James Brackenbury: Sick Detachment Survivor Who Was Healed at Pueblo and Rejoined the Saints in Salt Lake Valley (1820–1880)

James Brackenbury was born in 1820 and joined the Church in the 1840s. When the Mormon Battalion was organized in July 1846, he enlisted in Company B and began the march from Council Bluffs.

By the time the Battalion reached Santa Fe in October 1846, Brackenbury was among the men who had been weakened by the months of hard marching and was placed on one of the Sick Detachments sent north to Pueblo, Colorado, to winter there rather than continue the grueling desert march to California.

At Pueblo, the Sick Detachment record is consistent across multiple sources: 'Many were sick and were healed by laying on of hands.' Brackenbury was in this community of approximately 92 men, 19 women, and 10 children who spent the winter at the isolated fur-trading post, administered to each other by priesthood ordinance, and survived conditions that would have overwhelmed them without divine assistance.

In the spring of 1847, the Sick Detachments left Pueblo and trekked north to join Brigham Young's Pioneer Company. The advance party met the vanguard on July 4, 1847; the main body arrived in the Salt Lake Valley shortly after Brigham Young's company.

Brackenbury settled in the Salt Lake Valley and built his life there. His experience at Pueblo — the healing, the community, the faith exercised in difficult circumstances — was the defining spiritual event of his young adult life, a witness that God had not forgotten the men who were too sick to complete the march.

James Brackenbury died around 1880 in Utah, having spent three decades as a settler in the faith for which he had marched and suffered.