President Woodruff's Deliverance from a Steamboat Disaster
Published October 11, 2026 at 8:13 PM
Contributed by
Millennial Star Research
While at Pittsburg with a company of Saints, President Wilford Woodruff engaged passage on a steamboat. Immediately after doing so, he felt a strong prompt from the Spirit to not board that vessel. The steamboat subsequently caught fire five miles down the river, resulting in three hundred deaths.
In his autobiography, Wilford Woodruff clarifies that this event took place in 1850 while he was returning to Utah from Boston and the East. He notes that the steamboat he avoided had two hundred passengers on board. Regarding the outcome, he specifies that the fire burned the vessel's tiller ropes, rendering the ship unable to reach the shore, and that the deaths resulted from either fire or drowning. In a secondary account, the official Church manual clarifies that Woodruff specifically asked the captain if he could take another hundred passengers before the Spirit intervened, and it notes that after the ship caught fire, not a soul on board was saved.
In Their Own Words
“While returning to Utah in 1850 with a large company of Saints from Boston and the east, on my arrival at Pittsburg I engaged a passage for myself and company on a steamer to St. Louis. But no sooner had I engaged the passage than the Spirit said to me, "Go not on board of that steamer, neither you nor your company." I obeyed the revelation to me, and I did not go on board, but took another steamer. The first steamer started at dark, with two hundred passengers on board. When five miles down the Ohio river it took fire, burned the tiller ropes so that the vessel could not reach shore, and the lives of nearly all on board were lost either by fire or water. We arrived in safety at our destination, by obeying the revelation of the Spirit of God to us.”
— Wilford Woodruff, Leaves from My Journal
Sources & References
The Latter-day Saints' Millennial Star (Manchester, later Liverpool, England, May 1840–1970), 12 October 1891 (Vol. 53, No. 41). https://archive.org/details/per_utah-and-the-mormons_the-latter-day-saints-millennial-star_1891-10-12_53_41 (account extracted verbatim from the issue's Internet Archive OCR text; research confidence: high) Additional sources (periodical research): Wilford Woodruff, "Autobiography 1882 Leaves from My Journal," p. 101, Wilford Woodruff Papers, https://wilfordwoodruffpapers.org/documents/11947e8e-ba52-4039-a6e3-59781ce48462/page/2e3a73e4-2ed7-4e89-92c7-b0faca11d380 Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Wilford Woodruff (2011), Chapter: The Life and Ministry of Wilford Woodruff, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/teachings-wilford-woodruff/the-life-and-ministry-of-wilford-woodruff Full first-person account: Wilford Woodruff, Leaves from My Journal (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1882), 101. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46028
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