The Orphan Who Made Peace on the Trail: Andrew Smith Gibbons, Pioneer and Indian Missionary (1847–1886)

Andrew Gibbons was born March 12, 1825, at Licking, Ohio, a twin whose mother died giving birth to him and his brother Richard. Left with four young children and two infants, his father gave the baby boys to two other families to raise. Andrew was given to Joshua and Sarah Smith — and he carried their name the rest of his life, taking the middle name "Smith" in honor of the parents who raised him. Because of that good couple he heard the gospel and was baptized in 1840, at fifteen.

He gathered to Nauvoo, where on January 5, 1845 he married Rizpah Knight, a daughter of Bishop Vinson Knight. Driven out with the Saints, they stopped at Council Bluffs, where their first child was born in December 1846 — one of fifteen they would have, seven of whom lived to grow up.

In 1847, at twenty-two, Andrew was asked into Brigham Young's Vanguard Company, traveling in the Twelfth Ten under Captain Norton Jacobs and assigned as assistant cook. When a wagon rolled over in midstream crossing the Platte, he jumped into the river to steady it and swam safely to the far bank — an account told in its own record in this archive.

But it is as a missionary that his name is remembered. After bringing Rizpah and their three children west in 1852, he settled Bountiful and Lehi, and in 1854 was called to Iron County — where he became identified with the Indian mission under Jacob Hamblin, the great apostle to the tribes of the south. In 1858 he joined ten other men visiting the Pueblo Indian villages east of the Colorado River. In 1865 Apostle Erastus Snow called him to the Muddy to locate settlers and mediate between the whites and the Indians. In 1868 he represented Piute County, Arizona in the territorial legislature at Tucson — a journey of hundreds of miles through country infested with hostile Indians, made by a man whose whole work had been to make peace between races on the trail he had helped blaze. He explored Arizona and New Mexico with Jacob Hamblin and James S. Brown looking toward colonization, and in 1875 was called on the Indian Territory Mission, serving until 1877.

Andrew Smith Gibbons died in 1886, at sixty-one. His life was the first company's promise kept: the trail west opened at twenty-two became, for him, a lifetime of carrying the gospel of peace along it — to the Shoshone, the Pueblos, the Paiutes, and the tribes of Indian Territory, by a man who had begun as an orphan given away at birth and ended as the missionary whom two peoples trusted.