Joan Campbell — A Saint Who Died for Her Religion in the Iowa Wilderness (1846)

Joan Campbell was among the Saints driven from Nauvoo in September 1846, when mobs forced the city's poorest inhabitants across the Mississippi River without adequate food or shelter. Camp records preserve her end: between 2 and 3 o'clock on the morning of October 16, 1846, in the refugee camp on the Iowa side of the river, she was delivered of a stillborn child and was immediately seized by a chill. In less than an hour she was dead — a healthy young woman when she fled Nauvoo, cut down by the exposure and sickness of the slough camps. Thomas Bullock, the camp's clerk and a fellow refugee (later a member of the first pioneer company to enter the Salt Lake Valley in 1847), recorded her death and burial in his diary and bore witness that persecution — not chance — had cut short her life. She was laid in a grave in the wilderness on October 17, followed by a single mourner, with a hymn and a prayer. Her name is preserved as a testimony of the cost the early Saints paid for their faith, and of how the Lord's people endured and witnessed even in death.