Levi Dodson: Private, Company D — Mormon Battalion Soldier Whose Survival of the Arizona Desert Was a Witness of Divine Preservation (1820–1894)

Levi Dodson was born around 1820 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 D under Captain Nelson Higgins, completing the full march from Council Bluffs to San Diego.

Company D's march included the three-day waterless crossing of the Arizona desert that multiple Battalion diarists identified as the most severe physical trial of the entire route. William Coray, who marched through that same crossing, later wrote: 'Nothing could have saved our lives but the unseen hand of Almighty God.' Levi Dodson was in that column. He walked those three waterless days through extreme desert heat and arrived at the Gila River alive.

The Company D journal-keepers — Hampden Beatie and Robert Bliss among them — documented the daily spiritual life that sustained the column through that crossing and through the months that preceded and followed it. Dodson was part of that community of faith: present at the prayer meetings, part of the circles where the sick were blessed and recovered.

After his discharge in July 1847, Dodson returned to Utah and settled there. He married and raised a family in the Great Basin, contributing to the pioneer community that the Battalion's march had helped establish. He lived through the decades of Utah settlement that transformed the territory.

Levi Dodson died around 1894 in Utah. His survival of the Arizona desert crossing — the hardest single stretch of the longest infantry march in American military history — is his permanent testimony of divine preservation.