The Night Guard Who Timbered the Tabernacle: Barnabas L. Adams of the First Company (1847)

Barnabas Lathrop Adams was born August 28, 1812, near Perth in Upper Canada, the fifth of thirteen children born to Joshua and Susanann Baker Adams, a family of Vermont heritage. He was converted to the restored gospel at twenty-three, gathered with the "Canada Camp" under Elder John E. Page to Missouri in 1836 — one of the great organized immigrations of the Church's first decade — and passed through the expulsion of the Saints from Missouri and the gathering at Nauvoo. He married Julia Ann Bawker in 1846, in the very season the Saints were driven from Nauvoo into the Iowa wilds.

At Winter Quarters he was elected to the first pioneer company and assigned as a night guard over the animals — the unglamorous calling that kept the camp's oxen, horses, and mules alive across a thousand miles of country where Pawnee and Sioux horsemen were a nightly worry. His years of rafting logs down the Mississippi from Iowa to St. Louis made him a natural hand at the company's river fords, where wagons had to be floated across swollen streams without losing a team.

Adams reached the valley with the first company in July 1847, turned around, and walked back to Winter Quarters for Julia Ann and their young family that same year — he had crossed the plains twice before he had a home west of the Missouri. He brought them into the Salt Lake Valley in 1848 and settled at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon, where he put his lumberman's skill to the use of the whole territory: Adams furnished timber for the Salt Lake Tabernacle, the Salt Lake Theater, and other public buildings of the young city.

In 1869, while lifting the bed of a wagon, he injured himself internally and died on June 2 at age fifty-six, leaving Julia Ann and a large family. His life stands in the record of the first company as the quiet work of a builder: the convert from Canada who guarded the herd by night, floated wagons at the fords, and whose mill timber helped roof the gathering places of a new Zion.