Abner Blackburn and the Sick Detachment at Pueblo: When God’s Mercy Arrived in the Form of a Kansas Winter (1846–47)

Among the 496 men who enlisted in the Mormon Battalion, many were physically unable to complete the full march. When the main column reached Santa Fe in October 1846, commanding officer Colonel Cooke and Battalion officers made the difficult decision to send the sickest men north to winter quarters at Pueblo, Colorado, rather than force them across the Arizona and California deserts.

Abner Blackburn (1831–1904) was among those in the sick detachment. He did not march to California. Instead, he spent the winter of 1846-47 at Pueblo with roughly 150 fellow soldiers, under the care of God and a Kansas winter.

Blackburn's original journal was not preserved. But decades later he wrote an autobiography that was eventually published as *Frontiersman: Abner Blackburn's Narrative* (edited by Will Bagley). In it, he recorded the severe challenges the sick men faced: the cold, the insufficient shelter, the dwindling provisions, the separation from families, and the spiritual routines that held them together.

The men at Pueblo held prayer meetings, performed ordinances, administered to the sick among the sick, and looked after one another through the winter. They were, in a real sense, a congregation in exile. Their faith did not wait for California. It was practiced in a snowfield in Colorado, with inadequate blankets and insufficient food.

In the spring of 1847 they rejoined the main body of Saints traveling west. Many of them arrived in the Salt Lake Valley with the pioneer companies, some of them reaching the Valley before or alongside Brigham Young's vanguard.

The story of the sick detachments is often a footnote to the Battalion's larger story. But it deserves to be read as its own testimony: of men who were not strong enough to march 2,000 miles through the desert, but were strong enough to endure a Colorado winter together in prayer and fellowship. That too is a form of the march.