John Borrowman: Scottish Convert Who Marched the Full Trail and Kept a Journal Recording the Last Stage to California (1847)

John Borrowman (1816–after 1880) was born in Scotland and converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints before emigrating to America. He joined the Mormon Battalion as a private in Company C and marched the full 2,000 miles from Council Bluffs to San Diego.

Borroman kept a journal — specifically covering the last stage of the march into California and his subsequent life there. His journal, held in the Church History Library, is one of the few first-hand accounts of the Battalion's experience from a European-born convert.

For Borrowman, every mile of the march was something stranger and more foreign than it was for the men born on the American frontier. The desert, the heat, the mountains, the Catholic missions of California, the Spanish-speaking population — all of it was entirely unlike anything in Scotland. Yet he marched. He endured. He wrote it down.

His journal provides a first-hand account that historians have used to reconstruct the Battalion's experience in the final months of the march, when men were stretched to their absolute physical limits. The fact that a Scottish convert — not a frontier American, not a man raised in the culture of the West — could complete that march, is itself a testimony to the faith that drove it.

After the Battalion was discharged, Borrowman remained in California for a period before eventually returning to the Saints. His journal stands as evidence that the Battalion was not one kind of man doing one kind of thing: it was a community of different origins, different backgrounds, and one shared faith, marching toward the same covenant.