Christopher Buckley: Private, Company B — Mormon Battalion Soldier Whose Endurance Was Its Own Witness of Faith (1821–1895)

Christopher Buckley was born in 1821 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 B, completing the full 2,000-mile march from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to San Diego, California.

Buckley's Company B marched under Captain Jesse D. Hunter — a veteran Latter-day Saint leader who had been in the Church since the Kirtland era. Company B included among its members some of the Battalion's most prolific journal-keepers: John Borrowman, Robert Bliss, and others who recorded the daily spiritual life of the march in granular detail. Buckley was part of that community — present at the same prayer meetings, the same administrations to the sick, the same providential moments that his fellow soldiers recorded.

After his discharge in July 1847, Buckley returned to Utah and settled there. He married and raised a family, living through the decades of Utah settlement and territorial development. He attended his ward, served in his community, and bore witness to the faith that had carried him through the march.

The simple fact of his completing the march — a 24-year-old man walking 2,000 miles through desert, mountain, and wilderness without losing a single companion to enemy fire, exactly as Brigham Young had prophesied — is the central miracle of his story. He had been told, before he left, that God would bring him home. He came home.

Christopher Buckley died around 1895 in Utah, having outlived his Battalion discharge by nearly 50 years.