The Hunter Who Kept Watch Over His Kill: Joseph Hancock's Night Alone on the Bluffs (May 1847)

Joseph Hancock was born March 17, 1800, at Springfield, Massachusetts, the elder brother of Levi W. Hancock, who would become one of the First Council of the Seventy and the chronicler of Zion's Camp. By the spring of 1847 Joseph was forty-seven — among the older men of the first pioneer company — and Brigham Young had a particular use for him: he was named one of the principal hunters of the pioneer camp, and among the eleven men selected to hunt on foot.

On May 1, 1847, as the company moved up the Platte near Grand Island, the camp made its first buffalo hunt. Wilford Woodruff, riding in the chase, recorded that the hunters killed eleven buffalo "which we considered was doing vary well, considering that we were nearly all strangers to that mode of hunting, as but vary few of us ever saw a wild buffalo before in our lives." Part of the chase ran through one of the largest prairie dog towns either man had ever seen — nearly ten miles long and two wide, honeycombed with burrows every rod, "great danger of a horse stepping into them & falling," yet "there was no accident happened at all to any one, which was truly a blessing."

But the episode the camp remembered came off the bluffs that night. Joseph Hancock went out in the morning onto the bluffs to kill buffalo on foot — alone, no horse, no partner, on a prairie the camp shared with wolves and Pawnee hunting parties. He did not come in at night, and the camp felt concerned about him. In the morning he walked into camp unhurt. He had killed a three-year-old cow, and rather than leave the meat to be devoured, had kept watch over the carcass through the whole night. Three wolves came upon him in the dark; he shot one, and the rest ran away. His kill made twelve buffalo for the day, and the wagons went out and brought in the meat that fed the company.

It was the kind of self-reliant courage the first company ran on: a man near fifty, afoot in Indian country, standing guard through a prairie night over the meat his people needed, and walking back at dawn with the story. Joseph Hancock lived out his years in the valley he had provisioned, settling at Payson, Utah County, where the old hunter was still living in the 1890s, one of the last survivors of the first company.

Wilford Woodruff, who recorded the night, would later count his own life preserved from danger on twenty-seven occasions. Joseph Hancock's night on the bluffs belongs to the same ledger: the ordinary bravery of the first company, preserved by the God they were walking toward.