Azariah Smith: The 17-Year-Old Diarist at Sutter’s Mill, Who Was Homesick for His Mother and Didn’t Care Much About the Gold

Azariah Smith was born August 1, 1828, in New York. He marched into Fort Leavenworth on August 1, 1846 — his eighteenth birthday — as one of the youngest members of the Mormon Battalion. His father Albert Smith and his uncle Thomas P. Dutcher enlisted with him.

Azariah was one of only two Battalion soldiers known to have kept a diary throughout the march and the California period. (The other was Henry Bigler, thirteen years his senior.) His journal, edited by David L. Bigler and published by the University of Utah Press in 1990 as *The Gold Discovery Journal of Azariah Smith*, is now one of the key primary sources for the Battalion experience and the Gold Rush.

What makes Azariah's account remarkable is not just what he witnessed but who he was while witnessing it. He was a teenager, homesick and often physically unwell, writing with the candor and innocence of someone who did not know he was observing history. At Santa Fe he attended Catholic Mass and noted with tolerance the priests 'bowing and kissing the Images.' At San Diego he heard the cathedral bells and thought them 'most beautiful.' He climbed mountains with his father and rolled rocks down for the fun of it.

On January 24, 1848, he was at Sutter's Mill when gold was discovered: 'Mr. Marshall found some pieces of (as we all suppose) Gold, and he has gone to the Fort, for the Purpose of finding out.'

But the gold did not move him. Fifty years later, he recalled: 'I was home-sick as well as physically sick. I wanted to see mother and I did not care whether there was gold in the locality or not.'

After his time at Sutter's Mill, Azariah and fellow ex-Battalion members blazed the Mormon-Carson Pass Emigrant Trail over the Sierra Nevada on their return journey to Salt Lake City in 1848 — the same route that tens of thousands of forty-niners would use the following year.

Azariah was baptized in 1841 at thirteen, followed his parents' faith through Missouri, Ohio, Iowa, and Illinois, and ended up at the precise location of one of American history's most defining moments — not because he sought fame or gold, but because he had followed his covenant. His diary is the other foundational document, alongside Bigler's, proving the date of January 24, 1848.