The story has been told many times of Mary Fielding Smith’s journey across the plains to the Great Salt Lake Valley. In the many retellings, she crossed the Plains as a widowed mother, blessed a sick ox, and reached the Salt Lake Valley ahead of the perhaps villainous captain of the wagon train.
Over the years writers have occasionally questioned whether Joseph F. Smith’s childhood memories of the plains crossing were accurate.[1] And rightly so! Joseph F. Smith’s father was murdered when he was five and his mother died when he was thirteen. Orphaned children, or children who otherwise live through severe trauma, may not form accurate childhood memories.
When Mary Fielding Smith left Winter Quarters with her large household in 1848, she was in the Heber C. Kimball Wagon Company. Church leaders divided each company into groups led by Captains of Fifty and Captains of Ten. Cornelius Lott was the Captain of Ten for a group including Mary’s household. According to the stories, she had problems getting from Winter Quarters to the staging ground at the Elk Horn River. In one retelling:
The man who supervised the cattle in the company [Cornelius Lott] urged Mary to stay behind, saying, “If you start out in this manner, you will be a burden on the company the whole way, and I will have to carry you along or leave you on the way.”
Undaunted, Sister Smith told him, “I will beat you to the valley and will ask no help from you either.”[2]
Cornelius Lott had a reputation elsewhere of being reasonable and close to Joseph Smith, which led to questions about this memory. Was Lott really that ornery toward Mary Fielding Smith?[3]
I’ve been reading the records of Winter Quarters and noticed that there was indeed a contentious history between Mary Fielding Smith and Cornelius Lott.
Keeping cattle safe and out of crops caused no end of grief at the refugee camps at Winter Quarters on the Omaha Nation. The Winter Quarters High Council governed the settlement. They regularly discussed cattle, stray cattle, and the killing of cattle by the nearby Indigenous people. In a meeting on December 18, 1847, police chief Hosea Stout reported on the stray cattle held in the Stray Yard. He also reported on “Father Lot’s Cattle destroying Hyrum’s W[id]o[w]s Corn.”[4] The destruction of the corn meant to feed a large extended family was not a minor problem if the police chief was bringing it before the High Council.
Hosea Stout appears to have held a dim view of Lott’s ability to handle strife. In a May 1847 meeting with the Omaha, he was greatly concerned when Lott reacted to Omaha leader Young Elk “with very hostile & what I considered unreasonable feelings.” He was more impressed with Young Elk’s negotiating skills and relieved when “Br Lott’s wrath abated.”[5]
When the High Council met on December 18, Brigham Young had already been to the Great Salt Lake Valley and returned to Winter Quarters. He listened to Stout’s report about the destruction of the corn and “instructed [High] Co[unselor Joseph] Fielding to prefer a charge against [Lott] before this Hi[gh] Council.”[6]
Hosea Stout reported about the meeting: “Went to Council … Called up some stray pen poleticks &ac. &c.”[7] And that’s all I’ve found about the incident. It’s not much of a story by itself but it does provide supporting evidence for Joseph F. Smith’s memory.
Notes
[1] See, for example, Lavina Fielding Anderson, “Mary Fielding Smith: Her Ox Goes Marching On,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 14, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 91–100.
[2] Jane McBride Choate, “Mary Fielding Smith—Mother in Israel,” Friend, July 1993, link.
[3] Amusingly, the Lott family has memorialized their ancestor as the wagon train captain who tried to dissuade Mary Fielding Smith from crossing the Plains. “Cornelius Peter Lott: Life Sketch,” FamilySearch Family Tree, link. For more information on Lott, see Gary S. Ford, “Cornelius P. Lott and His Contribution to the Temporal Salvation of the Latter-Day Saint Pioneers Through the Care of Livestock” (Provo, Utah Brigham Young University, 2005), BYU Scholars Archive, link.
[4] There is a vanishingly small possibility that the anecdote meant Mercy Fielding Thompson Smith Taylor, Mary’s sister and a plural wife of Hyrum Smith, but by this time she had remarried John Taylor as a plural wife. She had no children with Smith, so was unlikely to be mentioned as “Widow Smith” in this setting. The two sisters are buried next to each other, and only Mary’s gravestone identifies her as the widow of Hyrum Smith. December 18, 1847, Winter Quarters Municipal High Council Records, 1846–1848, CR 100 318, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.
[5] Hosea Stout, On the Mormon Frontier: The Diary of Hosea Stout, 1844–1861, ed. Juanita Brooks (Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press; Utah State Historical Society, 1964), i:257.
