Joshua Abbott: A 41-Year-Old Veteran Enlists in the Mormon Battalion, Marches 2,000 Miles, and Lives to Age 91 (1846–1847)

Joshua Chandler Abbott was born February 6, 1805, in Andover, Essex County, Massachusetts. He was christened in the Congregationalist tradition, converted to the Church, and by 1846 was encamped with the Saints at Council Bluffs, Iowa, as one of the thousands driven from Nauvoo.

When Captain James Allen arrived with the call for volunteers in July 1846, Joshua Abbott was 41 years old. He enlisted as a private in Company A.

He was among the older soldiers in a battalion composed largely of men in their twenties. He made the entire 2,000-mile march from Council Bluffs to San Diego, arriving January 29, 1847. He was discharged in July 1847 after a full year of military service.

After his discharge, Abbott made his way to the Salt Lake Valley, where he settled and built his life among the Saints. He married Ruth Markham and later Nancy Jane Kirkpatrick, and raised a family in Utah.

Joshua Abbott died on April 9, 1896, in Gardiner, Douglas County, Oregon — at the remarkable age of 91. He had outlived most of the Battalion by decades. His longevity was noted by those who knew him as itself a kind of gift: a man who had given a year of his life in voluntary military service at middle age, had walked 2,000 miles through desert and mountain, and had then been given four more decades to build, serve, and witness.