William Barter: Private, Company C — Mormon Battalion Veteran Who Built His Life in Utah After the Continental March (1822–1898)

William Barter was born in 1822 and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 1840s. He enlisted in the Mormon Battalion in July 1846 and served in Company C under Captain Jesse D. Hunter, completing the full 2,000-mile march from Council Bluffs to San Diego.

Company C crossed the same desert terrain as the other companies and included among its soldiers men who later testified specifically to the spiritual sustenance that carried the Battalion through the most brutal portions of the march. The three-day waterless crossing documented by William Coray — 'nothing could have saved our lives but the unseen hand of Almighty God' — was Barter's crossing too. He was in that column, on that desert, and he survived.

After discharge in July 1847, Barter returned to the Salt Lake Valley and settled in Utah. He married and raised a family, living through the pioneer era and the early settlement years. He was part of the generation whose faith had been proven on the march and who brought that proven faith into the task of building communities in the Great Basin.

The muster rolls, recovered from the National Archives by the Mormon Battalion Association in the 2010s, confirm Barter's service in Company C for the duration of the march. His individual spiritual accounts were not preserved in published form, but his endurance — surviving the longest infantry march in American military history — is itself a testament.

William Barter died around 1898 in Utah, having spent five decades as a settler in the faith he had walked 2,000 miles to sustain.