People

Rebecca Winters was emigrating to Utah with her family in 1852 when she contracted Cholera and died within sight of Scotts Bluff. Her grave site was marked with a metal wagon wheel rim that was engraved “Rebecca Winters, Age 50.”

In January 1846, Young ordered Brown to gather the “Mississippi Saints” and meet the main body of Mormons along the Platte River trail to Utah later that summer. Brown managed to convince just forty-three of the Monroe County converts to make the 640-mile trip to Independence, Missouri. William Lay and his wife, Sytha (Crosby), decided to take with them their twenty-year-old enslaved man, Hark Lay.

Green Flake was born into slavery on 6 January 1828 in Lilesville, Anson County, North Carolina. His master, Jordan Flake, gave ten-year-old Green to his son James Madison Flake as a wedding gift in 1838. When Brigham Young led the first LDS wagon companies out of Nauvoo in 1846, three Mormon families from Mississippi volunteered their enslaved men—Green Flake, Oscar Crosby, and Hark Lay—to go along as laborers.

Zina Diantha Huntington was an early convert to the Mormon faith and the wife of both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Zina and her son Zebulon left Nauvoo to join the Mormons who had started to gather in Iowa in preparation for their mass migration to the Salt Lake Valley. She lived a life of public service.

Elizabeth “Lizzy” Flake was born enslaved in Anson County, North Carolina, in 1833. The Mississippi Saints, that her owners were members of, moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1844 and joined the migration to Utah two years later. Two years after arriving in Utah, Lizzy set out on another migration. Along with several other Mormon colonists, she headed to California’s San Bernardino Valley, just east of Los Angeles.

Elijah Abel was born in Maryland in either 1808 or 1810, most likely into slavery. He converted to the Mormon faith in 1832. In 1839 Abel relocated to Nauvoo, Illinois, where LDS Church founder Joseph Smith, Jr. and about 10,000 of his followers had relocated after being expelled from the state of Missouri. Abel spent three years there volunteering his carpentry skills to help build the new temple.

Joseph Fielding Smith, sixth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the nephew of its founder, Joseph Smith, was born in Far West, Missouri, on 13 November 1838. Joseph left with his family on the Mormon Pioneer Trail in 1846, spent time in Winter Quarters, and arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on 24 September 1848, almost four months after their departure from Winter Quarters.