Abner Blackburn's Encounter with the Supernatural: An Angel and the Marvels of the Frontier (1846–1847)

Abner Levi Blackburn was 19 years old when he enlisted in the Mormon Battalion. He had grown up in a Latter-day Saint family, helped finish the Nauvoo Temple as a teenager, and marched west with the expelled Saints before joining the Battalion at Winter Quarters.

His original journal was not preserved. But in his later years, Blackburn wrote an autobiography that captured his experiences with striking directness and detail. The Mormon Battalion Historic Site, which has researched Blackburn's autobiography extensively, documents that his account includes encounters with an angel — experiences that Blackburn recorded alongside the more mundane frontier hardships of his march.

The historian Dale Morgan, one of the great archivists of Western American history, reviewed Blackburn's narrative and declared that 'no other Mormon journal had the élan and the humor of Abner's story.' The praise is significant: Morgan was not primarily a faith historian, and his admiration was for the quality of the writing. That a secular historian found Blackburn's account so remarkable is itself a form of witness.

Blackburn's autobiography was eventually edited by historian Will Bagley and published as *Frontiersman: Abner Blackburn's Narrative* by the University of Utah Press in 1992 — nearly a century and a half after the events it describes. It remains one of the most vivid first-person accounts of both the Mormon Battalion experience and the broader frontier era of the 1840s and 1850s.

For Latter-day Saint readers, Blackburn's testimony of angelic visitation — recorded in the context of one of the Church's most consecrated collective experiences — stands as one of many witnesses that the march west was not merely a military event, but a spiritual one.