Cyrus Canfield Beers: Private, Company C — From the Mormon Battalion to Faithful Colonizer of Dixie (1818–1895)

Cyrus Canfield Beers was born January 8, 1818, in Genesee County, New York. He joined the Church in the early 1840s and gathered with the Saints to Nauvoo. When the Mormon Battalion was called in July 1846, Beers enlisted in Company C and marched the full route from Iowa to California.

Beers was one of the men who endured the most difficult stretch of the march: the three-day waterless crossing in the Arizona desert, where William Coray later wrote that 'nothing could have saved our lives but the unseen hand of Almighty God.' Beers was in the column that crossed that desert. He was among those for whom the arrival of fresh beef at the precise moment of crisis was understood as divine provision.

After his discharge in July 1847, Beers worked his way to the Salt Lake Valley. In the 1860s, he responded to Brigham Young's call to help colonize southern Utah — the area known as Dixie. He settled in Washington County, Utah, becoming one of the builders of the Cotton Mission and helping establish the communities that would eventually include St. George.

The cotton mission colonists were known for their cheerfulness under difficult conditions — Brigham Young specifically praised them for it. They planted cotton in a desert, built a tabernacle, and laid the groundwork for the St. George Temple, the first temple completed in Utah.

Cyrus Canfield Beers died April 12, 1895, in Washington County, Utah. He had walked across the American continent as a young man and spent his later life helping to make the desert blossom as the rose.