Description

True as Steel

Melissa Burton was born March 2, 1828 in Ontario Canada. When she was ten years old she was baptized a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When the saints left Nauvoo in 1846, Melissa and her family were among them. On June 2, 1846, at Mount Pisgah, Iowa, she married William Coray. She was 18 years old.

Just days later, a call came for volunteers from the church to fight for the United States in the war against Mexico. William volunteered. Melissa saw no reason why she must remain behind. She said, “If he must go, I want to go. Why must women always stay behind and worry about their husbands, when they could just as well march beside them?”

Leaving her family was very difficult, but she felt her duty was to her husband. Indeed, she never saw her mother in mortality again, as she passed away and was buried along the Missouri River in 1846.

Employed as a laundress for Company B, Melissa departed Council Bluffs in July 1846 and marched with the Battalion to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas Territory. From there the Battalion was outfitted and marched on to Santa Fe, and from Santa Fe across New Mexico, Arizona, and the Imperial Desert of California, building as they went a great wagon road of more than 1000 miles. It was an unspeakably grueling march. On a number of occasions, those too weak or sickly were dismissed from the ranks. From Santa Fe onward, Melissa was one of only four women to continue on.

“I didn’t mind it,” she said, “I walked because I wanted to; my husband had to walk, and I went along by his side.”

The country through which they journeyed was formidable and dangerous because of a lack of water and food. To survive, Melissa carefully rationed their food and would carry a stone in her mouth to lessen her thirst.

Somewhere in Arizona, Melissa learned that she was expecting and from that time on did her best to hide her pregnancy and the nausea that relentlessly accompanied it.

Finally, in January 1847, the exhausted members of the Battalion reached the shores of the Pacific. As one soldier quipped, they came in not with flags flying but with rags flying. Their commanding officer, a tough, hardened military veteran named Colonel Philip St. George Cooke praised them, saying, “History may be searched in vain for an equal march of infantry.”

Once in California, Melissa and William served with Company B in San Diego. After their discharge in July 1847, Melissa and her husband headed north with a new wagon and a team of horses. It was in Monterey, on October 2, 1847, that Melissa gave birth to her first born, William Coray Jr., he died a few days after his birth.

Continuing on to the north, Melissa and William fell in with the Browett-Holmes Company. They determined to blaze a new road over the Sierra Nevada Mountains south of Lake Tahoe. It took them six long weeks to build a wagon road over Carson’s Pass. That road would become the principle route of the 49ers coming into the California gold fields. More than 200,000 would come after them over that road.

Of her arrival into the Salt Lake Valley in December 1848, two and a half years after leaving Council Bluffs, Iowa, Melissa said, “We were glad to get here, I can tell you.” This was the promised land she had dreamed of, but it was to prove a harsh land. The winter of 1848-49 was very cold. On the morning of February 6, 1849, with minus 30-degree temperatures, Melissa gave birth to her second child, a little girl they named Melissa. Their joy was short-lived however, as Captain William Coray died on March 7 from consumption, starvation, and exposure.

In time Melissa would remarry William H. Kimball and bear seven more children. This woman, tough of faith and tender of heart, followed her husband and the prophets more than 3,000 miles to the Salt Lake Valley. In praise and honor her family declared her to be “true as steel to her convictions.” In 1994, the state of California, memorialized her courage and sacrifice by naming a mountain after her near the Carson Pass road that she helped make. Melissa Coray Peak.

We may not get a mountain named after us, but if we are true as steel to our convictions, heaven will remember and we will be lifted up to stand with Him in that great day of His coming.

Sources:
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/memories/KWV7-1JN
https://history.churchofjesuschrist.org/overlandtravel/sources/17596523428502343840-
eng/melissa-burton-coray-kimball-in-utah-womans-2-000-mile-march-fifty-five-years-ago-salt-
lake-herald-26-may-1901-2?firstName=Melissa&surname=Coray