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Of Bygone Days side of the grave?" Letters were exchanged, and goods and money sent by the father to the children. The father thought to print some of Ellen's letters in the Millennial Star, he told her, but none appeared. Brigham Young took special interest in the children. Upon one visit to their cabin, the president told Ellen to buy a good milk cow and he would pay for it. He reminded her of his saying last winter, that if she lacked anything she was to let him know. Wilford Woodruff visited the children and reported to the father that he considered them "a company of young martyrs .... A parent may well consider such a family of children a blessing from God. ... I enquired into their present circumstances. They said they had plenty of meat, and some veal, but had no flour. I told them to come to my house, and I would divide with them. The eldest son came down to day, and I gave him some flour and pork. I would have been glad to have divided with them a long time before, had i but known their circumstances." The father expected to return in two years to take his children to Salt Lake Valley with the emigration of 1848, but he was asked to remain in England another year. Nevertheless, Brigham Young saw that the children went with him, in his company, in 1848, leaving in May for Salt Lake Valley. (Brigham Young, after visiting Salt Lake Valley in 1847, returned to Winter Quarters for the winter of 1847-48, and then led the emigration of 1848.) However close friends may have become at Nauvoo and Winter Quarters, the experience of crossing the plains together bound close friends even closer and allowed for making new friends. In Brigham Young's 1848 company were the Spencer children, the Bullocks, and Mrs. Pratt with her four daughters. In the company, also, was a young man, Hiram B. Clawson, aged twenty-one, whom Ellen Spencer was later to marry, and another young man, Thomas Rogers, who was to marry Aurelia Spencer. Upon arrival in Salt Lake Valley, September i, 1848, Mrs. |
