Patriarch John Smith’s Miraculous Preservation from Wolves on the Platte River

While encamped on the Platte River with a wagon company in 1848, John Smith (then a boy of sixteen) set out at sundown on foot to find a lost woman. During his six-mile walk along the road, he encountered multiple scenes of dead animal carcasses surrounded by wolves fighting and howling. He walked past approximately twenty such scenes, but remained unnoticed by the wolves and eventually found the lost woman safe at sunrise.

Fuller account of this event (as retold in The Young Woman's Journal, vol. 22 no. 12 (December 1911)):

On one occasion a circumstance occurred which he never forgot. One day about sundown, while the party were encamped on the Platte river, it was reported that a woman was lost. Without ceremony he took his coat on his arm and a piece of cornbread in his hand and started out up the road, to follow a party of the company which had left at noon. He had not gone far when he came up with a dead carcass, which was covered with wolves fighting and howling. He walked past as fast and as quietly as possible. He traveled six miles before he came up with the wagons. During this distance he passed about twenty such frightful scenes, but he got through safe, and he thinks he was unnoticed by the wolves. He stopped for the rest of the night with an acquaintance, and at daybreak proceeded on his journey, and found the lost woman, a little after sunrise, safe with her mother, six miles from where he stayed for the night.