Part of a series of articles titled People of the Mormon Pioneer Trail.
Article
Hark Lay, the Mormon Pioneer Trail
Hark Lay – Mormon Pioneer Trail[1]
By Angela Reiniche
In 1839, the first missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints headed to the South but had relatively little success in converting Southerners to their faith. Monroe County, Mississippi, however, was a different story. Most of the settlers had emigrated there from the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee in the late 1830s, and their children grew up together, intermarried, and prospered in the cotton industry. Because of the county’s tightly woven kinship networks, missionary John Brown’s efforts to spread the Mormon faith among those families led to the formation of a thriving congregation within a year of his arrival in 1843. A year later, in June 1844, church president and prophet Joseph Smith died in Carthage, Illinois. Not long afterwards, Brigham Young, Smith’s successor, began efforts to move the church and its followers to the West.
In January 1846, Young ordered Brown to gather the “Mississippi Saints” and meet the main body of Mormons along the Platte River trail to Utah later that summer. Brown managed to convince just forty-three of the Monroe County converts to make the 640-mile trip to Independence, Missouri. William Lay and his wife, Sytha (Crosby), decided to take with them their twenty-year-old enslaved man, Hark Lay. The fourteen families that made up the traveling party chose William Crosby as their leader and, with their nineteen wagons full of supplies and possessions, headed north out of Monroe County on the morning of 8 April 1846. Seven weeks later, after shifting their course westward, Hark Lay and the rest of the party arrived at Independence—the primary “jumping off” point for multiple emigrant trails. The Mississippi Saints then merged with a small caravan of emigrants bound for Oregon and, for a time, followed the Oregon Trail – being careful to hide their identity as Latter-day Saints.[2] Because of their violent expulsion from Missouri and Illinois, Mormons at the time were commonly regarded with suspicion and fear. But the Mississippi Saints wanted no trouble; they wished only to travel as part of a larger party to help ensure their safety and security while crossing the plains.[3]
When the Mississippians arrived at the Platte River, about mid-June, the fatigued party found no signs of Brigham Young or the Mormon encampment. After debating what to do next, the party’s leaders concluded that the rest of the Saints must have gone ahead of them. The sweltering summer weather and an overnight storm that ripped through the camp, destroying tents and overturning smaller wagons, added to the growing sense of exhaustion that accompanied overland travel. Other events described by diarists in the party included the perceived threat of a Pawnee raid, a stampede of horses and cattle, their first bison hunt, and the theft and recovery of two colts and a mare, all of which compounded the Mississippi Saints’ woes. Undoubtedly, Hark Lay, an able-bodied young man, spent considerable energy righting wagons, searching for missing livestock, and guarding their encampment as the party pushed westward. When they learned from travelers on their return journey from California that there were no Mormons ahead of them on the trail, the already distressed Mississippians decided that the best course of action was to suspend their journey and find a place to spend the winter.
Nearly six hundred miles from Independence, Missouri, as they reached the far western edge of Nebraska, Hark Lay laid eyes upon Chimney Rock, a towering formation of Brule clay, volcanic ash, and Arikaree sandstone that had become one of the most recognizable landmarks on the Mormon, Oregon, and California emigrant trails. Lay crossed to the south bank of the North Platte River with the rest of the emigrant party and arrived at the site during the first week of July. At Chimney Rock the Mississippi Saints met and traded with a French fur trapper named John Richards, who offered to escort the emigrant party to Fort Pueblo, a small trading post established by independent traders in 1842, near present-day Pueblo, Colorado. With Richards as their guide, they left Nebraska on 10 July 1846 and traveled south through Colorado for more than three hundred miles. The Mississippi Mormons rolled into Fort Pueblo on August 7th and, without delay, became acquainted with what would become their home for the winter. At the time, Fort Pueblo was occupied by a handful of mountain men and their Hispano and Indigenous wives, who had constructed a plaza, a handful of adobe homes, and vegetable gardens. John Brown directed the Mississippi Saints to build cabins, plant crops, and erect a meetinghouse in preparation for the winter. At some point, Brown learned that the rest of the Saints had remained at Winter Quarters in Nebraska and that Brigham Young had organized a battalion of five hundred Mormon men to aid the U.S. Army in the nation’s newly declared war against Mexico. The pay received by the soldiers of the Mormon Battalion would allow the Saints to continue their journey to the Salt Lake Valley the following spring.[4]
Within weeks of their arrival at Pueblo, John Brown took a small party, including Hark Lay, on a return trip to Mississippi to gather the rest of their Monroe County congregation. Along the way, they encountered a group of Mormon Battalion soldiers who had fallen ill during the westward march and had split from the main group. Brown pointed them in the direction of the colony at Fort Pueblo before moving on toward Mississippi. While preparing the rest of the Mississippi Saints for the trip to Winter Quarters, Brown received word from Young that he should delay their journey for a year and instead bring with him a few able-bodied men. Brown, once again, took Hark Lay and headed north from Mississippi. Brown’s small party also included his own slave, Henry Brown, and two other enslaved men, Oscar Crosby and Mark (whose surname is unknown). The severe storms, wintry freezes, mud, lack of shelter, and exhaustion made for a considerably more arduous journey than the previous year’s trip; both Henry Brown and Mark succumbed to illness and were buried in Missouri.
