Description

The Call Was Pressing

In 1878, Margaret Phelps, the wife of Alva Phelps, recounted to Daniel Tyler those hours In July 1846, when the call to serve in the Mormon Battalion came.

We were traveling along the way when the call came for my husband to leave us. It was midnight when we were awakened from our slumbers with the painful news that we were to be left homeless and without a protector. I was very ill at the time, my children were not well. My babe was also extremely sick, but the call was pressing. There was no time for any provisions to be made for wife or children. No time for tears, regret was unavailing, he started in the morning. I watched him from my wagon bed till his loved form was lost in the distance. It was my last sight of him. Two months from the day of his enlistment, the sad news of my bereavement arrived.

July 20, 1846, Alva Phelps had marched off with Battalion to Fort Leavenworth. While at Fort Leavenworth, he became ill. When the Battalion left the Fort on August 12, Alva was still sick but kept going. Then, while camped on the Arkansas River, Henry Standage, a fellow Battalion soldier wrote the following in his journal.

Wednesday Sept 16, 1846. Brother Alva Phelps died this evening. I believe that calomel killed him as he was a faithful brother and he had not been sick but a little. I helped dig his grave by torchlight…. After I had returned from digging Bro Phelps grave and had laid down in my tent, some of the battalion called me to look at a star in the east that continued to move both north and south and up and down, it was directly in the course that we had traveled….When he was taken sick he pleaded against his being forced to take calomel and said he would get well without it.

Though this seems a sad tale to relate, it is the choice that Margaret made after Alva’s death that makes the entire story of the men and women of the Battalion so utterly astonishing. She relates,

The blow entirely prostrated me, but I had just embarked on the sea of my troubles. Winter found me bed-ridden, destitute, in a wretched hovel which was built upon a hillside; the season was one of constant rain; the situation of the hovel and its openness, gave free access to piercing winds and water flowed over the dirt floor, converting it to mud two or three inches deep. No wood, but what m little ones picked up around the fences, so green it filled the house with smoke. The rain dripping and wetting the bed which I was powerless to leave. No relatives to cheer and comfort me, a stranger away from all who ever loved me. My neighbors could do but little, their own troubles and destitution engrossing their time. My little daughter of seven was my only help. No eye to witness my suffering but the pitying one of God. He did not desert me.…“how we made it through, I don’t know, but somehow we did and we found our way to the rocky mountains in the west, finally”

She kept going and kept the faith, as I hope we all will—come what may!

Sources: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/memories/L5TV-FYR