"Thus My Whole Family Died, Martyrs to Christ": Edson Whipple's Sacrifice at Pony Creek (1846)

Edson Whipple was born February 5, 1805, in Dummerston, Vermont. Baptized in Philadelphia on June 15, 1840, he served as first counselor in the Philadelphia Branch before moving his family to Nauvoo in September 1842. In 1844 he was called on the campaign mission promoting Joseph Smith's candidacy for president of the United States — a mission abruptly transformed by the martyrdom, after which he returned to help complete the Nauvoo Temple and spent the winter of 1845-46 building wagons for the exodus.

At Council Bluffs, Iowa, he was counseled to settle for the winter at Pony Creek, thirty miles south. There the malaria-ridden lowlands broke his household. His mother died September 9, 1846; his wife Lavinie died September 13; and their only daughter died a few weeks later. "Of the whole camp, consisting of 14 families, all but two persons were sick," he wrote in his history. "Thus my whole family died, martyrs to Christ."

Stripped of everything yet unwilling to abandon the cause for which they had died, the forty-one-year-old widower answered the call for the first pioneer company in the spring of 1847. He was assigned as a night guard, standing watch half the night every third night across the dangerous country between the Platte and the Salt Lake Valley. After arriving he farmed for Heber C. Kimball, raising some four hundred bushels of grain, and served on the first high council in Salt Lake City.

Traveling east the next year on business with eleven members of the Mormon Battalion, he was called to assist Wilford Woodruff in gathering the Saints from the Eastern States, and in 1850 he led a company of fifty wagons west, arriving October 13. He helped settle Parowan in Iron County — it was his city plan the colonists accepted — and with a Brother Brimhall built the first water-powered threshing machine and threshed the settlement's first crop. He died in Colonia Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, on May 11, 1894, at age 89, having crossed his whole life to the gospel's frontier and back.

Whipple's story is preserved in the archive as a witness of consecration: a man who lost at once his mother, his wife, and his only child to the exodus, and whose answer was to take a night watchman's post in the very next company to go west, guarding his fellow Saints on the trail that had cost him everything.