John Tanner and his family

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88 John Tanner and His Family Nathan gives much the same description: "Father and family left Kirtland with a borrowed team, and had one old broken down stage horse, and an old turnpike cart, a cag of powder, and $7.50 in cash."!' of abject poverty is hard to believe knowing of his affluent situation when he arrived in Ohio three years earlier, but in his determination to payoff the obligations he had incurred by signing notes for the church, he was stripped to the bone. Nathan says simply: "This left father without anything." This The picture trip to Far West, Missouri, must have been a nightmare for John Tanner. Nathan relates: "The old wagon broke down on the road. His little daughter [Philomelia] died and was buried on the way before he reached Far West." In addition to this great sorrow, he was humiliated when the scant money he carried was gone and "they were under the necessity of appealing to the benevo­ lence of the inhabitants on the road for buttermilk and sometimes for other food to sustain life.'?" While John Tanner had not been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and was used to making his way in life, this was an en­ tirely new experience and must have hurt deeply. But after his arrival in Missouri, in conversation with a friend narrating his ex­ perience, he remarked: "Well if others have as much.":" come up easier, they have not learned Scraps of Biography states he arrived in Far West on the third of July. He would be sixty years old in a little over a month, August 15 rather old to be going through these hardships. But whether or not he knew it, hardships were all that were in store for John - Tanner; it would be ten years before he would find rest in the Land of Promise beside the Little Cottonwood, in Utah. He would live but a little more than a year in the newly settled Zion. Yes, for John Tanner, Mormonism carried a high price tag, but he figured it was worth what it cost him and paid without protest. If the from Kirtland, Ohio, to Missouri was a bitter ex­ but a foretaste of what was to follow John had perience, no brought provisions with him from Kirtland, and found none at Far West when he arrived. Myron, though only twelve years of age, remembers their circumstances and comments: it trip was . We arrived in Missouri somewhere about the latter part of June, 1836, [It was early in July J. Soon after our arrival, I with some of my brothers, was sent to Clay County for the purpose of getting