The Coffin Maker of Winter Quarters: Charles Burke's Quiet Service from Nauvoo to the Vanguard Company (1847)

Charles Allen Burke (also recorded as Burk) was born September 2, 1823, at Kirtland, Ohio — while the Church was still in its Kirtland period — to John M. and Abigail Fellows Burke. His parents joined the Church when Charles was seven, and he was later baptized by Peter Whitmer, one of the Three Witnesses of the Book of Mormon.

His mother died of cholera in Missouri in 1832 as the family traveled to join the Saints in Jackson County, and the family was driven from Missouri by mob persecution before settling at Nauvoo. There Charles joined the Nauvoo Legion and played the fife in its band, worked as a stonemason and carpenter, and helped construct the temple.

When the Saints were driven from Nauvoo, Charles and his father built the wagons that carried their families into exile. At Winter Quarters, Charles made coffins and assisted in burying those who did not survive the winter camps — the last service a craftsman could render the exiled Saints.

In 1847, at twenty-three, he was called into Brigham Young's Vanguard Company, riding in the Fourteenth Ten under Joseph Matthews. He was among the advance party that entered the Salt Lake Valley on July 22, 1847. On the return trail east that fall, his company lived for six weeks on unsalted buffalo meat.

He brought his family west with the Willard Richards Company in 1848, helped colonize San Bernardino, and after the 1857 recall settled at Parowan and then Minersville, Utah, where his carpentry built some of the area's first gristmills, furniture, window sashes, and coffins — the same quiet craft he had first exercised among the dying at Winter Quarters. He died in 1888 at Minersville.