The Oldest Man in the Ranks: George Mills, Sixty Years Old on the Trail (1847)

George Mills was born about 1787 in England, and came to the restored Church as a grown man with most of a lifetime already behind him. The record of how he joined has not survived — only that he emigrated from England, gathered with the Saints, and endured the expulsion from Nauvoo and the starving camp at Winter Quarters like the rest.

In the spring of 1847 he was asked into Brigham Young's Vanguard Company — and on the roster he was listed at age sixty, the oldest member of the company. Men his age had crossed the plains before, as settlers heading to Oregon; no one his age had yet done it as a pioneer, helping to build the road itself. George traveled in the Twelfth Ten under Captain Norton Jacobs, walking and riding the 1,031 miles from the Missouri to the Great Salt Lake beside men a third his age — including the company's youngest, boys of seventeen. When the company was officially organized on April 16, 1847 into hundreds, fifties, and tens, George stood in the ranks and started west with them.

In the 1850 census for Great Salt Lake he appears living in the household of Mary Fielding Smith — the widowed wife of the Patriarch Hyrum Smith, herself famous for bringing her fatherless family across the plains by the power of her faith — listed as a laborer. He stayed near the Smith family, the old English Saint working in the household of the family whose patriarch had been murdered for the gospel he had crossed an ocean and a continent to keep.

In his last years George suffered from cancer. In 1854 he asked Dr. Samuel L. Sprague — the physician who had crossed with the Brigham Young Company in 1848 and served as camp doctor — to operate in hopes of halting the incurable disease. The doctor consulted three other physicians; all concluded the operation could well prove fatal. Brigham Young himself was consulted and gave his permission. George arranged his will and put his affairs in order, then submitted to the surgery in Salt Lake City. He died on the table, at about sixty-seven years old, on August 29, 1854.

The oldest man of the first company — the one who had the least reason to expect to see the far side of the trail — is remembered for having made the whole of it: from an English birth in the eighteenth century to a grave in the city he helped found in the American desert.