Mormons were not the only ones setting out across the continent in the middle of the 19th century, of course: there were all those ’49ers heading to the gold fields, and all those settlers aiming for the Oregon country, and plenty of others. As their destinations differed, so did their origins, and people who might otherwise never have met each other came together on the transcontinental highway.

One group of non-Mormon emigrants included Fannie Farley Kegley and her husband Lawson Kegley. Originally from Tennessee, the couple had met and married in Indiana, and in 1851 they, with their infant twins and the family of Fannie’s brother William, set out to find a new home in Oregon. “They got as far as Iowa,” Fannie’s daughter Elizabeth later recalled, “and saw the beautiful prairie. They said, ‘Here we will make our homes.’”

The two families chose their homesteads – they had first choice of all the best land, because there was virtually no one in the neighborhood. The Kegleys and Farleys were the first residents of what later became Osceola, Iowa. The Farley family lived in their covered wagon that first season, but Fannie Kegley needed something more – she was soon to give birth – so her husband built a crude log and sod shelter, with a sod chimney over a fireplace, for Fannie to live in.

A few years earlier, in 1846, as the Mormons left Nauvoo and struggled in a chaotic fashion to cross muddy Iowa, a group of seven Mormon families became separated from the main road and found themselves six miles south of where the Kegleys and Farleys would eventually build Osceola. Among the seven families was that of Emeline Jackson Langley and her husband Johnson Langley, and several of their children, who were teenagers and younger. The families made winter quarters there in Iowa, calling their rude settlement “Lost Camp,” and when spring came they put in a crop and began to make other improvements. The families would stay there for several years, until they had accumulated enough to be able to rejoin the body of the Saints and move on to the western valleys.

I don’t know much about Emeline Jackson Langley. She had been born in 1799 in western New York, and so was about 50 during her years at Lost Camp. Emeline and Johnson had moved from New York to Michigan, and it was probably in Michigan when they heard the gospel and were baptized in 1841. They gathered almost immediately to Nauvoo, where their names appear on a census. They may not have been able to go to the temple there, because they were sealed in the Endowment House later in Utah.

Beyond these few genealogical facts, I have been unable to find personal information about Emeline – what attracted her to the gospel, or how she felt about pioneering, or what she thought of her eventual Utah home. Her descendants have recorded no life sketch in Family Search. Her name does not appear in the Deseret News. I have located no picture of her in any of the usual pioneer sources.

But one person did pass on her knowledge of one act performed by Emeline in the late fall of 1851, near Osceola, Iowa.

Fannie Kegley went into labor in that rude log-and-sod shelter built by her husband, with its dirt floor and sod chimney, on October 27, 1851. There was no doctor in the neighborhood. There was no other adult woman in her family to help. But there was Emeline Jackson Langley, six miles away in Lost Camp. And Emeline came.

“An old Mormon woman cared for mother and me,” the child born that day recorded many years later. “She was one … that had become stranded here on their trek to Utah.”

The next spring, in 1852, the Langleys packed up their wagon and left Iowa to cross the Plains with the James C. Snow wagon company. They eventually settled in Lehi … and then disappear from the usual sources of Mormon history.

But Fannie Farley Kegley remembered Emeline, and she told her daughter Elizabeth the name of the “old Mormon woman” who had helped to deliver her. Elizabeth Kegley Foster remembered Emeline’s name – her last name, at least – and recorded it in an autobiographical memoir. Elizabeth died in 1944.

In 1951, when Osceola celebrated its centennial, the local newspaper published a few hundred words from Elizabeth’s memoir, including the fact that “an old Mormon woman cared for mother and me.” And now 65 years after that, the newspaper comes to light again, preserving a record of human kindness offered by one woman to another.

If that act is the only earthly memorial to the goodness of Emeline Jackson Langley, it is enough.