Ministering Angels to the Sick: Clara Decker Young, Youngest Woman of the 1847 Pioneer Company

When Brigham Young's vanguard pioneer company left Winter Quarters in April 1847, three women rode with it: Harriet Page Wheeler Young, age 43 and nearly eight months pregnant; Ellen Sanders Kimball, age 22, a Norwegian orphan convert; and the youngest of the three, Clarissa "Clara" Decker Young, Brigham Young's eighteen-year-old wife, who was also Harriet's daughter.

It was never intended that women should join the first company, because of the danger. But after Harriet pleaded to go, saying the climate at Winter Quarters would be her death, permission was granted, and Clara was asked by Brigham himself to accompany the advance party to the Salt Lake Valley. The young bride had crossed the frozen Mississippi out of Nauvoo with the fleeing Saints in 1846 and had spent the exile at Winter Quarters, where sickness ravaged the camps and graves multiplied.

Across the 1,000-mile trek, the official biographies of the original pioneer company record that "the women proved to be ministering angels to the sick as the company traveled." At eighteen, Clara helped nurse ailing pioneers through camps where mountain fever, chills, and exhaustion felled grown men half the company's ranks, doing the cooking, sewing, washing, and sick-nursing that kept the company moving. She gazed on the desolate Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, and chose to remain there through the first, hungry winter of 1847-1848 while her husband returned east to bring the remaining Saints, keeping faith with the tiny band beginning a city in the desert.

Susa Young Gates, who knew her, remembered that Clara was one of "father's nurses in all his various spells of sickness," including the 1847 mountain fever that nearly took the Church leader's life on the trail. "Everybody loved her who ever came near her," Susa wrote, and Clara "was never heard to utter an unkind word or a slurring thought." Her quiet, sustained ministry to the sick across the plains and through the valley's first winter stands as a faith-promoting memorial to the youngest woman of the first company, whose strength held through hardships that broke stronger bodies, and whose care preserved lives the trail would otherwise have claimed.