Twice Left Behind, Never Turned Back: Charles D. Barnum of the First Company (1836–1850)

Charles Davids Barnum was born May 9, 1800, near Brockville in Leeds County, Upper Canada — in the same district where Oliver Cowdery had proselyted in the earliest years of the Church. Barnum heard the message of the restored gospel there and was baptized on July 25, 1836, by Elder John E. Page, the apostle whose Canada converts would form the great "Canada Camp" immigration, and was ordained a teacher.

His was a gathering made against the grain of his own household. Moving first to Indiana and then to Far West, Missouri, he was there in the season of expulsion and helped move some of the persecuted Saints from Missouri to Quincy, Illinois. He moved on to Nauvoo — but his family refused to join him. Alone among his own, he quarried stone for the Nauvoo Temple and served in the Nauvoo Legion. Only after three years did his family relent and come to Nauvoo.

When the Saints were driven out in 1846, his family refused a second time. Barnum evacuated the city alone, crossed Iowa, and at Winter Quarters remarried and rebuilt a life among the Saints. Chosen for the first pioneer company in 1847 — a man of forty-seven on the trail — he went back for the winter, and in 1850 brought a company of his own people west with William Snow's company, settling in Salt Lake City's Fifteenth Ward. From 1851 to 1853 he served as a counselor to Bishop Andrew Cunningham.

Charles D. Barnum outlived nearly the whole of his generation of pioneers, dying in Salt Lake City on September 9, 1894, at ninety-four — a man who had been driven from two states and twice left behind by those he loved most, and who, each time, kept the covenant and led the way west.