Frank Richard Bentley of the Carson Mission

Frank Richard Bentley

       “In 1855 I put in fifteen acres of wheat, ten acres in one lot and five in the other. When the wheat was about six inches high, the grasshoppers came down like a cloud and devoured everything before them. They commenced at one side of the field and cleared it as they went.

 About this time, Marshal Heywood was ordered to get up a company of men to go to Carson Valley as guard to the U.S. District Court, to organize Carson County.

The marshal proposed that I go along, which proposition I accepted as by this time the grasshoppers had taken ten acres of my wheat and the prospect was fair that they would take the other five. The terms were five dollars a day with everything furnished for a man and his horse. I thought it would be a good chance to get my bread and other provisions for my family.

 We were in Carson about two months. At the U.S. District Court at this time I took out my final papers of citizenship. Orson Hyde was clerk of the court.

When I returned home at the end of two months, I found my family all well, and my wife had one hundred bushels of wheat stored in the house which was quite a surprise to me. My wife informed me that after I left she thought she would try to save the other five acres of wheat which the grasshoppers had not reached. So, she took the children, the pigs and chickens and went to the field every day to fight the hoppers, and by that means saved the wheat. That was the only wheat saved in the settlement.

At the October conference, I, with about one hundred others, was called to move to Carson County and colonize that county.

In the winter, I sold out my possessions in Nephi and made preparations to start for Carson. In the spring of 1856 with my family and all I possessed, I started for Carson Valley. I had one wagon drawn by two yoke of oxen and one yoke of cows with several loose cows in the herd. The company was very large numbering over one hundred wagons and a large number of loose cattle. We made the trip in about six weeks. On reaching the Carson River the company was disorganized; the people locating on the river in Carson Valley and in several small valleys adjacent. Washaw [Washoe] Valley was selected by Apostle Orson Hyde, who with his wife Mary Ann was with the company as head quarters of the mission.

A beautiful stream of pure mountain water ran through the town site and formed a lake on the south side of the valley. The valley is about six miles long east and west and about three miles wide and is situated close at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I bought a lot at the mouth of the creek and built a hewed log house. . . . A log school house was built and improvements made and we soon had quite a comfortable little settlement.

August 14, 1856, my son Frank was born and being the first child born in the new colony had the honor of having the town named Franktown after him.

I was very much pleased with Carson and the surrounding valleys also with the climate and the many crystal streams coursing down the mighty mountains. Mountain trout was very abundant in the river and small streams emptying into it, so much so that after the spring overflow on the bottoms had subsided, a great amount of fish was left in the low places and pools, so the farmers turned their hogs loose and they got fat on the fish. I bought some of the bacon gut, it was so fishy that I could not eat it.

In the summer the white clover grew so high (8–-10 feet) the wind blew it down flat and in the fall, so I am told, it would rot off at the bottom and the wind would roll it into wind rows ready for the farmers to haul it off for hay in the winter.

There was a great deal of fish in Washoe Lake and in the spring they ran up the creek to spawn. A few rods above my house the creek forked. When the Indians wanted fish they put a dam in one fork and turned the water all down the other; and when the water drained out of the fork they had dammed off, they followed it down and picked up the fish with their hands that were struggling to get from one pool to another. My house was not more than twenty feet from the creek and my children could throw out a mess of fish for breakfast in a few minutes. (Memoirs of Frank Bentley)

A number of Frank Bentley’s descendants live in the Reno-Sparks area.

From Genoa to the Carson Mission

From Genoa to the Carson Mission

    In August 1850, Amasa Lyman and 30 Mormon men passed through Carson Valley on their return to Salt Lake City from California and confirmed its desirability.       

    By 1851, John Reese from Salt Lake City had established a trading post in Carson Valley, about a mile away from the Abner Blackburn trading post. He and his partners quickly cleared an acre of ground and built a stockade around the plot. Inside the stockade, a 30-by-50-foot log hotel and store were built. They began planting crops to sell the following season. Within a year it was a full- fledged commercial operation that many emigrants mentioned in their journals as Mormon Station. Seventeen men worked for Reese, cutting timber, building log houses, a blacksmith shop, with fenced acreage for wheat, barley, corn, watermelons, and turnips (Davies, Mormon Gold).

