bring in the emigrants still on the plains. Wilford Woodruff’s journal records the concrete scale of the appeal: sixty teams, twelve tons of flour and forty additional teamsters. Concern for distant travelers became an assignment requiring immediate preparation and sacrifice.

The call invites a direct question for disciples of Jesus Christ: what does another person need from me now? Read Matthew 25:35–40 beside this appeal for food, clothing and willing hands.

Women gathered bedding, clothing and other supplies while rescuers traveled east. Lucy Meserve Smith remembered the work of women in Provo to comfort those in need. Their service continued as survivors arrived; one delivery of food could not meet every need.

Salt Lake City was still warm when the first appeal was made. The first relief company left on October 7, before the storm caught the emigrants on October 19. Further appeals and supplies sustained the rescue over the following weeks.

Relief did not instantly restore exhausted bodies. Daniel W. Jones later remembered rescuers bringing fuel, distributing provisions and encouraging the Willie emigrants. Some were already beyond recovery. The company still faced Rocky Ridge, a long, exposed crossing remembered for terrible suffering and loss.

The dated overview records the crossing and the burials at Rock Creek. Remembering rescue also means remembering those who did not survive. Alma 7:11–12 directs our faith toward a Savior who knows suffering, rather than treating survival as a measure of anyone’s righteousness.

The Martin company crossed the North Platte as the October 19 storm struck. It would be October 28 before express riders reached them, and October 31 before supply wagons arrived. In November they sheltered in the cove near Devil’s Gate, still suffering hunger, cold and exhaustion.

Jones identified Joseph A. Young, Abel Garr and himself as the riders sent to find the remaining companies. He also remembered helping pull exhausted families into camp. Later, baggage was stored at Fort Seminoe so wagons could carry people; Jones and others stayed to guard that property through winter.

In a reminiscence recorded in 1891, Ephraim Hanks described a repeated nighttime call to help the handcart travelers. When a later appeal for volunteers came, he recalled answering, “I am ready now!” He was thirty in 1856 and joined the later rescue effort; he was not one of the riders who first reached Martin on October 28.

Hanks remembered praying for a buffalo, finding one, and killing another the next day. He loaded his horses with meat and brought it to hungry families. He also recalled caring for the sick and administering priesthood blessings, including a healing near Fort Bridger. His testimony includes miraculous help alongside the lasting effects of frostbite.

As the Martin company approached Salt Lake City on November 30, Brigham Young asked residents to receive the newcomers into comfortable family homes and provide careful nursing and nourishment. The rescue was not complete at the city boundary. Its next work belonged in kitchens, sickrooms and households willing to share what they had.

The Willie company had arrived on November 9. For Elizabeth and her children, the overland journey ended with all three alive. We remember their arrival alongside the grief of neighbors whose families had been broken by death.

Years later, Jane was visiting a daughter in Pocatello when she attended a Mother’s Day church meeting. An elderly man recalled being a hungry boy in the Willie company. He remembered a woman sharing dried meat that she had received miraculously. Jane wept and told him that woman was her mother.

Jane later told her niece, June Cranney Monson, about this encounter. For Jane, whose mother’s account had sometimes been ridiculed, his recollection was a treasured second witness. Jane had been a baby on the trek; this is her later encounter with a recipient of the food, not a claim that she witnessed the cave herself. The surviving account does not name the man or date the meeting.

On May 10, 1869, the transcontinental lines met at Promontory Summit. Railroad travel changed the journey west that wagons and handcarts had once made over many months. The waiting family and passenger train bring that change in travel into view.

Elizabeth’s later life continued in Logan. The family history records marriages to William Wilkes and Hiram K. Cranney and remembers her enduring trust in God. She died on March 15, 1891, aged sixty-three. Jane and Christopher carried the family’s memories into another generation.

The winter departure from Nauvoo began a long migration shaped by uncertainty, sacrifice, and faith. Families crossed the Mississippi River carrying what they could preserve from homes they were leaving behind.

A family moves beside its wagon through a cold, uncertain landscape. They are leaving Nauvoo behind, carrying loss, determination and the hope that their westward journey will lead to safety.

Winter Quarters became a major temporary settlement where the Saints built homes, organized companies, worshipped, and prepared for the journey west. Illness, exposure, and grief made the winter especially difficult.

Families and neighbors build together at Winter Quarters because survival depends upon shared labor. Their preparation through a season of grief and endurance helped make the organized 1847 migration possible.

Travel across the plains included far more than forward movement. Each day required cooking, caring for children and animals, repairing equipment, finding water, and preparing camp.

The different tasks in the scene show the ordinary labor behind the migration. Progress depended on practical skill, cooperation, and the repeated choice to continue one day at a time.

Much of the overland route followed river corridors that provided water, grass, and a recognizable path across the plains. Pioneer companies often traveled in organized groups rather than as one unbroken line.

The separated wagons and broad landscape emphasize the scale and distance of the journey. The Platte River corridor connected camps, landmarks, and difficult stretches along the westward trail.

River crossings demanded careful judgment and coordinated labor. Travelers had to guide animals, protect supplies, manage wagons, and respond to changing water and weather conditions.

People crowd around the wagon as it enters the cold river. Every steadying hand matters, revealing both the danger of the crossing and the pioneers' dependence upon one another.

Between 1856 and 1860, thousands of Latter-day Saint emigrants traveled west in handcart companies. Their smaller carts limited what families could carry and required travelers to supply much of the power themselves.

A family leans together into the weight of a handcart. Their journey would demand preparation and endurance, and for some it would also bring terrible loss, rescuing hands and lasting faith.

When late handcart companies encountered severe winter conditions in 1856, relief parties traveled from Utah with food, clothing, wagons, and teams. Their aid saved lives, though many pioneers had already suffered terribly.

Rescuers place food, blankets and supplies into waiting hands. The human care at the center of the moment answers tragedy with the disciples' urgent determination to go out and help.

After months of travel, members of the advance company entered the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847. Arrival did not end their work; it began the immediate tasks of planting, irrigation, shelter, and preparation for others still coming.

A couple looks across the valley with relief, uncertainty and new responsibility before them. Their destination is not a finished refuge; it is a place where homes, crops and a community must now be built.

The pioneers began organizing irrigation, shelter, food production, roads, and community life soon after arriving. Settlement required sustained effort from people with different skills and responsibilities.

Neighbors work side by side, preparing a place to live as more travelers enter the valley. Reaching their destination was only the beginning of making a home.

Construction of the Salt Lake Temple began in 1853 and continued for forty years before its dedication in 1893. The project endured interruptions, engineering challenges, and changes in building methods.

Workers shape stone as the temple walls slowly rise. Four decades of sacrifice turned their labor into a lasting expression of worship, covenant and devotion to Jesus Christ.