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James Stevens Brown

The Mormon Battalion was discharged from service in the United States Army, July 16, 1847 in Los Angeles. Immediately after discharge, the men split up into different groups and began to make their way back to join the main body of the saints wherever they were.

This story is about James Stevens Brown. He joined up with a group, headed home led by Levi Ward Hancock and they made their way North from Los Angeles up towards San Francisco. They were intending to cross the Sierra Nevada Mountains East of Sacramento. On September 7, 1847, they were met by messengers up in the mountains sent from President Brigham Young informing them that unless they had sufficient provisions to survive the winter in the Salt Lake Valley, they ought not to come. Food was scarce. If they didn’t have what they needed, President Young advised that they remain in California until the following season. 

Well, of the 70-some men in the group about half kept going East towards Salt Lake and their families while James Brown and a number of others turned back, looking for work for the winter. 

As it would turn out and some of you know this, James and five others secured employment, working for one John Sutter  – building a mill on the American River. These five Latter-day saints they were there on January 24, 1848 when the foreman of the project, James Marshall discovered gold in the mill race.

It’s a wonderful and involved story but that discovery sparked the gold rush of 1849 in which it is estimated that tens of billions of dollars in gold was found and some 300,000 people rushed to California from all over the world to claim it but before all those 49ers got there, James Brown and his brethren were there first. They had the first pickins. They found that gold everywhere. They talk about making a fortune.

As summer approaches, however, the summer of ‘48, the battalion boys were faced with a weighty decision  – should they stay and make a fortune in gold? Or leave it all behind and return to their families and their faith? Bless his heart, James Stevens Brown summed it up so well:

“The day before starting from the gold diggings was a kind of an off day in which I wandered off from camp with pick and shovel up a dry gulch where I soon struck a very rich prospect of gold. By sundown, I had washed out 49.50 cents in gold. Yet strange as it may appear, I  have never seen that rich spot of Earth since, nor do I regret it, for there has always been a higher object before me than gold. We had covenanted to move together. We were in honor bound to move the next day. We did move, leaving that rich prospect without ever sticking a stake in the gulch but abandoning it to those who might follow. People said, “Here is gold on the bedrock, gold on the hills, gold in the rills, gold everywhere, gold to spend, gold to land, gold for all that will delve and soon you can make an independent fortune. We could realize all that, James said, still, duty called. Our honor was at stake. We had covenanted with each other. There was a principle involved. For with us, it was God in his kingdom first. We had friends and relatives in the wilderness yet in an untried desert land and who knew their condition. We did not, so it was duty before pleasure, before wealth and with this prompting, we rolled out and joined our comrades.”

I love that story. You and me, do we have a higher object in this world? Higher than wealth, power, pleasure or whatever else the world may offer? I pray you do. Oh, I pray that you do.  This, my dear friends, is a remarkable example of the law of sacrifice in action.