Elder John Walsh's mother's miraculous rescue from a pioneer company

Elder John Walsh related the story of his mother who was an early Latter-day Saint pioneer. While traveling from Iowa City toward the Rocky Mountains in a handcart company, she was accidentally left behind by the company as they broke camp one morning. She knelt in the snow with her two babes to shield them from the cold and prayed for help. In response to her prayer, a member of the advancing company was miraculously halted and returned to find the mother and her children, saving them from the freezing conditions.

In her own autobiographical sketch, Alice Walsh (later Strong) recounts the same period of the 1856 journey, noting that after her husband died near Devil's Gate, Wyoming, she was left a widow with two young children. Regarding the event of being left behind or struggling to find transport, she writes that as the company prepared to leave Martin's Cove on November 9, she sat in the snow with her children, fearing she would be unable to ride due to the limited space in the wagons. Before the last teams departed, she was assigned a place in the commissary wagon, in which she traveled until reaching Salt Lake City on November 30, 1856.