David Patten Kimball: He Waded the Icy Sweetwater to Carry Pioneers Across — Then Saw His Dead Father in a Vision

David Patten Kimball (August 23, 1839 – November 21, 1883) was born in Nauvoo, Illinois, the son of Apostle Heber C. Kimball and Vilate Murray, and named after David W. Patten, the first martyred apostle of the Church.

At age 17, David was part of the rescue party that found the Martin Handcart Company in November 1856. When the beleaguered company reached the Sweetwater River — icy, swift, with ice caking the banks — the survivors could not cross. David, together with C. Allen Huntington and George W. Grant, waded into the freezing water and carried the pioneers across, one by one, for hours. Their clothes froze to their bodies. Brigham Young wept when he heard what they had done and said publicly: "That act alone will ensure C. Allen Huntington, George W. Grant, and David P. Kimball an everlasting salvation in the Celestial Kingdom of God, worlds without end."

In November 1881, David — by then a freighter living at Jonesville near Mesa, Arizona — took a severe cold in a snowstorm at Prescott, which brought on pneumonia and lung fever. On the night of November 16, at Black's Ranch on the road home, he awoke to see six or eight figures standing around his bed, heard a choir sing "God bless Brother David Kimball," recognized the voice of his deceased wife Julia Merrill, and then heard his father, Heber C. Kimball, speaking to him from the spirit world. His father reproved him for his wrong-doings, told him of his associations with President Young, the Prophet Joseph, and others beyond the veil, and finally granted his plea to remain with his family two years longer to repent and set his life in order. In the days that followed, David was lost on the desert for four days without food or water; he later testified that his father and mother appeared to him, gave him a drink of water, and comforted him with the assurance that he would be found by friends and would live the two years he had been promised. Searchers from Mesa tracked him between seventy-five and one hundred miles and found him on November 23, 1881.

David recorded the experience in a letter to his sister Helen Mar (Kimball) Whitney on January 8, 1882, writing: "I know these things were shown to me for my own good, and it was no dream but a glorious and awful reality." The letter was submitted to President John Taylor, who directed that it be published as a true vision. It appeared in "Helpful Visions" (Faith-Promoting Series no. 14), edited by Bishop Orson F. Whitney, and as an appendix to "Life of Heber C. Kimball." David Patten Kimball died on November 21, 1883 — almost exactly two years after the promise. His great-grandson is Elder Quentin L. Cook of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.