Not long after, Hark Lay arrived in Winter Quarters, Nebraska. On 8 April 1847, Brigham Young’s Party, which has been also called the Vanguard Company, departed from Winter Quarters with forty-two men and twenty-three wagons. They traveled twenty miles westward along the Platte River and established the Pioneer Camp, where for eight days Young recruited additional emigrants and supervised the preparations for their journey to the Salt Lake Valley. Along with the rest of the Pioneer Camp, Hark Lay worked to repair wagons, organize supplies, and gather firewood. The vanguard party officially organized on April 16. By this time, it had added to its ranks one hundred men, three women, two children, and an additional forty-nine wagons.
The mission of the vanguard party was to find a way for the main group of emigrants to enter the Salt Lake Valley without having to navigate the treacherous landscape of the canyons located just east of the valley. During the journey, Lay, along with two other African Americans – Green Flake and Oscar Crosby – helped to provide game for the travelers and to stand guard over the livestock. Thomas Bullock, a member of the party, recorded in his journal that on 3 May 1847, Hark Lay had shot a prairie dog and presented it to him. On June 2, the first of the vanguard party reached Fort Laramie and were met by seventeen of the Pueblo colonists, some of them being the Mississippi Saints and others from the Mormon Battalion who had since recovered from their illnesses.[5]
Because Hark Lay could neither read nor write, it is impossible to know what he thought of Fort Laramie and how he experienced it. During their layover at the fort, the vanguard party continued to wait for Amasa Lyman, an ordained leader of the church, to return with the rest of the Pueblo group. Tired of waiting, however, Young and the vanguard company started back up toward Utah on June 6. (The rest of the Pueblo group finally reached Fort Laramie on June 13 and caught up with the rest of the vanguard party on July 4.)
The newly reunited party continued west toward Utah. But on July 12, in the vicinity of the Needles (on today’s Wyoming-Utah border) Brigham Young fell ill with “mountain fever.” Soon afterward, Young decided to send John Brown and Orson Pratt, along with Lay, Flake, and Crosby, ahead to scout the terrain of the last leg of their journey into the Salt Lake Valley. Brown and Pratt may have been the first to see the Salt Lake Valley from the top of Big Mountain. But it was the enslaved men, Hark Lay, Oscar Crosby, and Green Flake, who – largely following the Donner Party’s path from the year before – made the descent into Emigrant Canyon and entered the Salt Lake Valley on 22 July 1847. By the time Brigham Young arrived in the valley, just two days later via the road created by Lay, Crosby, and Flake, the party had already started the work of building homes and planting potatoes, buckwheat, and beans. The Mississippians and their enslaved men had quite literally planted the seeds for the permanent settlement of the Mormon pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley.
But there were still Mississippi Saints who had yet to make the overland journey to the Salt Lake Valley. On August 26, less than a month after entering the valley, Brigham Young and John Brown returned to Winter Quarters with a small party. Brown continued on to Mississippi, arriving there in December to collect the rest of the Saints, which included Hark’s owners William and Sytha Lay. They and twelve other families, consisting of fifty-six white people and thirty-four slaves, arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in October 1848. Their arrival brought the population of white Southerners in Utah to about two hundred and the slave population to thirty-seven. The Mississippi Saints later relocated to a place informally called Amasa’s Survey, about ten miles from the main pioneer settlement. Their row of cabins constituted the first town in Utah outside of Salt Lake City. It became known as Cottonwood or the Mississippi Ward but at present it bears the name of Holladay, after one of the early bishops of the ward.[6] By 1849, Hark, who had been returned to the household of William and Sytha Lay, apparently resumed laboring for the benefit of his owners.
