Part of a series of articles titled People of the Mormon Pioneer Trail.
Article
Rebecca Winters, the Mormon Pioneer Trail
Rebecca Winters – Mormon Pioneer Trail[1]
By Angela Reiniche
Rebecca Winters, at the advanced age of 53, crossed the plains with her family on their way to Utah in 1852. The fate that befell her along the way was one shared by many emigrants on the westering trails.
On 16 January 1799, Rebecca Burdick was born to Gideon Burdick and Catharina Schmidt in Canajoharie, New York. Catharina passed away when Rebecca was seven and, shortly thereafter, Rebecca’s father married Jane Ripley Brown. By the time Rebecca turned eighteen, the family had relocated to Athens County, Ohio, where she met and married Hiram Winters in 1824. Before long, the couple was introduced to Mormonism, and they joined the movement of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Winters family moved to Kirtland, Ohio, where they served as caretakers of the Kirtland Temple. In the mid-to-late 1830s, most of the followers of the church—whether they lived in Ohio, Missouri, Mississippi, or in other places where Mormon communities had taken root—migrated to Nauvoo, Illinois. Rebecca made the trek as well.[2]
Amid the turmoil that followed the assassinations of Joseph Smith and other church leaders in Carthage, Illinois, Brigham Young announced that the Saints would embark on a mass migration to the far West where they would rebuild their community. Although thousands of Mormon devotees embarked for Utah between 1846 and 1868, the overland journey proved arduous and, in many cases, disease and mishap reduced their numbers.[3]
Hiram Winters served as a division captain in the James C. Snow Wagon Company, a church-organized emigration company that departed Kanesville, Iowa, in June 1852. Besides his wife, Rebecca, their children Alonzo, Hiram, Rebecca, Hellen, Elizabeth, and Hetta, Hiram also brought two wagons, eight head of cattle, and two cows. There were six other families in their party; in total, they traveled with thirty-five people, ten wagons, and a wide variety of stock.
Mormon wagon trains, unlike those of the general emigration, were tightly organized and led by tough-minded captains who demanded—and generally received—strict discipline and obedience to their commands. Their job was to get emigrants, wagons, and livestock to Utah as efficiently as possible, and to see that their converts observed proper Mormon practices along the way. The Snow Company adopted seven regulations to ensure that these goals would be met: group prayer at morning and night, no swearing, meetings on the Sabbath when convenient (but at least once per week), dogs tied up in the camp, cattle staked outside the corral, horses staked inside the corral, and—perhaps most importantly—no gunfire in camp. The Snow Company, along with the Winters family, rolled out of its staging area outside of Winter Quarters, in eastern Nebraska, on 6 July 1852.[4]
The first several days of their journey passed with little to report; fortunately, the river crossings at the sometimes dangerous Elkhorn and Loupe Fork fords occurred without incident. For the next fifty miles, however, as the company moved along the south side of the Loupe Fork toward the Platte River, they had “considerable difficulty in finding water.” On the days they stopped to rest, Mormon elders performed baptisms, young boys hunted bison, and the group worshipped and “enjoied [sic] [themselves] the best that circumstances would allow.”
By the time they passed Chimney Rock in western Nebraska on August 12, five adults of the company had died of causes not recorded. A journal-writer in the company suggests that one of them, Father Erasmus, died three days after “drinking too hearty at the cold springs.” On August 13 the party reached Spring Creek, about seven or eight miles past Scott’s Bluff, and camped for the night. That evening, Hiram reported in his journal that his wife, known as “Sister Winters,” had also become quite ill and that his part of the company would stay behind “for the good of the community.”[5] The dreaded cholera, perhaps imbibed with contaminated water at Father Erasmus’s cold spring, had undoubtedly struck the company.
To prevent the disease from spreading, and perhaps for the comfort of his wife, Hiram pulled his company off the trail. Three days later, from his camp thirty-three miles east of Fort Laramie, Captain Snow sent a note to Hiram, imploring him to “not delay on account of sickness” as he believed it would exacerbate the situation. The messengers met Winters’s division on the way and learned that Sister Winters had died at one o’clock the previous afternoon.[6] Rebecca Burdick Winters, a wife to Hiram and mother to his children, never reached the valley of the Great Salt Lake, succumbing to cholera on 15 August 1852.
