The Allred Brothers: Four Brothers Who Enlisted Together in the Mormon Battalion — A Family’s Covenant of Faith (1846)

Among the 496 men who enlisted in the Mormon Battalion in the summer of 1846, there were many families whose sons marched together. Few, however, match the Allred family of Tennessee for the completeness and clarity of their collective covenant.

Four brothers — Reddick Newton, James Riley, James Tillman Sanford, and Reuben Warren — all enlisted together. They were sons of the Isaac Allred family, Tennessee converts who had followed the Saints through Missouri and Illinois. Now, at Council Bluffs in 1846, with their families destitute and the Church in desperate need, these four brothers stepped forward as one.

A fifth life bound to this story was Fent F. Allred — born September 8, 1846, to James Tillman Sanford Allred and his wife Eliza on the Battalion trail itself, between Santa Fe and Pueblo, Colorado. The baby was born and died the same day, September 8, 1846 — one of the smallest and most poignant tragedies of the entire march.

Reddick served as Quartermaster Sergeant. James Riley was a private. James Tillman — whose wife had just buried their infant — continued on the march. Reuben Warren survived the full journey and lived to be 88, dying in Thatcher, Arizona in 1916.

For Latter-day Saints, the Allred family's story captures something essential about what the Mormon Battalion was: not an abstraction of Church history, but an act of collective faith lived out by real families — fathers, brothers, wives, and in the case of Fent Allred, a baby who arrived and left in the same day on a desert trail.

The Allred family's faith across multiple generations, from Tennessee conversion to pioneer settlement, stands as one of the quiet enduring testimonies of the Restoration.