Horace Martin Alexander: From Persecutor of the Saints to Faithful Battalion Soldier — and the Woman Who Kept a Promise to His Dying Wife

Horace Martin Alexander (1812–1881) began his story as one of the local toughs in an Indiana community who took pleasure in harassing Latter-day Saints as they held their meetings. Then one day he encountered a young woman named Nancy Reeder — sixteen years old, a member of the Church, and, as it turned out, the person who would change the course of his life.

Horace was taken not only with Nancy but with her faith. He was taught the gospel, baptized, and converted. He and Nancy married, and together they were among those who lost everything when the Saints were expelled from Far West, Missouri. They eventually made their way to Nauvoo, where Horace worked as a carpenter. On April 6, 1841, he was called to labor on the Nauvoo Temple, a call he honored.

In the summer of 1846, as the Saints camped on the Missouri River preparing for the great westward migration, Horace heard the call for volunteers to join the Mormon Battalion. He enlisted — leaving behind Nancy, who was pregnant.

On January 1, 1847, Nancy gave birth to a baby boy. But their shelter and bedding were wholly insufficient for a Nebraska winter, and Nancy contracted pneumonia. A young woman named Catherine Houston was asked by family members to help nurse her. As Nancy grew weaker, she asked Catherine to make a solemn promise: care for her daughters, and get them safely to the Salt Lake Valley to be reunited with their father.

Catherine made the promise. Nancy, lonely and dying, asked for her husband's riding boots — the boots he had worn away from her when he left to march. Catherine brought them. Nancy clutched them to her and wept. A short time later, she passed away. She and her infant son were buried in the cemetery at Winter Quarters.

A letter was written and sent to Horace, somewhere high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the summer of 1847.

By spring of 1848, Horace was in Salt Lake City, and he learned that his daughters were on the trail coming west. He rode out to meet them. He found them near the Sweetwater River in Wyoming — with Catherine Houston, who had more than honored her promise. She had grown to love those girls as her own. On February 15, 1849, Horace Alexander and Catherine Houston were married.

For Latter-day Saints, this story is an emblem of the cost and the covenant of the Battalion: of what was sacrificed, of what Providence provided, and of the quiet, human-scale miracles through which God works.