Melissa Coray: The 18-Year-Old Bride Who Walked 2,000 Miles Rather Than Be Separated from Her Husband (1846–1847)

Melissa Burton Coray was born March 2, 1828, in Western Canada. She converted to the Church at age ten. She married William Coray at Mt. Pisgah, Iowa — and three months later, the call came for the Mormon Battalion.

She refused to be left behind.

'If he must go, I want to go,' she said. 'Why must women always stay behind and worry about their husbands, when they could just as well march beside them?'

She became one of four women permitted to make the entire march with the Battalion, employed as a laundress in Company B. She was 18 years old.

What followed was one of the most remarkable physical ordeals recorded by any Latter-day Saint woman. Other members of the Battalion later testified that she walked a large part of the 2,000 miles to San Diego and most of the return journey to Salt Lake — while pregnant. 'I didn't mind it,' she said. 'I walked because I wanted to; my husband had to walk, and I went along by his side.'

When the battalion passed through Santa Fe and Colonel Cooke ordered the sick and women sent to Pueblo, Melissa almost lost courage. Her husband and several officers went to the Colonel and persuaded him to let the four women continue. She stayed.

She endured marches of two days without water. She watched men suck water through a quill from a trickle seeping from rocks. She learned to carry a pebble in her mouth so her saliva would flow more freely against the thirst: 'That is something that only gets worse when you think of it. When I was thirsty, I tried not to think of it.'

At some point in Arizona, exhausted and footsore, Colonel Cooke — who commanded the entire Battalion on his big white horse — dismounted and offered the horse to her. She rode. She never forgot the detail that it was a white horse, as though that made the moment more real.

Fuller account of this event (as retold in Mormon-Carson Pass Emigrant Trail Historical Marker):

Melissa Coray, then a bride of 18, walked beside her husband to California. The naming of Melissa Coray Peak honors not only the heroic pioneering efforts of Melissa and her party, but thousands of emigrant women who endured similar hardships in settling the West. When work was completed, 45 men and one woman (wife of Sgt. William Coray) turned their backs on newly-discovered gold fields and headed east for Great Salt Lake Valley. Following the ridge south of Silver Lake (viewed on your right) and obscured Squaw Ridge to the east, they crossed lofty West Pass at the foot of Melissa Coray Peak (9763 feet) on July 24. This pass and peak are seen ahead on the distant skyline. From West Pass (9550 feet), the 1848 route drops abruptly northward to Caples Lake, then eastward to Carson Pass (8550 feet). In 40 days, this party blazed 170 miles of wagon road across trackless terrain, before joining the established California emigrant trail and heading east along the Humboldt River.