Lem's Miraculous Preservation from Falling into the Wash
Published October 22, 2026 at 4:07 PM
Contributed by
Young Woman's Journal Research
Lem, while riding to Plainville, stopped at Black Dave's cabin for the night. During the night, he witnessed a spectral reenactment of the murder of Black Dave by a mob. He heard Nank, his horse, struggling in the stable. When he fled the cabin in terror, he ran until he collapsed from exhaustion. The next morning, he awoke on the edge of a wash, only five feet from a twenty-foot drop onto a large boulder, which Jack Billings and Buck Jones identified as being five feet from the safe side of death.
In Their Own Words
“I was wakened the next morning by Jack Billings and Buck Jones. The sun was shining. 'What’s the matter, Lem,' Jack was asking. 'Had a fall?' 'I guess so,' I replied weakly. 'Where am I?' 'Well, as I figger it out,' commented Buck, you’re about five feet on the safe side of death.' Buck was right. I lay only five feet from the edge of the wash at its deepest point. Twenty feet below lay a huge, irregular boulder. — The Young Woman's Journal 34:1”
Sources & References
The Young Woman's Journal, vol. 34 no. 1 (January 1923). L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University digital collections. https://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/digital/collection/YWJ/id/23650 (account extracted verbatim from the collection's page-level OCR; research confidence: high)
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