Last updated: March 10, 2023
Person
Hark Lay
Quick Facts
Significance:
Enslaved and brought on the Mormon Pioneer Trail
Date of Death:
either 1881, 1887, or 1890
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. Monroe County, Mississippi, however, was an exception. In January 1846, Brigham Young ordered the “Mississippi Saints” to meet the main body of Mormons along the Platte River trail to Utah later that summer. Just forty-three of the Monroe County converts made the 640-mile trip to Independence, Missouri. William Lay and his wife, Sytha, decided to take with them their twenty-year-old enslaved man, Hark Lay. Thus started Hark’s odyssey, which took him to Independence, Missouri; the fur-trading outpost of Fort Pueblo, in present-day Colorado; back to Mississippi; and eventually to Winter Quarters (present-day Nebraska). On 8 April 1847, Brigham Young’s Party, also known as the Vanguard Company, departed from Winter Quarters with forty-two men and twenty-three wagons. Hark Lay accompanied them, working to repair wagons, organize supplies, and gather firewood.
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 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. On June 2, the first of the vanguard party reached Fort Laramie and were joined by seventeen of the Mississippians that had wintered at Fort Pueblo.
The newly reunited party continued west toward Utah. But on July 12, Brigham Young fell ill with “mountain fever.” He sent a party including Lay, Flake, and Crosby ahead to scout the last leg of their journey into the Salt Lake Valley. The enslaved men 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 two days later, using 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. Along with many other Mississippi Saints, Hark’s owners William and Sytha Lay 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 enslaved population to thirty-seven. The Mississippi Saints later relocated to a place ten miles from the main pioneer settlement, now called Holladay.
In 1850, Brigham Young requested that the residents of Holladay establish a new Mormon settlement in California’s San Bernardino Valley. Before the move, Hark married an enslaved woman belonging to another family; however, he was forced to leave her because William Lay did not have the funds to purchase her, and her family had no intention of moving west. When Hark Lay entered California with the Mississippi Saints, he and the other twenty-five enslaved members of the party became free men and women according to California law. Young called the San Bernardino settlers back to Utah in 1857, but Hark Lay stayed out west; at some point, he also changed his last name to “Wales.” In 1871, he was living in San Timoteo (about five miles southeast of San Bernardino) and working as a farmer.
By 1879, however, he had returned to Utah to live in Union Fort, about thirteen miles from Salt Lake City in the southeastern section of the valley. Working as a laborer, Hark lived next door to Green Flake, another formerly enslaved Black man. Along with Flake and Flake’s son-in-law Stevens, Daniel Freeman, Hark operated mining claims in the Big Cottonwood Canyon Mining District which included Wales Lode (named after Hark). Hark’s date of death is uncertain, with various sources showing it in either 1881, 1887, or 1890.
Today, the names of “Green Flake, Hark Lay, and Oscar Crosby, Colored Servants” sit 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. The monument commemorates the Mormon vanguard company that arrived first in the Salt Lake Valley; it also recognizes the first three enslaved Black men to live in Utah.
Though a small number of African Americans, both free and enslaved, joined the church in its early years, Hark Lay was not one of them. He 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.
(Special thanks to UNM PhD candidate Angela Reiniche for compiling this information)