Description

Ezra and Sarah Fiske Allen

Ezra Allen—29 years old–enlisted in the Mormon Battalion on July 16, 1846 from Mt. Pisgah, Iowa. He signed on as a musician in company C (he had been a fifer in the Nauvoo Legion) He left Sarah and two children and made the historic march to California. While he was gone Sarah’s struggles to survive tried her faith and refined her soul. All the while she waited for her beloved’s return. 

In July 1847, Ezra was discharged from the Battalion in Los Angeles. He joined others and headed home. In the Sierra Nevada Mountains his party met Captain James Brown who delivered a message from President Brigham Young that there were not provisions sufficient to support them in the new settlement of Salt Lake City and they should winter over in California. Obediently Ezra turned back and passed the winter working for John Sutter. 

May 1, 1848, anxious to be home, Ezra and eight others set out to cross the mountains, but the snow was still too deep. They turned back. Meanwhile, Sarah began to eagerly anticipate the return of her husband. 

“I looked forward to the time when his strong arms would lift these burdens of care from my shoulders,” she said. “I gathered grapes from the lowlands near the river, and made preparations, making things I thought would please him.”

 Then she received word that a group of battalion men had reached the River and would cross in a few days in search of their families. She wanted to go to him but she could not, so she waited anxiously, hanging on every footstep that sounded outside her door. Then word came that three battalion men had been killed by Indians in the mountains of California. Her hopes were blasted in a moment for she knew in her heart that one of them had to be her Ezra, and so it was. 

Ezra and two others had been searching for a route over the mountains. It was June 27, 1848 when they had made camp near a spring. There they were attacked, brutally tortured, and killed. Ezra’s fellow travelers found his body and that of his two companions, buried them, and marked the site. They aptly named the place “Tragedy Springs.”

When the word was confirmed that Ezra would not return, Sarah felt she would sink under the burden of grief and anguish. 

“What could I do now but trust in God?” she wrote. “I had no relative in the Church, two small children, and the journey of a thousand miles before me.” 

Then came a remarkable blessing—Ezra’s Battalion companions had discovered a gold pouch lying near his body in the mountains of California. Knowing it was his, they picked it up and carried it 1700 miles to his widow on the Missouri. As they handed it to her, Sarah saw the blood that stained the leather. 

“It seemed to me,” she said, “the price of his life.” 

With those means she outfitted herself to make the journey west, arriving in the Salt Lake Valley September 14, 1852. Sarah Beriah Fiske Allen eventually married Joel Ricks and they settled in Cache Valley, Utah where she faithfully served ten years as one of the first relief society presidents in Logan. She is buried in the Logan City Cemetery.

Today we sing fervently, “Onward, ever onward…forward pressing forward.” Looking back at those in our past, how can we do otherwise?

Sources:

https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/memories/KWJB-CZQ

https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/memories/KWJ6-C8G