Three Days on a Waterless Desert: The Finding of Hosea Cushing, Survivor of the Walker War (1853)

Hosea Cushing was born April 2, 1826, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Phillip and Mary Cushing. Apprenticed to a carpenter at sixteen, he heard the missionaries preach and was baptized in February 1844 in Boston, and soon began serving a mission himself. He traveled to Nauvoo, arriving April 8, 1845, where he worked on the Nauvoo Temple before joining the exodus west on February 15, 1846. In 1847 he was chosen for the pioneer company, assigned to the 9th Ten.

After reaching the valley, he brought his bride, Helen Janet Murray, out in the spring of 1848 and built a small cabin a block north of the temple block grounds in Salt Lake City.

In 1853, when the Walker War broke out between the Utes under Chief Walkara and the Utah settlers, Cushing was called up with the militia. During a skirmish in the campaign, he and another man, named Ging, were separated and lost on the desert. For three days the two men wandered without food and — in the punishing late-summer heat of the Utah desert — without water. Searchers finally found them. Ging recovered; Cushing was found suffering terribly, and though he was carried home, he never fully recovered from the ordeal. He died in Salt Lake City on May 17, 1854, at just twenty-eight years of age, survived by Helen and their young family.

The record of his life is short, but it is the record the whole first company understood: a Boston carpenter who gave his trade, his mission years, and at last his strength to the kingdom, and who was brought home — alive out of a waterless desert — to be buried by the people he had crossed the plains to build a place for.