Called from the Graveside Camp: Ezra T. Benson, Apostle of the First Company (1846)

Ezra Taft Benson was born February 22, 1811, at Mendon, Massachusetts, a farmer with no taste for fanaticism. He and his wife, Pamelia Andrus, settled at Quincy, Illinois, where the two of them encountered the Mormon debates head-on — and where Elders Orson Hyde and John E. Page, passing through on their way to dedicate Jerusalem, preached the restored gospel. Pamelia accepted readily; Ezra studied intensely, examining every objection, before the two were baptized on July 19, 1840. Within a month he was an elder; within a year Hyrum Smith had ordained him a high priest.

The Bensons gathered to Nauvoo, where Ezra served on the Nauvoo High Council from 1844 and worked on the temple through the last perilous year. Then came the exodus of 1846 — the crossing of Iowa in mud and snow that killed the old and the young by the hundred. Benson was called to preside over the exiles at Mount Pisgah, Iowa, one of the way stations where the Saints, out of provisions and out of country, dug into the frozen hillsides to survive. It was there, in the dead of that winter — while he was daily nursing the sick and burying the dead of a starving camp — that word came from Brigham Young that he had been called to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, filling the vacancy left by the apostate John E. Page. He was ordained an apostle on July 16, 1846, by Brigham Young, at thirty-five years old a New England farmer standing in the place of a man who had fallen away.

He proved the choice right. In 1847 Benson rode in the first pioneer company into the Salt Lake Valley, then turned back east that same fall to guide incoming companies and organize the 1848 immigration, bringing his own family west with the George A. Smith company in 1849. In 1856 he was appointed to preside over the mission in Europe, landing in Liverpool in the very season the Saints there were shipping west in the handcart companies. In 1860 Brigham Young called him to preside over Cache Valley, which he shepherded through its hard first years; in 1864 he was sent to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) with Lorenzo Snow and Joseph F. Smith to reclaim Church leadership from the usurper Walter Murray Gibson.

He died in Ogden on September 3, 1869, at fifty-eight, after twenty-three years as an apostle that began in a snowbound refugee camp — the quiet convert of Quincy who studied his way into the kingdom and then never once turned aside from the work he had verified for himself.