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Louisa Barnes Pratt
“As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.” Happiness is a choice, not a chance. And I can’t think of a better way to illustrate how such a choice is made than by this story.
Louisa Barnes Pratt lived in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1846. Her husband, Addison had been called to serve as a missionary in the South Pacific, leaving her to fend for herself with three little children. When the call came in the Spring of 1846, to flee Nauvoo and go West, Louisa went to one of the leaders. She said:
“I asked him, if he could divine the reason why those who had sent my husband to the ends of the earth did not call to inquire whether I could prepare myself for such a perilous journey, or if I wished to go or stay? His reply was, ‘Sister Pratt, they expect you to be smart enough to go yourself without help, and even to assist others.’”
And what happens next represents the spirit of this remarkable woman. She wrote:
“The remark awakened in me a spirit of self-reliance. I replied, ‘Well, I will show them what I can do.’ I nerved up my heart, and put all my energies to the test, to get ready, determined to follow the Church, come life or death.”
And death would be nearly the outcome before she was through. As they crossed the mud of Iowa, she wrote, “Yesterday we traveled the most intolerable roads!” And yet Louisa chose not to look at the mud. The very next day, she wrote, “I begin now to admire the country, such a beautiful rolling prairie!”
You can almost see her conscious will to be of good cheer in this statement when she was deep into the wilderness:
“It comes suddenly to my mind how far I am going from home, parents, and every relative I have in the world! But, the Lord has called us, and appointed us a place where we can live in peace and be free.”
Eventually, Louisa and family arrived at Winter Quarters on the Missouri River, and like so many became deathly ill. She wrote:
“The shaking ague fastened deathless fangs upon me, from which there is no escape….I shook until it appeared to me my very bones were pulverized. I wept and I prayed.”
Her children, similarly afflicted, huddled by their mother. Her fever broke for a time, and she managed the will to hire a man to make a sod hut for her, 10 feet by 12. When he finished, she wrote:
“I hung up a blanket for a door…. I built a fire, drew up my rocking chair before it, and that moment felt as rich as some persons would to be moved into a costly building. Thus we learn to prize enjoyments by sacrifices.”
Her sufferings and sacrifices continued. The sickness ebbed and flowed through the winter, and yet she never surrendered to a complaining spirit. In the Spring of 1848, she once more answered the prophetic call and set out for the Salt Lake Valley.
“It was hard for me,” she said, “to wave the dread of a never-ending journey.” But once again, Louisa plucked up her spirits and when she was three weeks out on the trail, she said of herself, “There was not a more mirthful woman in the whole company. The grandeur of nature filled me with grateful aspirations.
As she crossed over the mountains she summarized her journey:
“Although we have been compelled to leave Nauvoo, we did not feel like outcasts. We realized that our Heavenly Father had made a beautiful world, and desired that his children should enjoy it.”
And then just outside of Salt Lake, as the company was struggling over “objects that seem[ed] almost insurmountable”, she wrote what some would consider unbelievable: “I feel now as if I could go another thousand miles.”
Then August 20, 1848, Louisa recorded:
“We have ascended an eminence, where with a spyglass we can see the Great Salt Lake in the Valley of which the Saints are located, our hearts leap for joy.”
It is a true principle that our hearts can leap only as high as we allow them to jump. It is in our divine nature to seek joy. May we so seek.
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