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of food and supplies, with 143 men including three black servants to do all the “chores”. It was different for those who followed, but for these first three, I’d say it was strictly de luxe. And those two kids! What a time they must have had.

The company struggled into the Great Salt Lake Valley from July 21-24 1847. Harriet is widely quoted as being very dissatisfied with the location. “We have traveled 1500 miles to get here, and I would willingly travel a thousand more to get where it looked as though a white man could live.” I suppose that in her capacity of self-appointed voice of the women of the church she felt it proper to make some complaint on general principles. It did her no good. The great majority of the people were content with Brigham Young’s “This is the right place.” Harriet had heard Samuel Brannan extol the beauties of California when they had met back along the trail. Maybe she valued that over the opinion of her son-in-law. Or it’s possible she was just out of sorts after riding so far in a pregnant condition. She gave birth to the first male white child in the valley September 26,1847, so she was probably seven months along when she arrived. According to her diary she had been ill a great part of the way. Her afflictions were called variously, Phthises, Pulmonary Tuberculosis, Consumption, and Asthma. Dr, Priddy Meeks on page 213 of Vol 10 Utah Historical Quarterly, says Case 6: In the first settling of the Salt Lake Valley. Lorenzo D. Young’s wife had the phthisic for twelve or fifteen years (Footnote says, consumption). She could not live in a crowded fort and had a house built some rods outside on higher ground. I gave her nothing but bitter root or Indian hemp root, and it cured her entirely. I think she had it no more. Ten or twelve years afterward she said she never had it any more after taking that medicine. That there is the thought that maybe the feelings between the men of the company and these three women may not have been so amicable after all. Just maybe every time they made up their beds, washed the dishes, prepared the food, or darned their socks they were sore at these generally uninvited guests. At least, of all the diaries written on the trip, not one even mentioned any one of these women for good or bad. They completely ignore them.

The dearth of females in the company was broken at about the half-way mark of their trip when the “Crow” party with 6 women joined them on June 4 1847. How they got along is not stated. Then five days after the
pioneer entrance, July 29 1847, the Pueblo detachment of the Mormon Battalion came in with the main body of the Mississippi emigrants, about 100 soldiers and about the same number of Mississippians. McGacin in the “Mormon Pioneers” says, “This increased the number in the valley to about 400 souls.” This must have included quite a few women. So the original three need no longer be lonesome for female companionship.

The original encampment of July 22-3-4 was on what is now State Street between first South and the City and County building Square. City Creek divided near the mouth of the canyon, one branch trending South and the other West. Early Monday morning the 26”, Harriet and Lorenzo, not liking their present situation, removed their outfit to a point on the West Fork about half a mile away. “Opposite the northeast corner of Temple Block” says Orson F. Whitney History of Utah, “There stood a solitary scrub oak, one of the few trees first visible in the valley. Beneath the scant shade of this exile of the forest he placed his covered wagon box and did all in his power to make a comfortable cozy little nook for his dejected wife, so badly dispirited over the treeless and desolate aspect of their new home. Later in the day Brigham Young and his party, passing on his way to the mountain decided that this was a better camping ground than the one occupied on the other fork, other wagons were therefore directed to remove to this vicinity, which, being done, it was thereforth known as the Upper Camp. In the neighborhood, a spot for a garden was selected and its cultivation immediately begun. Thus was Harriet’s effort for privacy thwarted.

The first order of activities after getting into the valley was to get food planted and roofs over their heads for next Winter. The first plowing and planting was on the 23rd and 24th. Building was a little later getting started, Whitney’s popular History of Utah page 42 says: These Battalion men (who came on the 29th built the first structure in the valley. It was a bowery in which to hold public meetings.” The footnote on this page reads: “The day the bowery was built two small camps of Indians, Utes and Shoshones, were trading at the camps on City Creek. A young Ute stole a horse from the Sboshones and traded it to one of the settlers for a rifle. When detected he refused to give up the gun, and a fight ensued between him and a Shoshone youth. They were separated, but not until the father of one of them had lashed both of the young fellows with a heavy thong of rawhide.
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