Shortly after California achieved statehood in 1850, Brigham Young requested that the Cottonwood, or Holladay, settlers move to the San Bernardino Valley and establish a new Mormon settlement. Before that move, Hark married an enslaved woman belonging to another family, but he was forced to separate from his bride because William Lay did not have the cash to purchase her, and her family had no intention to emigrate to California. In an effort to resolve Hark’s problem, Brigham Young suggested that the Lays take another enslaved man, Green Flake, to California instead and leave Hark and his wife in Utah. Hark’s owners, however, chose not to do that.
In 1850, before the colonists left for California, Thomas Bullock recorded a census of the Cottonwood settlement for the U.S. government. In the census documents, both Hark Lay and his brother, Thompson, appeared on the slave schedule as the property of William Lay. The schedule also listed a twenty-three-year-old woman named Harriet as a slave in the Lay household. The matter of his wife’s identity has not yet been solved by the documentary record. All of the enslaved are listed as “going to California.”[7]
When Hark Lay entered California with the Mississippi Saints and the twenty-five slaves they brought with them, he and the other slaves became free men and women according to California law. After Brigham Young called the San Bernardino settlers back to Utah in 1857 in anticipation of an impending conflict with the federal government, Hark Lay stayed out west, perhaps having learned of the change in his status as a slave. At some point, he also changed his last name to “Wales.” According to the California Voter Registry, recorded on 5 September 1871, “Hark Wales,” born in Mississippi, age 46, lived in San Timoteo (about five miles southeast of San Bernardino) and worked as a farmer.[8] By 1879, however, Hark Wales had returned to Utah to live in Union Fort, about thirteen miles from Salt Lake City in the southeastern section of the valley, where the settlers were primarily farmers and “excluded from the general gaze and off the line of travel.”[9] Hark, working as a laborer at the age of 59, lived with George Washington Stevens and next door to Green Flake, also Black men and the latter a former slave.[10] Along with Flake, Flake’s son-in-law Stevens, Daniel Freeman, and Miles Litchford, Hark operated mining claims in the Big Cottonwood Canyon Mining District which included the Union Blue Lode, Abraham Lincoln Lode, Wales Lode (named after Hark), O.K. Lode, and Poor Man’s Friend Lode. Hark’s date of death is uncertain, with various sources showing it in either 1881, 1887, or 1890.
At the end of a list of the original 1847 Mormon pioneers, emblazoned on a bronze tablet on the north side of a monument in Salt Lake City, are the names of “Green Flake, Hark Lay, and Oscar Crosby, Colored Servants.” The monument commemorates and honors the Mormon vanguard company that arrived first in the Salt Lake Valley; at the same time, it recognizes the first three enslaved Black men to live in Utah. In 1850, only Utah and New Mexico Territory allowed the “peculiar institution” of slavery. Knowing that some of the Mormon pioneers were from southern states like Mississippi, Missouri, and North Carolina, it is not surprising that these territorial laws allowed for the continued practice of slavery. Their trip was the first leg of many journeys in which Mormon families moved their families and slaves westward in the mid-nineteenth century. John Brown’s journal, the diaries of other travelers, and other remnant records of Hark Lay’s life—during and after his multiple journeys and eventual migration to California and back to Utah—offer an opportunity to recover a story of the Mormon Pioneer Trail often obscured by the personalities and legacies of its more famous travelers. Though a small number of African Americans, both free and enslaved, became members of the church in its early years, Hark Lay was not one of them. Hark had no choice in making the journey to Utah, where his enslavement would continue as many of the slaveholding Mississippi Saints attempted to re-establish a Southern plantation lifestyle in the American West. However, Brigham Young’s decision in 1850 to order the residents of Cottonwood to establish a settlement in San Bernardino, California, created, even if unknowingly so, the conditions under which Hark Lay became a free man.