    Establishing a full-fledged trading post attracted a number of people, both Mormon and non-Mormon alike. By 1851, the residents established a squatter’s government to maintain some regulation concerning the amount of land a resident could hold. A heated discussion about the boundary line of California and the Utah Territory arose in the new community. The non-Mormon residents maintained Carson Valley was in California and refused to send their taxes into Salt Lake. The Mormons, including Brigham Young, maintained the area belonged to the Utah Territory. By 1855, the Utah legislature passed an act creating Carson County. Brigham Young sent an impressive entourage to organize the county government seat.

    Orson Hyde, a probate judge, was sent to Carson Valley to be the spiritual leader of the community. He was also to fulfill the mandates of the Salt Lake legislature. Along with Orson Hyde, Governor Young sent Marshal Joseph L. Heywood and U.S. District Judge Styles. These astute men were assigned to meet with officials from the state of California and establish the proper boundary between the state of California and the Utah Territory.

To assure the county would remain in the Utah Territory, Governor Young made a major investment of human resources by sending 257 people to establish their homes in the Carson Valley. In the spring general conference of the church, Brigham Young called these families to establish a firm government over the region. Indeed, when Carson Valley held an election, the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of the “Mormon ticket” rather than what was called, “the Human Ticket.” Nine of the twelve offices established by the election were held by Mormons.

    At that point, one of the purposes of the new community was met, but there were other important reasons Brigham sent folks to settle a mission. He planned to establish a midway station between the Utah settlements and the Pacific coast. Carson Valley was to be a major outpost of Zion.

    Orson constructed a saw mill in Washoe Valley to prepare for the families coming from Salt Lake. He spent $10,000 on its construction including materials donated from members of the church in California. The mill would provide families with lumber for flooring, finish for their houses, and fence for their land. It later became the subject source for the famous “Orson Hyde Curse.”

    Hyde was unfaltering in his zeal to accomplish all of his given mandates. He conducted surveys and secured water, land, and timber rights for settlers moving into the area. He had a bridge built on the Carson River as well as a road cut into Carson Canyon. When the surveys showed Carson Valley was located inside the territory of Utah, Orson changed the name of Mormon Station to that of Genoa. The area reminded him of Genoa, Italy, Columbus’s birthplace. He established other communities in surrounding valleys. He mapped out Franktown in five-acre lots with the same intention of establishing the area as that of Salt Lake City, with broad streets. In a report given by Orson, he concluded, “This is a beautiful valley. . . . There are so many valleys in this vicinity rich and fertile sufficient to make a state or an empire” (Arrington, Mormons in Nevada). There was an enthusiastic feeling in these valleys—a feeling that the colony was going to be successful, both economically and politically.

    “On September 28, 1856, Orson Hyde held the first conference of the Church in Carson Valley. Sermons were delivered on such subjects as swearing, prayer, keeping away from grog shops and the respectful treatment of non-Mormons. Elder Hyde’s advice to the new settlers was as follows: ‘Labor hard, settle up, mind your own business, be slow of speech, and live your religion. Fear God and work righteousness.’ (Arrington, Mormons in Nevada).

    At the time of the annual stake conference, the Mormon membership was reported to be as follows:

Carson Valley Branch, 116 members, of whom 5 were high priests and 31 seventies and elders:

Washoe Branch, 111 members, of whom 12 were high priests and 10 were seventies and elders:

Eagle Valley Branch, 60 members, of whom 4 were high priests and 7 seventies and elders. (Arrington, Mormons in Nevada)

As presiding elder of the local church, Orson organized the church members into a stake. “William Price was president; Chester Loveland, president of the high council, and Richard Bentley, stake bishop. Home teachers were appointed for each of these branches, as well as the full quota of twelve men for the stake high council” (Hatch, “History of Christopher Layton,”)

The members included some prominent men in Utah history. William Jennings, a butcher and meat dealer whose entrepreneurial spirit is evidenced by the fact that he later became Utah’s first millionaire and was a principal organizer of Z.C.M.I.; Chester Loveland, who later became the first mayor of Brigham City; Christopher Layton, founder of Layton, Utah and of Layton, Arizona; Meltier Hatch, a prominent colonizer in southern Utah and eastern Nevada and whom Hatch, Utah is named after; and Abraham Hunsaker, a prime colonizer in northern Utah, who was one of the best stockmen in the territory. Many of the men were also veterans of the Mormon Battalion.” (Arrington, Mormons in Nevada) 

    When the saints from Salt Lake arrived, they dissembled to spread out among the small settlements in Eagle Valley (Carson City), Washoe Valley, Jack and Pleasant Valleys, and Franktown.

