Following is her own story, written by Minerva Melinda Higbee Cunnington
It was July 24, 1847 that the first company of pioneers reached Utah, but a few men came the day before. They hurriedly built a few log huts in the shape of a fort, to shelter them until they could look around and get settled and located at their journey’s end.
Their leader was President Brigham Young, and as Mr. S.A. Kenner says in his book, “Utah As It Is”, pioneers had a pretty hard time of it, crossing an unsettled, savage and barren wilderness, of which they knew but little, to arrive in a place of which they knew nothing. But what they didn’t know, they proceeded to find out.
My father did not come to Utah with the first company, for President Brigham Young counselled him to stay at Missouri to ferry the Mormons that were left there across the river. He was the ferryman at that time, so they could take their ox wagon train for the far west as this Rocky Mountain region was then called.
It was in the spring of 1848 that my father started west with his family, which consisted of my mother (Charlotte Woods Higbee) and three daughters and one son and a step-son, John S. Carter, my mother’s former husband’s son. (His father, Gideon Carter, was killed by the mob in Nauvoo). I was only three years old but I faintly remember two incidents that occurred on the journey west.
One day the company stopped to allow the women to do their washing and I saw a large herd of buffalo in the distance.
My father’s oldest daughter, Amanda, was married to John McEwan about two years before the move, and while I know they came to Utah with the early pioneers, I cannot find out which company they came in. They had a son born near Nebraska on the way out and he is still living in Provo City.
We were about three months on our way and when we reached Salt Lake City, it had become quite a settlement and we stayed there about a year, when my sister, Clara Higbee Graves was born, January 2, 1849.
Soon after that, President Young called my father to take his own and thirty or forty other families and go fifty miles south to start another settlement near Provo River. They first built the fort on the shore of Utah Lake, which is several miles west of the present Provo town. The houses or huts, were built adjoining, in the shape of a fort, about the size of a city block. The Indians were very troublesome that winter. They came down from the East Mountains and circled the fort, yelling their horrible war whoop and we expected them to break in the fort and massacre the lot of us. But help came from Salt Lake in time to save the fort, but there was a severe battle with the Indians and my brother Joseph was killed, my father’s only son. He was only twenty years old. The fight occurred on February 9, 1850. My mother had charge of the ammunition and the kegs of powder were kept under her bed in one corner of the room, and I can remember seeing my two half sisters, Hannah and Emma Higbee, kneeling in front of the fireplace running the bullets of melted lead into the molds that were to fit the guns that were used in the fight.
Those were truly troublesome times in the days of the Mormon pioneers.
As soon as possible after 1850, President Young made peace with the Indians. The fort was then abandoned and the people moved to where the city of Provo is now located and my sister Lottie was born August 15, 1851, in the new town.
Little do the present generations know of the hardships the pioneers had to endure, the obstacles they had to overcome, or the difficult situations they had to meet, but by their faith and industry and determined will, they laid the foundation of the great state of Utah; and for the benefit of their children and those who came after, they have succeeded in making the “Desert blossom as the rose”.
Received from Minerva M. Higbee Cunnington by Ruby Thomas, February 12, 1929.
Source: Higbee Family Magazine 1957
Contributed to by pamelakayhigbee1 · 12 January 2014
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