1st
Rescue: When the rescuers showed up for the Martin & Willy Handcart
companies.
2nd
Rescue: When the stake in Wyoming tracked down and did the temple work for all
of the members of the Martin & Willy Handcart Company.
3rd
Rescue: Going on now through the missionary program and through rescuing souls
within and from without the church.
Share
testimony about what we can do today to help the 3rd rescue. We are part of that rescue party.
Joseph
Young, Abel Garr, and Dan Jones went ahead of the rescue party and were the
first ones to arrive at the camp of the Martin Company. The members of the
company were almost entirely out of food and their arrival was expressed by one
woman who said, “I see them coming. Surely they are angels from heaven!” Over
fifty members had perished, and more would die that evening.
The rescuers were
overcome as they arrived to the camp. Patience Loader remembers Joseph Young
coming to her and asking, as he wept, “How many are dead and how many are still
living?”
Daniel Jones encouraged them to keep moving each day as far as they
could in order to keep them alive.
John Oborn
“Those
of you who have never had this experience cannot realize how … we thanked God
for our rescue,” remembered John Oborn, a child at the time of the rescue.
“Mother and I were cared for by a dear brother, who … seemed like an angel from
heaven. We left our handcart and rode in his wagon and slowly but safely he
brought us to Zion”
Mary Hurren Wight
Rescuers
arrived amidst cries of joy on 21 October.
“If help had not come when it did, there would have been no one left to
tell the tale,” wrote Mary Hurren Wight, who was a child at the time. “Tears
streamed down the cheeks of the men and the children danced for joy. As soon as
the people could control their feelings, they all knelt down in the snow and
gave thanks to God” (Autobiography, LDS Church Archives, 11–12)
Elder Faust Quoted:
Our souls were subdued when we arrived at the
hallowed ground of Martin’s Cove, the site where the Martin Handcart
Company, freezing and starving, waited for the rescue wagons to come from Salt
Lake City. About fifty-six members of the Martin Handcart Company perished there from hunger and cold.
It was an emotional experience to see the
Sweetwater River crossing where most of the five hundred members of the company
were carried across the icy river by brave young men.
Also heroic were the rescuers who responded to
President Brigham Young’s call in the October 1856 general conference.
President Young called for forty young men, sixty to sixty-five teams of mules
or horses, wagons loaded with twenty-four thousand pounds of flour to leave in
the next day or two to “bring in those people now on the plains.”
These excruciating
experiences developed in these pioneers an unshakable faith in God. Said
Elizabeth Horrocks Jackson Kingsford, “But I believe the Recording Angel has
inscribed in the archives above, and that my sufferings for the Gospel’s sake
will be sanctified unto me for my good.”
In addition to the legacy
of faith bequeathed by those who crossed the plains, they also left a great
heritage of love—love of God and love of mankind. It is an inheritance of
sobriety, independence, hard work, high moral values, and fellowship. It is a
birthright of obedience to the commandments of God and loyalty to those whom
God has called to lead this people.
I cannot help wondering
why these intrepid pioneers had to pay for their faith with such a terrible
price in agony and suffering. Why were not the elements tempered to spare them
from their profound agony? I believe their lives were consecrated to a higher
purpose through their suffering. Their love for the Savior was burned deep in
their souls, and into the souls of their children, and their children’s
children. The motivation for their lives came from a true conversion in the
center of their souls. As President Gordon B. Hinckley has said, “When there
throbs in the heart of an individual Latter-day Saint a great and vital
testimony of the truth of this work, he will be found doing his duty in the
Church.”
Above and beyond the epic
historical events they participated in, the pioneers found a guide to personal
living. They found reality and meaning in their lives.
I hope that this
priceless legacy of faith left by the pioneers will inspire all of us to more
fully participate in the Savior’s work of bringing to pass the immortality and
eternal life of his children.
The proving of one’s
faith goes before the witnessing, for Moroni testified, “Ye receive no witness
until after the trial of your faith” (Ether 12:6).
This trial of faith can
become a priceless experience. Stated Peter, “That the trial of your faith,
being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with
fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 1:7).
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