[1] Part of a 2016–2018 collaborative project of the National Trails- National Park Service and the University of New Mexico’s Department of History, “Student Experience in National Trails Historic Research: Vignettes Project” [Colorado Plateau Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CPCESU), Task Agreement P16AC00957]. This project was formulated to provide trail partners and the general public with useful biographies of less-studied trail figures—particularly African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, women, and children.
[2] John Brown recorded the details of the Mississippi Saints’ emigration in a journal presently held in the historical collections of the LDS Church: John Brown, Journal in Our Pioneer Heritage, vol. 2, 425–428 https://history.churchofjesuschrist.org/overlandtravel/sources/89983658339868308420-eng/brown-john-journal-in-our-pioneer-heritage-vol-2-p-425-428?firstName=Robert&surname=Crow. See also John Zimmerman Brown, ed., Autobiography of Pioneer John Brown, 1820–1896 (Salt Lake City, Utah, 1941); John Zimmerman Brown, ed., “Pioneer Journeys: From Nauvoo, Illinois, to Pueblo, Colorado, in 1846, and Over the Plains in 1847,” Improvement Era 13 (1910): 802–10; Kate B. Carter, ed., “Mississippi Saints,” in Our Pioneer Heritage, 19 vols. (Salt Lake City: Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, 1958–76), 2:421–76; and LaMar C. Berrett, “History of the Southern States Mission, 1831–1861” (Master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1960), 46–171.
[3] Brown recorded, “When we got out into the Indian country, our Oregon friends found out that they were in company with a lot of Mormons. They were a little uneasy and somewhat frightened, and began to think that we did not travel fast enough for them. They left us and next day we passed and left them in the rear. They were a little afraid to go on not being strong enough…. At length they traveled with us till we got to the Platte River where we met a company of six men from Oregon and when they saw six men who had traveled the road alone, they took courage, having 13 or 14 men in the company. So they left us again and…we saw them no more.” See Brown, Autobiography, 67.
[4] Brown, Autobiography, 68–70; John Brown, Journal; LeRoy R. Hagen and Frank M. Young, “The Mormon Settlement at Pueblo, Colorado, during the Mexican War,” Colorado Magazine 9 (1932): 121–136; and George Frederick Ruxton, Life in the Far West (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1849), 212–214.
[5] Thomas Bullock journal, Church History Library, MS 1385, https://history.lds.org/overlandtravel/sources/ 17143644455003774922-eng/bullock-thomas-journals-1843-1849-vol-4?firstName=Hark Lay&surname=Wales; David R. Crocket, Saints Find the Place: A Day-by-Day Pioneer Experience, LDS-Gems Pioneer Trek Series (Saratoga Spring, Utah: David R. Crockett, n.d.), 237; and also George D. Smith, ed., An Intimate Chronicle: The Journals of William Clayton (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1991; 1995). Much of this same information is repeated in the diary of William Clayton, 1847, January to December; Howard Egan, published in Pioneering the West, 1846 to 1878, ed. and comp. William M. Egan (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2007), 21–105; Heber C. Kimball journal in Heber C. Kimball papers, 1837-1866, https://catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org/record? id=eb905feb-8b2d-4d03-bdec-2094761555f3&compId=8b0f3e2f-37e1-4c26-86c3-04be49190a66&view=browse &subView=arrangement; and Rockwood, Albert Perry, Diary, 1847 April–July, https://catalog.churchofjesuschrist. org/assets?id=45a45960-e5c6-440a-92c8-6af8ff57810d&crate=1&index=0. (Rockwood writes the association of each member of the vanguard party with the LDS church – Lay, along with Crosby.)
[6] Brown, Our Pioneer Heritage, vol. 2, p. 423.
[7] Census, Place: Utah, Utah Territory; Roll: M432_919; Page: 144A; Image: 296. Seventh Census of the United States, 1850 (National Archives Microfilm Publication M432, 1009 rolls); Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29; National Archives, Washington, D.C.
[8] California State Library, California History Section; Great Registers, 1866–1898; Collection Number: 4 - 2A; CSL Roll Number: 37; FHL Roll Number: 977092.
[9] U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995 [database on-line] (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011).
[10] 1880; Census, Place: Union, Salt Lake, Utah; Roll: 1337; Family History Film: 1255337; Page: 260B; Enumeration District: 056.
Last updated: March 10, 2023