Daniel Tyler: The Sergeant Who Spent 35 Years Gathering the Battalion’s Stories So They Would Not Be Forgotten (1881)

Daniel Tyler (1816–1906) was a private in Company B of the Mormon Battalion, one of the men who marched the full 2,000 miles from Council Bluffs to San Diego. After the march ended and he settled in Utah, Tyler carried something most veterans do not: a historian's sense of duty.

For thirty-five years, he gathered. He collected journals, letters, personal accounts, and testimonies from surviving Battalion veterans before they died and their stories died with them. He took notes. He wrote letters. He cross-referenced accounts. He tracked down men who were now scattered across the Utah settlements, Idaho, Arizona, and California.

In 1881 — thirty-four years after the Battalion was discharged — he published the result: *A Concise History of the Mormon Battalion in the Mexican War, 1846-1847* (Salt Lake City, 1881). At 376 pages, it remains the foundational primary text for every serious scholar of the Battalion. It contains not just Tyler's own observations but first-hand accounts from dozens of fellow veterans, giving voice to men whose own journals were never published.

The book was published for the Church and digitized by the Church History Library. It is now freely available via the Internet Archive (archive.org).

For Latter-day Saints, what Tyler did is a form of sacred stewardship: taking what had been experienced in faith and suffering and sacrifice, and refusing to let it dissolve into silence. His faith in the march's meaning drove him to do what no one else did. Every record of the Battalion that exists today — every healing, every prayer, every miracle on the trail — owes something to the fact that Daniel Tyler kept asking and kept writing.

He lived until 1906, dying at age 90, long enough to see two generations of Utah children grow up in the land their fathers' march had helped secure.