Eliza R. Snow: 'It Will Take More Than This to Cure Me of My Faith' — She Walked Barefoot in Frozen Missouri and Did Not Break

Eliza Roxey Snow (1804–1887) endured some of the most severe persecution in early LDS history. When Governor Lilburn Boggs issued the Extermination Order in Missouri in 1838, commanding all Mormons to leave the state or face death, Eliza was among the Saints forced to flee Far West in the dead of winter.

Leaving Far West on a bitter cold winter day, she walked ahead of the wagon teams to try to warm her freezing feet by the motion of walking. A member of the mob militia rode up on horseback and, seeing her bedraggled state, jeered at her: 'Well, I think this will cure you of your faith!'

Eliza looked up at him and replied without hesitation: 'No, sir, it will take more than this to cure me of my faith.'

She walked on.

This account, preserved in the Ensign biography of her life, captures the essential Eliza R. Snow: a woman who had traded a life of literary fame, cultured society, and comfortable Ohio living for repeated expulsions, poverty, and persecution — and never once regretted it. In her own words: 'Change is the key word to this dispensation. The righteous, like gold, must be seven times purified.'

Eliza's faith was not the passive belief of a sheltered believer. It was tested in Kirtland, in Missouri, in Nauvoo, in the exodus west, and on the plains — and in every trial it grew stronger rather than weaker. Brigham Young described her as the leading woman of the Church. In Missouri, in snow, with a persecutor's taunt still in the air, she put that faith into its most concentrated form: four words that became one of the most quoted declarations of pioneer resilience in Church history.