The Blacksmith of the First Company: James Davenport's Forge on the North Platte (1847)

James Davenport was born May 1, 1802, in Danville, Vermont — a town just a few miles from the boyhood home of Joseph Smith, and a few years before the Prophet. A blacksmith and farmer, he married Almira Phelps in 1823, and the family was baptized by Parley P. Pratt soon after the birth of their fifth child in 1834. Their conversions began a restless decade: children born in four different states, the loss of a toddler son, the gathering to Nauvoo, and endowments and sealings in the Nauvoo Temple. In the winter of 1846 they crossed Iowa with the exiled Saints, and at Winter Quarters, on March 11, 1847, their eleventh child, little Elmira, was born at the end of the freezing, fatal winter — days before her father left for the Rocky Mountains.

James Davenport was recruited as the blacksmith of the first pioneer company — the man whose forge kept the wagons and teams of the vanguard moving. When the company reached the dangerous high-water crossing of the North Platte River near present-day Casper, Wyoming, in June 1847, Brigham Young ordered a ferry built of twenty-three-foot logs and ropes, and when the company crossed and moved on, Young designated nine men to stay behind and operate the crossing for the companies following. Thomas Grover was named captain; Davenport was the ferry's blacksmith, with Benjamin Stewart mining coal to keep his forge hot. Their written instructions required strict obedience and goodwill, with fees payable in cash or provisions, and they signed their names to the covenant.

For a month the nine men operated the crossing — ferrying emigrant wagons, doctoring, shoeing oxen and horses for the companies of Saints already on the road to Zion. On July 24, 1847, the very day the main company entered the Salt Lake Valley, Davenport joined a company of emigrants returning east from Oregon as their guide, making repeated trips back and forth on the trail shepherding companies toward Zion. It was almost three years before he could afford to bring his own family out; they crossed in 1851 with the Phileman Merrill Company and settled at Grantsville, and later at Richmond on the Idaho border, living with ninety families inside the Old Fort during Indian troubles.

James and Almira's patriarchal blessings had promised that their posterity "shall be numerous" and "shall continue to increase so that they cannot be numbered." Nine of their eleven children grew to maturity, and their household grew to ninety-one grandchildren — two of their children alone had fourteen each. James died July 23, 1883, at Richmond, seventeen months after Almira, both buried in the Richmond Cemetery — the blacksmith of the first company, whose quiet forge on the Platte held the road open for everyone who came behind.