Sentenced to Burn at the Stake: The Deliverance of Tippets and Woolsey on the Winter Dispatch Run (1846–47)

John Harvey Tippets was born September 5, 1810, in Rockingham County, New Hampshire. Baptized in 1832, he passed through the trials of Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois with the Saints. Thomas Woolsey was born November 3, 1806, in Pulaski County, Kentucky, and joined the Church in 1838. Both volunteered for the Mormon Battalion in 1846 — Tippets leaving a family that had buried two children in Nauvoo, Woolsey leaving his wife and children in a dugout at Mt. Pisgah, Iowa. Both were sent with the sick detachments to winter at Pueblo, on the Arkansas River.

In the winter of 1846–47, the Pueblo detachments chose two of their number to carry the Battalion soldiers' pay and mail back to Winter Quarters — wages the destitute Saints in the camps desperately needed for the coming migration. Tippets and Woolsey were given the errand: a 52-day, several-hundred-mile crossing of the plains in the dead of winter, through country controlled by the Pawnee, on half-starved horses.

Somewhere on the Platte they were taken prisoner by a Pawnee war party. The warriors stripped them of their arms and means, and sentences of death were pronounced — the two Latter-day Saint soldiers were bound and preparations were made to burn them at the stake. Woolsey later wrote of that hour: "We knew we were in a trap, and only through the power of God would we hope to escape, and believe me, we did send up a petition to God. Our prayers were answered."

The answer came through an act of providence the two men could never have engineered: a band of friendly Omaha Indians arrived, ransomed the prisoners out of the Pawnees' hands, and guided them the rest of the way across the frozen prairie. The two arrived at Winter Quarters in early 1847, delivering the Battalion wages and letters to the Twelve intact — the very funds and dispatches that would help fit out Brigham Young's pioneer company that April. When the first pioneer company rolled west in the spring of 1847, Tippets marched in the 11th Ten and Woolsey in the 6th Ten, hauling the company cannon; both walked into the Salt Lake Valley that July. Woolsey later helped settle Orderville and died at Orderville, Utah, in 1897; Tippets died in 1886 at Bunkerville, Nevada.