Harriet Young's Mastiff Deliverance: An Armed Attack Turned Back at the First Home Outside the Fort

Harriet Page Wheeler Young, age 43 and expecting a child, was one of only three women permitted to join Brigham Young's original 1847 pioneer company. It was not intended that women should make the journey at all, because of the danger. But Harriet, whose health had been broken by successive exiles from Ohio to Missouri to Illinois, pleaded so earnestly to accompany her husband Lorenzo Dow Young, saying that the sickly climate at Winter Quarters would eventually lead to her death, that Brigham Young consented. Nearly eight months pregnant, she walked and rode more than a thousand miles across prairies, deserts, and mountains, bringing a milk cow and a coop of chickens that she tended so carefully on the back of the wagon that the hens laid three eggs a day all across the plains. She entered the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, and on September 20 gave birth to a son, the first white male child born in the Salt Lake Valley.

That first winter brought one of the most dramatic deliverances of the pioneer era. In December, Lorenzo built the first log house erected outside the safety of the pioneer fort, against the advice of friends who feared hostile Indians. One day Harriet was alone in that house with her three-month-old baby boy when a fierce-looking Indian came to her door and demanded bread. She gave him all she had, three small biscuits, but he wanted more. When she refused, he drew his bow and aimed an arrow at her heart. Believing her last moments had come, and her baby's with her, she remembered the large mastiff her husband had given her for protection in the other room. Feigning that she would fetch more bread, she stepped into the next room and released the dog with a command to seize the intruder. The mastiff bounded through the door and bore the Indian to the ground. He begged for his life; Harriet took his bow and arrow, called off the dog, washed and bound up his wounds, and set him free.

The providence woven through the episode is unmistakable: the husband's foresighted gift of the mastiff for a wife who would live alone outside the fort, the presence of mind granted in the moment of mortal danger, and a frontier mother's courage that turned an attacker into a supplicant and answered hostility with kindness.