John Wesley Adair: Alabama Convert Marches in the Mormon Battalion, Then Helps Settle Utah Dixie and Arizona (1821–1903)

John Wesley Adair was born February 18, 1821, in Greene County, Alabama. He became a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints around 1842 and gathered with the Saints.

In 1846 he enlisted in the Mormon Battalion and completed the march from Council Bluffs to San Diego. He was discharged in July 1847 and made his way toward the Salt Lake Valley.

Adair was a colonizer — one of those rare individuals who answered not just one call but several. After settling in Utah, he was called to help settle Utah Dixie in 1870, joining the generations of Saints who moved when Brigham Young pointed south.

In 1880, he was called again — this time to help establish St. Johns, Arizona, as part of the effort to colonize the Little Colorado River country. He made that journey and helped build another community.

John Wesley Adair died May 5, 1903, in Nutrioso, Apache County, Arizona Territory, at the age of 82. He had lived long enough to have volunteered for the Mexican War, walked to California, helped settle three different corners of the American West, and raised children in the faith he had embraced in Alabama as a young man.

His life traced the full arc of the Restoration's frontier era: from the South to the Missouri, across the desert, into the valley, and then out again into the margins of the West, again and again, in obedience.