Alice Walsh-autobiography
Alice Walsh Strong
Autobiographical Sketch
Source:
In Josiah Rogerson, Papers [ca.1895-1914], fd.2
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We left on the 26th of July and traveled on the stage road through the State
of Iowa, to Council Bluffs, Ia [Iowa]; on to 24th of August, a distance of over
300 miles. Next day we ferried the Missouri and made camp at Florence. We left
here on the 27th of Aug. for 1,031 miles journey to Salt Lake. My eldest son
Robert [Walsh] was never well after we started, and one night after we had camped
my husband took one of our quilt s [quilts] and went quite a distance to sell
it for something more desirable to eat. He did not recover his health on the
journey and died on the way between Laramie and Devils Gate. My grief at his
interment is beyond expression, on account of the location and the certainty
that his remains would be molested by wolves.
At night in our tent s [tents] there would be three couples and six to eight
children under eight years of age. The weather after leaving Laramie became
very cold at nights, and the hardship on the men having to stand guard six hours
every other night was beyond human endurance.
Our rations had to be cut down both for adults and children and the clothing
of both sexes becoming in-sufficient for the healthful warmth of our bodies.
Arriving at Devils-Gate about the first of Nov. on account of
the nightly fatalities of the male members of our company, for two or three
weeks previously, there were many widows in our company, and the women and the
children had to pitch and put up the tents, shoveling the snow away with tin
plates etc, making our beds on the ground and getting up in the morning wet
with melted snow and lie on our clothing. This hard service continued with all
that were able to endure it till we nearly reached the South Pass, and one night
I dropped to the ground in a dead faint with my baby in my arms. I had some
pepper pods with me and recovering from my stupor I took some of them to warm
all <our food> and to recover my strength. During these times we had only
a little thin flour gruel two or three times a day, and, this was meager nourishment
for a mother and a nursing baby.
My husband [William Walsh] died and was buried at or near Devil’s Gate
and the ground was frozen so hard that the men had a difficult task in digging
the grave deep enough [enough] in which to inter him, and several nine others
that morning, and it is more than probable that several were only covered over
with snow. Here I was left a widow with two young children. The boy [John Walsh]
became so weak, he could not stand alone, and I had to sit and hold both of
them in the relief wagons from this on. At times most of us had to walk after
being met by the teams from Salt Lake, and late in the day, and toward evening
my shoes would nearly freeze to my feet and at one time in taking them of[f]
some of the skin and flesh came of[f] with them. Some of the bones _f [of] my
feet were left bare and my hands were severely frozen.
When the relief help reached us and nearly all of us had been assigned to some
wagon I was sitting in the snow with my children on my lap, and it seemed that
ther[e] was no chance for me to ride, but before the last teams had left the
camp, I was assigned to ride in the commissary wagon, and did so until our arrival
in Salt Lake City.
The young man in charge of the commissary wagon, was, Joseph B.
Alvoard; and seemed to be well acquainted with frontier and mountain life and
realizing my condition of a widow with two children, he helped me early and
late to the bes[t] of his ability.
Arriving in Salt Lake Nov. 30th 1856, with two children and the clothes I stood
up in, were all of my possessions in a strange land, without kin or relatives;
the extra clothing we had started with and pulled on our carts to the Devils
Gate, was left there and I never saw it afterwards.