Nathaniel Vary Jones: Original Journal Witness to the Battalion’s Mission Called from Los Angeles (May 1847)

Nathaniel Vary Jones (1822–1863) was born in Brighton, New York, baptized into the Church on April 6, 1841 at age 18, and enlisted in the Mormon Battalion in July 1846 as a private.

Jones kept a detailed original journal throughout the Battalion's march, now preserved in two collections — a 25-page carbon copy typescript at Utah State University's Merrill-Cazier Library, and his papers in Archives West. His wife later added her own memories, creating a complementary account.

But the most remarkable event Jones documented occurred after the Battalion's formal service was complete.

In May 1847, a small group of discharged Mormon Battalion soldiers stationed at Los Angeles were called on missions to the Pacific Islands. Nathaniel Jones was among those selected. He recorded in his journal that three men were chosen from each of the four companies then at Los Angeles — men who had just completed a 2,000-mile military march, whose enlistment had barely ended, and who now received a call to immediately serve as missionaries.

For Jones and the others called, the sequence was remarkable: from Iowa to Santa Fe to San Diego to Los Angeles, all in government service — and then, still in California, with the ink barely dry on their discharge papers, a call to preach the gospel in the Pacific.

Jones served his mission and eventually returned to Utah. He died in 1863 at age 41. His journal remains one of the primary first-hand accounts of the Battalion experience and of the missions that grew from it.