The Biscuit Miracle — Ann Rowley's Two Sea Biscuits Feed Eight Starving Children

In the fall of 1856, Ann Jewell Rowley, a widowed English convert and member of the ill-fated Willie Handcart Company, was crossing the Wyoming plains with her seven children. Food had run out. The men had left camp to hunt buffalo. Night was falling and there was nothing to eat.

Ann knelt in prayer. As she did, she remembered two hard sea biscuits that had been at the bottom of her trunk since the ocean voyage months earlier. They were so hard they could not be broken. She wrote in her personal journal:

'Surely, that was not enough to feed 8 people, but 5 loaves and 2 fishes were not enough to feed 5,000 people either, but through a miracle, Jesus had done it. So, with God’s help, nothing is impossible. I found the biscuits and put them in a dutch oven and covered them with water and asked for God’s blessing. Then I put the lid on the pan and set it on the coals. When I took off the lid a little later, I found the pan filled with food. I kneeled with my family and thanked God for his goodness. That night my family had sufficient food.'

The children had also been chewing loose rawhide strips from the cart wheels to survive. This miracle of multiplication — consciously compared by Ann to Christ feeding the five thousand — sustained the family through one of the most desperate nights of the entire pioneer trek.

Ann Rowley's family survived the crossing. Her account was preserved in her personal journal, held in the LDS Church History archives, and was cited by Elder Marcus B. Nash at General Conference in November 2012. Her story was also dramatized in the 2011 film '17 Miracles' directed by T.C. Christensen.

The same account is retold for children in the March 2025 issue of the Friend magazine, presenting Jane (representing Ann's daughter) as the point-of-view character.

Ann's firsthand account is preserved in her biographical sketch in Jolene S. Allphin's 'Tell My Story, Too,' the standard reference on the Willie and Martin handcart companies. The sketch adds the full family context around the biscuit night: Ann, 48, had been widowed in 1848 after her husband William died partly from the effects of persecution for joining the Church, and she crossed the plains with her seven children — Louisa (18), Elizabeth (16), John (14), Samuel (12), Richard (11), Thomas (10), and Jane (7) — plus her stepdaughter Eliza (32). In Iowa City she sacrificed her feather-bed, ripping it open and emptying the feathers so the tick could cover the handcart supplies. On October 19, 1856 — the day the winter storms began and Eliza's 33rd birthday — Eliza died at the Fifth Crossing of the Sweetwater River, spared the tortuous passage over Rocky Ridge that her family faced four days later. During those same weeks, Thomas's right hand froze while pushing the back of the cart, and on the night the storms struck, twelve people in the company died. Ann confessed that at times it seemed the Lord had deserted them — and that she was ashamed for thinking so, because hope arrived with the rescue party, whose leader Cyrus H. Wheelock could not hold back his tears at the company's condition. Her son Richard later summarized the family's deliverance: 'By the protecting care of the Lord we were preserved to gather with the Saints in the valleys of the Mountains.'