Oscar Winters' Panning Pioneer's Faith-Filled Singing and Passing

“One night, as we were making camp, we noticed one of our brethren had not arrived, and a volunteer party was immediately organized to return and see if anything had happened to him. Just as we were about to start, we saw the missing brother coming in the distance. When he arrived, he said he had been quite sick; so some of us unyoked his oxen and attended to his part of the camp duties. After supper, he sat down before the campfire on a large rock, and sang in a very faint but plaintive and sweet voice, the hymn “Come, Come, Ye Saints.” It was a rule of the camp that whenever anybody started this hymn all the camp should join, but for some reason this evening nobody joined him; he sang the hymn alone. When he had finished, I doubt if there was a single dry eye in the camp. The next morning we noticed that he was not yoking up his cattle. We went to his wagon and found that he had died during the night. We dug a shallow grave, and after we had covered his body with the earth we rolled the large stone to the head of the grave to mark it, the stone on which he had been sitting the night before when he sang: “And should we die before our journey’s through, Happy day! all is well!” — Oscar Winters, in Heber J. Grant, “Our Favorite Hymns,” Improvement Era, June 1914”