The 8 August 1871 issue of the Millennial Star published a tiny notice on a back page:

Information is wanted of George Drake, who left Bristol about the year 1850 for Salt Lake City. Address Henry Drake, 55 Milk street, Bristol.

A notice like that usually means that family in the old home have lost touch with someone who emigrated. In this case you have to wonder whether George Drake wrote home even once during the intervening 21 years, because it sounds like Henry wasn’t even sure George had made it all the way to Salt Lake City, much less that he had eventually settled in, say, American Fork or Manti, or perhaps moved on to California. If anyone did know George’s whereabouts in 1871, or perhaps the date or place of his death, let us hope that they wrote to Henry directly … because there is scarcely a trace of George in Utah records to hint at what became of him.

Scarcely a trace. Not “no trace.”

George appears on the emigration records of the British Mission as having sailed from Liverpool to New Orleans late in 1850. He was a sawyer (that is, a saw-er, one who worked in a sawmill) from Bristol, and so far as that record shows, he traveled without any family members – although he had been married since 1846 to Julia Restell. George would have arrived on the frontier too late to have crossed the Plains in 1850; he probably spent the winter working in or around St. Louis, then traveled West in the summer of 1851 (he does not appear on the pioneer rosters, however).

We know George did make it to Utah by 1851, though, because his wife Julia met him there the next year.

Julia sailed from Liverpool in January, 1852, arriving at the frontier in time to join the Abraham O. Smoot Company when it left Kansas City with 250 emigrants on June 1, 1852.

I see some notable names on the roster of the Smoot company. There’s Haden Wells Church, a missionary to Britain and to Tennessee who has figured several times in stories of the Tennessee Saints on the “Amateur Mormon Historian” blog.

There’s Christopher Layton, one of the great colonizers and businessmen of the first generation of Mormon settlers in Utah, Nevada and Arizona, and the man for whom the town of Layton, Utah was named.

There’s John Menzies Macfarlane, featured on Keepa years ago as the writer of the Christmas carol “Far, Far Away on Judea’s Plains.”

And there’s Julia Drake, age 32.

Smoot’s company was one of those remembered as a “cholera company” for the illness that killed so many of its members: Eliza Murdock, age 3; Franklin James, age 11 months; John Carmichael, age 58; Martha Cumberland, age 32; Peggy Duffin, age 56; William M. Reeves, age 5 months, the Brown family (father, mother, three children) … and on and on. 25 deaths. 10% of the entire company. It was a difficult, sad crossing. Christopher Layton took over leadership of the company when Abraham O. Smoot fell ill with the same dread cholera.

Julia Drake made it all right, though.

As the company approached the Salt Lake Valley, members of the settlement there came out to meet them in the mountains east of the Valley. George Drake was among them, coming to meet his wife.

You’d like to think it was a joyful meeting, wouldn’t you? Husband and wife, united again after two years, each of them having made his or her way separately to join the Saints in their western refuge. Their meeting was anything but joyful, though.

It is likely – we do not know for certain, but it is likely – that George immediately realized that Julia, whom he had not seen for so long, was pregnant.

John Menzies Macfarlane recorded in his diary that upon meeting Julia on the mountain trail, George Drake “beat his wife cruelly and dragged her upon the mountain behind a rock.”

Someone immediately reported this to the acting wagon master, Christopher Layton. “Bro Layton on learning this, went up to them and found Drake with his knife out and his wife lying upon the ground, bleeding profusely. Bro Layton charged him with this and Drake called him a damned liar.”

Christopher Layton took instant action … and he wasn’t the only one. According to Macfarlane, “Bro Layton then beat him with a stick and set the women and boys on him, who chased him ahead of the train with sticks and stones, and took his knife from him.”

And that is the last, so far, that is known of the actions or whereabouts of George Drake.

We know that two months after her arrival in the Valley, Julia Restell Drake married Thomas Winter as a plural wife. She had a baby in 1853 (if we knew the exact date of that birth, we could know for certain whether Julia was pregnant as she approached the Valley, and have a better understanding of George Drake’s unexpected violence toward her). Julia died giving birth to a second child in February 1854. That second child, named Julia for her mother, lived on into the mid-20th century, marrying Samuel H.B. Smith (a nephew of Joseph Smith), and raising a very large family of her own.

But George? We don’t know what happened to George, any more than his family back in Bristol knew what became of him.

Amy Tanner Thiriot discovered the facts of this story and sent them to me to use in this post. She is also working to straighten out the two pioneers’ listings on the Mormon Pioneer Overland Trail database. Thanks, Amy.