William Austin Burt: The Compass Inventor's Son Who Marched in the Mormon Battalion (1822–1890)

William Austin Burt was born February 17, 1822, in Erie County, New York, the son of William Austin Burt Sr. — the American inventor of the solar compass and the typographer (an early typewriter), and one of the surveyors who documented the vast iron ore deposits of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

The younger Burt joined the Church and, when the Mormon Battalion was called in 1846, enlisted in Company A. He was the son of a notable American inventor — yet he chose to walk 2,000 miles across the desert in service of his faith.

Burt completed the march to San Diego and was mustered out in July 1847. He returned to the Salt Lake Valley and settled there, eventually making his home in Utah.

His family background gave him practical mechanical and surveying skills inherited from his father — skills that were useful in a settlement community that needed men who could measure, build, and think in three dimensions. Battalion veterans with technical backgrounds were disproportionately valuable in the early settlement era.

William Austin Burt Jr. died in 1890 in Utah. His father's solar compass had been used to survey much of the American Midwest; the son had walked across the American Southwest in faith. Between them, the two Burts had a remarkable relationship to the geography of the American West: one measured it from above, one crossed it on foot.

The Burt family story is a reminder that the Mormon Battalion was drawn from men of all backgrounds — mechanics' sons and farmers' sons, converts from New England and the South, men with educations and men without.