The Straw-Tick Shirt and the Prophecy Over It: George P. Billings Enters the Valley (July 1847)

George Perkins Billings was born into the very first generation of the Church — the son of Titus Billings, the second person baptized in Kirtland, Ohio, and later a counselor to the Church's first Presiding Bishop. George worked Mississippi River boats as a young man and helped his father, a stonemason and carpenter, build the temples at Kirtland and Nauvoo. He joined the first pioneer company at twenty years old, driving a wagon across the plains for his cousin, Heber C. Kimball.

The trail took nearly everything he wore. By the time Billings reached the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847, his shoes and shirt were gone and his buckskin pants had stretched, been trimmed off, and shrunk again. Sister Kimball made the young man a new shirt out of a striped straw tick — the woven bedding of a camp cot — and a pair of moccasins. When Heber C. Kimball saw his young cousin standing in the new valley dressed in his scant outfit, the apostle felt to prophesy that soon "clothing can be bought here as cheap as in New York City."

At the time it bordered on the absurd. The Saints had entered a desert valley a thousand miles from the nearest settlement, their earthly goods carried in two wagons' worth of baggage apiece at best. Yet within two years the California gold discovery had turned the trail past Salt Lake into the highway of a nation, and the arriving California pioneers and gold seekers needed exactly what the Saints could sell them. Goods that had been carried over the plains at enormous cost could suddenly be bought in the valley as cheaply as in the East — Kimball's prophecy, preserved in the record of the first company, "was literally fulfilled with the arrival of California pioneers and gold seekers."

Billings afterward went the way of many who followed the gold instead of the gathering: drawn to the California fields, then to Mexico to buy livestock to bring back to Utah, he watched his entire stock sicken and die on the trail and came home poorer than he left — just as Brigham Young had said would happen to those who left in search of gold. He helped settle Carson Valley, Nevada, and lived his last years in Sanpete Valley, dying at Manti on December 2, 1896, at sixty-nine. His record preserves in one life both halves of the lesson the Saints of 1847 taught each other: the Lord kept the prophecy made over a straw-tick shirt, and the gold He warned about failed every man who chased it.