    Currently, several Carson Mission immigrants of 1854, are remembered by their posterity who live within the same broad scope encompassed by the old Carson Mission .

Abner Blackburn

Abner Blackburn

Abner was a member of the sick detachment of the Mormon Battalion who wintered in Pueblo, Colorado. He and 12 others caught up with Brigham Young and the vanguard group around Fort Laramie, Wyoming, then continued into the Salt Lake Valley approximately the same time as the Brigham Young Company. Abner stayed in the valley for two to three weeks, after which, he traveled with Sam Brannon back to California. This was the first of many treks across the Sierra for him. When he returned to Utah after obtaining the battalion’s back pay, he continued to Missouri where he joined his family to help them move to the valley. The family wintered in Salt Lake that year, 1847–48. By that time he heard about the battalion’s gold discovery in California. He and several other battalion members planned their return to gold country the following spring.

In 1849 he joined a company who intended to take the new road carved out by the Mormon Battalion members who had previously wintered in California. When Abner’s group stopped near the Carson River for a couple of days to let their animals rest, he asked why no one had discovered gold on the eastern side of the Sierras. They responded by saying no one ever looked. Being curious, Abner took a bread pan and a butcher knife to a nearby ravine to dig around. Sure enough, he found a small quantity of gold. Abner remembered the location being in the vicinity of present-day Dayton, Nevada, a few miles south of what later became Virginia City. He “calculated to return some time in the future”(Will Bagley, Frontiersman,141). The company continued over the Sierras into California gold country. Abner worked several locations along the American River with great success, rescuing thousands of dollars of “the needful.”

After Abner’s stint in the gold fields he went back to Utah in 1849 for the winter.

Following his routine, he traveled east again in the spring of 1850. He and several others went back to the Nevada location where he had found gold the previous year, but the gold had been mined by others. His memoirs establish the first gold found in the area.

Abner was an adventurer. He, his brother, and four other men established a trading post in the Carson Valley. The post was later dubbed “Mormon Station.” He states in his memoirs, “There was no better place” in Carson Valley for this site had “cold watter [sic] comeing [sic] out of the mountain and pine trees were plenty on the edge of the valley. There was [sic] oceans of good feed for stock.” (Bagley, “Nevada Town’s 150-Year Party Salt Lake Tribune, June 17, 2001; B1).

“My place was about 50 yards from the place where [Reese later] built his trading post. We put up a log cabin. It was not standing when I went bak. Timber was very plentiful. I left there in September and we sold out to someone named Moore. I think Reese bought this man out. We did no fencing or planting. We went to make a station for the purpose of supplying provisions to the emigrants who came along. We built a corral there to keep the stock in. The cabin was a double-logged one story house about 20 by 60 feet containing two rooms. We put no roof on nor a floor as it did not rain that season—at that time we did not know but what we would winter there when we would have to put a roof on. I don’t recollect the object of our putting up the log house only we had nothing to do so we put a house up. We had no trouble with Indians. My house was the first one built in the valley and I think in Nevada.” (Bagley, Frontiersman, 263)

 Business was good that year. He said, “Trade flowed in onto us” (Bagley, Frontiersman). Hundreds of hungry 49ers bought and traded goods before the final push through the mountains to California. At the end of the season the partners divided their proceeds and went their separate ways.

Abner traversed this area many times leaving in his wake a colorful stamp on Truckee Meadows history. He would have made a greater impact if he and his friends had gone a little farther up the hill toward Virginia City where they would have found the rich veins of the Comstock. The last time he wintered with the saints in Utah was the year 1850. He then took permanent leave of the saints in Utah to live in California.

