Ruel Barrus: From the Mormon Battalion to Temple Builder — A Life Rooted in Faith (1820–1896)

Ruel Barrus was born September 13, 1820, in Queensbury, New York. He was among the early converts to the Church in the 1840s and gathered with the Saints to Nauvoo. When the call for the Mormon Battalion went out in July 1846, he enlisted and was assigned to Company D.

Barrus marched the full 2,000-mile route from Council Bluffs to San Diego and was mustered out in July 1847. He then made his way to the Salt Lake Valley, arriving among the earliest Battalion returnees.

In the decades following the Battalion march, Ruel Barrus became one of the quiet pillars of the settlement era — a man whose faith had been tested on the march and who carried that tested faith into a lifetime of community service. He participated in the building of the early Utah settlements and lived to see the Saints transform the Great Basin from a barren desert into a productive territory.

His descendant family history records the pattern common to Battalion veterans: a man who had walked the longest infantry march in American military history, been sustained by healings and answered prayers on the march, and then built a life of consistent discipleship in the Salt Lake Valley. Ruel Barrus died August 5, 1896, in Utah, having outlived his discharge from the Battalion by 49 years.

His story represents the experience of hundreds of Battalion men whose names appear on the muster rolls but whose individual journals were not preserved — men whose faith was known by their families, their bishops, and their God, if not always by history.