At the time, physicians did not understand how cholera was transmitted or how to effectively treat it. The disease was a deadly scourge of the trail, claiming the lives of perhaps thousands of emigrants during 1849–1852—the peak of the California Gold Rush. Rebecca was but one of its many victims. Most of their graves today are lost to time, some marked with wooden boards that decayed over time and others not marked at all.
But Rebecca Winters’s reputation as warm, caring, and selfless makes it unsurprising that her gravesite was marked with permanence. Asa S. Hawley, who traveled with the company, wrote that many in their camp had died from cholera, but that “the most sorrowful to [him] was the death of Sister Winters, one of God’s noble and courageous women.”[7]
It was common practice, at the time, to bury the bodies of loved ones beneath the trail to hide their graves’ locations and thus protect them from animals. But Hiram Winters, along with William Fletcher Reynolds, a family friend, chose to bury Rebecca away from the roadway. Uncomfortable with the notion that she be touched by the dirt, Hiram and William lined the deep grave with wooden planks, wrapped Rebecca’s body in blankets, placed her on top of them, and covered her with a second layer of planks before filling the grave with dirt. To mark the location, which today is approximately five miles east of Scott’s Bluff National Monument, Reynolds carved her name and age into an iron wagon tire and sank it into the ground. (The site today is located in the Rebecca Winters Memorial Park, which is a Nebraska State Landmark.) The rest of the Winters family arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on 10 October, 1852, and they eventually settled in present-day Pleasant Grove, Utah.[8]
Because it was one of few marked graves on the trail, Rebecca’s gravesite became an oft-visited trail location where travelers stopped, perhaps to contemplate what might lay ahead for them on the trail. However, after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, Mormon converts began emigrating by rail, and Rebecca’s gravesite was all but forgotten. Many years later, in 1899, surveyors for the Burlington and Missouri Railroad discovered her gravesite, the marker’s iron having survived the harsh conditions of the prairie. To avoid disturbing it, the railroad diverted its tracks just a few feet from the site.
Nearly a century later, in 1995, the railroad (by this time called the Burlington Northern) approached the descendants of Rebecca Winters and worked out a plan to move the gravesite to a safe and accessible location. In the presence of more than sixty of her descendants, a team of archeologists worked to exhume Rebecca’s remains that autumn. Rebecca Burdick Winters’s body, now in a mahogany casket, is buried a mere one hundred yards from its original location.[9]
[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] For the story of Rebecca Burdick and Hiram Winters’s introduction and early experiences with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints movement, see Beth R. Olsen, Among the Remnant Who Lingered (Orem, Utah: Micro Dynamics Publishing, 1997).
[3] Henry Robinson, “Journal of Travels from Kanesville towards the City of the Great Salt Lake, October 10th” in James Chauncey Snow Emigrating Company, Journal, July–October 1852, Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel, 1847–1868, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, accessed 18 August 2017, https://history.lds.org/overlandtravel/sources/2084/james-chauncey-snow-emigrating-company-journal-1852-july-oct.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid. For more on how cholera affected migration on the Mormon Pioneer trail, see Patricia Rushton, “Cholera and Its Impact on Nineteenth-Century Mormon Migration,” Brigham Young University Studies 44, no.2 (2005): 123–44.
[7] Asa S. Hawley, “The Autobiography of Asa S. Hawley,” typescript [n.d.], Family and Church History Department Archives, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 2.
[8] United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, “Scotts Bluff: The Rebecca Winters Story,” accessed 06 August 2022, https://www.nps.gov/people/rebecca-winters.htm
[9] Ibid. There is a possibility (as of 2018) that Winters’ grave may again need to be moved, because her current grave is still in a location that is not particularly safe to visit due to proximity to both the railroad tracks and the highway.
Last updated: March 10, 2023