In 1897, Abner was invited to return to Salt Lake to participate in a commemoration celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the pioneers’ arrival in 1847. He wrote asking for financial assistance, saying, “California is not a land of gold and we are nearly all poor.” (Bagley, Frontiersman, 220). Abner had foolishly spent his gold money, letting it slip through his fingers. He did obtain funds to attend the Jubilee celebration of the battalion held in Salt Lake City. He proudly marched down Main Street, and posed for an historical picture of the remaining battalion veterans. 

The Impact of the Mormon Battalion

The Mormom Battalion’s Impact on the Truckee Meadows

On the Mormon Battalion website, there is a written statement that sums up the Mormon Battalion’s total contribution. “In every sense, they of the battalion had marched into history. Behind them would come many thousands of immigrants who would follow the trail they so painstakingly—and painfully—pioneered. They had raised ‘Old Glory,’ the flag of their country, on the Pacific shore. And they had raised the ensign of Zion.”[P1] 

There is no doubt that the Mormon Battalion etched a presence in the Truckee Meadows area as well. The various groups of Mormons going back and forth between Utah and California during this period made the Truckee Meadows/Carson Valley a virtual highway and a necessary way station.

Battalion veterans painstakingly carved out the Emigrant Trail passing through the beautiful Carson Valley. As the men returned to their loved ones, they gave a favorable report about Carson Valley, promoting the area as a suitable place to settle. They were impressed with its beauty, fertility, and location—being located at the end of a strenuous trip through the mountains, or just after the dry difficult journey through the desert. Each person who wrote about the valley, exclaimed how luxuriant the grass was. The trees were plentiful as were the rivers and streams. A few of the battalion members later became guides to those passing through Nevada to California and some of them came back to settle, at least for a short time.

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The Battalion and the Donner Party

The Battalion and the Donner Party

Lavina Murphy and her husband, Jeremiah, joined the church in 1836 when Wilford Woodruff and Reed Smoot introduced them to the gospel in Tennessee. Their home was somewhat a center of activity and Elder Woodruff mentioned them several times in his missionary accounts. Not long after Jeremiah died in 1839, Lavina moved to Nauvoo with her small family. She was an active participant in church affairs including baptisms for the dead. Her name was recorded several times in the record books of Nauvoo.

 In 1842, Lavina found employment in nearby Warsaw, necessitating that she move her family to the neighboring town. According to her son William, she maintained an avid interest in the scriptures. William also indicated his mother heard of a wonderful land in the West, so the family readied themselves to move on. The Murphy’s joined with the Donner-Reed Party in St. Louis. Her children and son-in-laws became the largest family in the company.

The Donner/Reid vanguard group offered to provide for Lavina and her children if she would cook and do the wash for them. Thinking that California was to be the final destination of the saints, Lavina accepted the position feeling she would be less of a burden and still unite with the saints later.

Lavina’s two oldest daughters and their husbands, William Foster and William Pike with their children joined the Donner Party as well.

While the party was hindered with numerous difficulties, William and William, the brother-in-laws, offered to cross the summit ahead of the group and bring provisions back. As they camped in the Truckee Meadows, William Foster while cleaning his gun, accidently shot his brother-in-law, William Pike. That left Lavina’s daughter, Harriet, a widow with a baby of a few months and a three-year-old daughter, Naomi.

The early ensuing storms impeded their travel westward through the Sierra. As the  accumulating snow engulfed them, the company realized they were too ill equipped to trudge to the summit as a unit. They submitted to the mountains brutal force to hunker down, assembling a ramshackle cabin near Donner Lake.

When rescuers arrived, many were escorted down the mountain but Lavina remained due to blindness. By the fourth and final rescue, she was dead, her body badly mutilated. Of the 80 Donner Party members who camped in the Truckee Meadows in the fall of 1846, 44 survived. Of the thirteen members of the Murphy family, only seven of the thirteen survived.

