Dear Ellen: Two Mormon Women and Their Letters

Dear Ellen, Page 008

Dear Ellen Exhibiting the Most Prominent Doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, preached, and collected tithes. While in England he married Martha Knight, April 1847, to whom a child was born January 30, 1848. Louisa B. Pratt and her four daughters left Nauvoo in May 1846 and made their way to Winter Quarters where they, too, struggled through poverty and sickness for two years, Mrs. Pratt taught school under a bowery set up before her sod-covered dugout. Ellen also "taught a juvenile school," and the younger sister Frances made a garden and took care of cows in winter, and sometimes, "when charity was cold, she chopped the wood." The Pratts lived near the Spencer children. Aurelia, twelve at the time, remembered that "We went to school to Sister Addison Pratt . . . who felt obliged to do something to earn a livelihood for herself and four daughters. She was an excellent lady and we spent most of our spare time at her house." The achievement of Ellen Spencer in school is attested bv a manuscript certificate preserved in her family papers: This certifies that Miss Ellen Spencer is one of the best spellers in the Winter Quarters Seminary as proved by a trial on friday afternoon the i/th of Dec 1847 and her faithfulness in attendance to her studies entitle her to the approbation of every lover of learning and Science. Eli B. Kelsey Dec igth 1847 Teacher Another certificate issued January 10, 1848, gives Ellen the same high ratings as proved in a January 7 trial. Just how Ellen Spencer managed for her young brothers and sisters at Winter Quarters is not fully known. The Bullocks had a family and troubles of their own. The scurvy, which took so many lives at Winter Quarters, took two of the Bullock children. When Orson Spencer, in Liverpool, heard of this he worried the more for his own and wrote Ellen: "Dear precious children have I seen you for the last time this 8