[6] Joseph Fielding was Mary Fielding Smith’s brother and a member of the High Council. December 18, 1847, Winter Quarters Municipal High Council Records.
[7] As used by Stout elsewhere, “poleticks” (politics) meant problems. Stout, i:291.
This is extraordinary, Amy, thank you for sharing it here. In isolation, it may not seem like the most dramatic or memorable story — but its importance goes so far beyond its value as story. This sort of detail fills in the background to Mary Fielding’s story, Joseph F.’s memory, the whole wider pioneer story: this reminds us that people of the past are people, with passions entirely like ours. This is why he did that; this is why she said this — understandings that can be hard to pin down after all this time. You did it!
Excellent. I had wondered about this, too, especially given the, um, “circumstances” around the ox healing story. Really helpful.
Cornelius Lott is my great, great, great-grandfather. He was indeed a man of unwavering opinions and strong action, stubborn, obdurate, and not inclined to compromise. His loyalty to Joseph Smith was deep and unwavering. I firmly believe his concern for Mary and her family was genuine. Truth be told, she was not adequately prepared to make the trek and was a burden on the rest of the company.
Yes, she did beat Cornelius into the Valley, but the full story isn’t quite as faith-promoting as the legend. Cornelius helped her wagon across the last obstacle (a creek?) on the trail. Instead of remaining with the company, she took off down the canyon by herself while Cornelius assisted others. When he had done his duty, he followed the rest of the company into the valley.
Cornelius was not a particularly pleasant fellow. (The stories I could tell!) But neither was he the demon young Joseph Fielding Smith painted him.
I love the humanity of it. Hosea Stout is a name I’ve heard, but now I’m interested in knowing more about him. It must have been difficult to defuse conflicts in as difficult an environment as Winter Quarters was.
Hosea Stout is one of my favorites. Over the years I have found him to be a reliable narrator. Juanita Brooks’s transcript and annotation of his diaries is a masterpiece.
He was a lawyer and wrote in his diary in 1858 about another lawyer: “Mr B— having eaten nearly a whole rooster for breakfast this morning appeared in court quite well and ready to crow…”
Great stuff, Amy.
Thoroughly enjoyed reading the story and all the comments. Pioneers were indeed human, emotional, endured so much, and I love learning about them. I don’t have pioneer ancesters but I certainly benefit from what they did and I claim them!
Amy, you got me thinking. I assume JFS is the source for this story. He was what? 9 or 10 at the time of the event? So he must be drawing on his mother’s own story. I wonder if Mary ever told the story to anyone else, or even in print? I wonder when JFS first recounted this story in public or in print? I wonder if his version changed over time? It’s not at all surprising that in JFS’s telling, his mother is the winner. But as other commenters have pointed out, history is complicated, and memory and history do not always go hand in hand.
Those are all great questions, Gary. This was far enough outside my reason for reading the records that I haven’t looked into much of that besides what I’ve written above. I have, however, formed many opinions over the years about other family and community stories and whether they are supported or contradicted by historical evidence. The mention of “Father Lot’s Cattle destroying Hyrum’s W[id]o[w]s Corn” turned out to be an intriguing datapoint into questions of the transmission of memory.
If there was a Captain of Fifty, then there were presumably at least 4 other Captains of Ten that Mary could have been assigned to. Whose idea was it to assign her to the guy she in essence sued before the High Council? Or were grievances so widespread that it would have been impossible to find a leader with whom she didn’t have one?
This raises a question I’ve never thought about: I wonder how overland companies were organized, in general. I’d welcome pointers from anyone to articles (or whatever) that explore the appointments of leaders at all levels, and the assignment of individual wagons into companies. What governed this in 1848 likely changed through the years, like everything else.
We are unfortunately missing the middle part of the story between Brigham Young’s recommendation and the families setting off for the Elk Horn River.
As a general rule of thumb, the wards at Winter Quarters tended to be the units that moved westward together.
If anyone’s interested, here’s the page of the wagon roster that shows Mary and her extended family traveling west in 1848:
https://catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org/assets/41aac740-4a7f-4c35-94c2-da0b0a352e4f/0/4
Thanks, Amy. I hadn’t known that wards traveled together (and I recognize you say “rule of thumb” only). My own family left Winter Quarters with the 1848 emigration, so this tells me something about my family history. This goes a very long way toward explaining why Mary’s family was in that particular company and also, I suppose, why there had been opportunity in Winter Quarters for friction.