Lavina Murphy’s daughter Mary, met Sergeant Daniel Tyler of the Mormon Battalion at Johnson’s ranch. She and several others marched out of the mountains to assemble a rescue party. These members are referred to as the “Forlorn Hope” group. In conversing with Mary, Daniel was informed of her family’s circumstances and concluded in his journal, “Alas, the example of Sister Murry [Murphy], although her motives were good, is an illustration of the truism that ‘it is better to suffer affliction with the people of God and trust in Him for deliverance than to mingle with the sinful for a season and be lured by human prospects of a better result’” (Tyler, A Concise History, 312).

When word of the Donner Party’s fate reached  the Thomas Rhoades family, two of his sons, John and Daniel, responded by volunteering as part of a rescue team.  There were to be principal players in rescuing several members  of the stranded group.

The rescuers endured the harsh conditions with treacherous cold and snow. None of them were experienced mountaineers who knew survival techniques. They labored to move forward through mounting exhaustion. Arriving at the camp on February 18, 1847, they were aghast at the conditions. Even so, it was impossible to take all the survivors; they could gather only twenty four.

“Big John Rhoads” carried little three-year-old Naomi Pike on his back for 40 miles. Naomi later wrote that she owed Big John her life for saving her. It is possible that John’s noble spirit had empathy for this beleaguered group since they had traveled from the East together until Fort Bridger. Not only did John make the first rescue attempt, but he volunteered for the fourth and final attempt as well.

 Next on the scene of the disaster was a small detachment of twelve Mormon battalion men. They were to accompany General Stephen Kearney as an armed escort for his return to the states from his post in California. Daniel Tyler wrote in his journal:

“On the 21^st, [the escort] traveled through snow from two to twelve feet deep and over rough mountains [the Sierra Nevadas] before reaching the Truckee River. There, a small lake was found . . . , now called Lake Tahoe. In the vicinity of this lake were several cabins built by . . . [the Donner-Reed Party], which was snowed in the previous fall. Their numbers were estimated at about eighty [82] souls, who all perished except about thirty. The General ordered a halt and detailed five men to bury the dead that were lying upon the ground.” (Tyler, A Concise History, 301–302)

When we contemplate the hardships and tragedies of the early Mormon pioneers in their treks cross country, it would be fitting to remember the Murphy family and their rescuers, much as we remember the members of the Willy, Martin Handcart companies and their ordeal in the winter wilds of Wyoming” (Quoted from Don Watts a local researcher and avid history buff).

The Donner Party tragedy left an indelible mark on all the battalion men who had contact with them either dead or alive. None of veterans had seen or heard of such a gruesome spectacle before. General Kearney commanded the men to gather the remains, dig a pit in one of the houses and burn the house with the remains. However, several other parties came upon the scene and found more evidence of the insanity that took place (Dorius, “Mormons in the Donner Party,”).

Reddick Allred was part of the newly discharged battalion party who traveled northward intent on finding their wives and families. His group came after General Kearney’s company who had already buried some of the dead in the mountains. Reddick records in his personal journal:

Proceeded on our journey on the 5^th [September 1847], and met Sam Brannan with an Epistle from President Young. All who did not intend to go to the Bluffs for their families should stay in California and get work through the winter. This broke up our organization and Andrew Lytle was our Captain.

When we passed the summit of the Sierra-Nevada Mountains, we found Hastings’[Donner Party’s] winter camp. At the base of the mountains we struck the Truckee River, then crossed an arm of the Great American Desert to the sink of the Humboldt River, passing the Hot Boiling Springs. (Family Papers.)

The Mormon Emigrant Trail

The following describes the difficulty of blazing this trail:

Saturday, July 22, Rock Creek. The climb was even steeper now. The wagons continue to break down and are in need of constant repair. Fifteen men worked the road to the top of the mountain.

       July 29, Summit Camp. Cliff with sharp drop, very hard going.

July 31. Impossible to build a road through this canyon. We had no hammers nor drills with which we could do anything with the stone. It seemed almost an impossibility to go farther. Finally someone suggested we build a fire on the rock. When the fire had died down we found as far as the heat had penetrated, the rocks were all broken in small pieces which were soon removed with pick and shovel. Another fire was built with the same result. After three or four fires, we found the rocks were not much in our way and we soon had a good wagon road right over them. (Norma Ricketts, Melissa’s Journey with the Mormon Battalion, 93)

It took five days to cut a wagon road through the seven-mile-long canyon not far from present day Grover’s Hot Springs. The canyon they worked diligently to render passable was tight and narrow, just wide enough for their wagons. Latter emigrants would never know of the exertions made by the hearty Mormons who blazed the trail before them. For the next 16 years, thousands of gold and land seekers, wagons, and livestock came into California over the Mormon Trail, following these battalion tracks. The company also blazed an estimated 170 miles of wagon road across trackless terrain in 40 days.

Most of the pioneers who wrote in diaries made mention of “The Back Bone.” It would later be dubbed “The Elephant Back” because of its apparent similarities to a pachyderm. Today it is known as the Carson Pass which reaches a grand height of 8,575 feet. The diarist of the Holmes-Thompson group who blazed this trail recorded it took another ten days to cross the Sierra Nevada. Today it is a 30-mile stretch that can be traversed by four-wheel drive between Highway 50 near Placerville, California, and Highway 88.

Henry Bigler, one of the battalion diarists wrote, “Sat. 5^th of Aug. . . .campt on Carson River though at the time we had no name for it only the one we gave it that was ‘Pilot River.’ Sun. 6^th. Continued down Carson River past a hot spring. Campt in the bend of the River. . .”( Journal of Henry William Bigler, Mormon Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.)

Melissa Coray and the Emigrant Trail

In addition to the necessary number of men in the battalion, there were women and children who accompanied them. In 1994 the U.S. government dedicated a mountain peak in the Sierra Nevada to Melissa Coray of the Mormon Battalion. The range is near the Emigrant Trail, behind Kirkwood Ski Resort. Even as a woman, Melissa came to idealize the courage and strength the battalion became known for.

Melissa was one of only four women to successfully complete the entire 2,030-mile military march accompanying her husband through dreadful exposure, exhaustion, lack of food and medicine. She was an 18-year-old bride, being married only four days, at the time they left. She said, “I didn’t mind it. I walked because I wanted to. My husband had to walk and I went along by his side” (Kenneth N. Owens, Gold Rush Saints, 197). “If he must go, I want to go,” she said. “Why must women always stay behind and worry about their husbands, when they could just as well march beside them.” (Ricketts, Melissa’s Journey with the Mormon Battalion). There were many sacrifices, but leaving her mother and father was extremely difficult for Melissa for she never saw her mother again. Hannah Burton died on the trail to Salt Lake before she could embrace her daughter Melissa again.

Melissa was wise beyond her years. During the never-ending miles of marching, she watched as others ate until they were satisfied without thinking or planning ahead. She, on the other hand, prudently planned to meet she and her husband’s needs. The young wife cooked their food cautiously so she never wasted. While many men suffered from starvation, Melissa and Will were never in danger, though they were never full. Her wisdom carried her through the bone dry conditions they were called to endure. “Thirst only gets worse when you think of it. When I was thirsty, I tried not to think of it.” It was at such a time that she learned to carry a pebble in her mouth. This caused the saliva to flow more freely and lessened her unquenchable thirst. (ibid, [pg#42]).

Toward the end of the trail, Melissa became pregnant. Nausea became another obstacle to overcome. She was anxious about her baby and wished for the day she and William could settle down to make a home for their new family. When the couple was discharged from their military service, they headed north. She delivered a baby boy named William Coray Jr. at Monterey. He lived a short while before being buried in a cemetery there.

By the time they reached Sutter’s Fort, Mormon Battalion veterans had discovered gold. William and Melissa stayed just long enough to gather two bags of gold, one of which was to be sent to some of their family back east. It would be enough to equip the family for the trip to Salt Lake.

The Corays did not linger in the gold fields long, they were anxious to reunite with the saints. The couple joined the Browett-Holmes Company with 45 men, two cannons, 17 wagons, 150 mules and horses, and about the same number of cattle. The lone woman was Melissa. The Truckee Route required 27 crossings over the mountains, so rather than ford the river with all the livestock and wagons they blazed a new trail, appropriately dubbed the Mormon Emigrant Trail.