Opening Hours
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Manuscripts
Eliza Roxey Snow diaries
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- Description
- Two diary volumes kept by Eliza R. Snow, primarily during her travels from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Salt Lake City, Utah, from 1846-1847. The first diary begins with Eliza's departure from Nauvoo with the family of Stephen Markham (Eliza lived in the Markhams' attic room for a time) in Heber Kimball's company. It traces their travels through Iowa and their time waiting out the winter weather at Winter Quarters. Eliza writes of the difficulties of the trip, particularly dissent among the traveling companions and their many illnesses and deaths. She thinly masks her intense loneliness ("Altho' so much alone, I feel no despondency," she wrote. "Surely happiness is not altogether the product of circumstances."). She initially tried to find support from Heber Kimball (she writes that she asked to be "number'd among his children...[and] from this time I call him father"), but ultimately found solace in religion and camaraderie with her sister-wives and other women in the company. Eliza also described her experiences driving a wagon, trading with the Pottawatomie tribe, and encounters with hostile Indians (she writes of the shooting of an Omaha Indian chief by a rival tribe in December 1846). The diary also contains a variety of poems and epitaphs, including "The Camp of Israel, A Song for Pioneers" (No.1, No.2, and No.3, also titled "Let Us Go"); "In All Things Rejoice," a song for the Camp of Israel; "A Journeying Song for the Camp of Israel, dedicated to Prest. Young & Lady;" "The Twelve, To Prest. B. Young;" and "To the Saints in Europe." (The pages with entries made between August 17, 1846, and October 28, 1846, are missing). The second diary volume resumes in June 1847, when Eliza left Iowa in the wagon of Robert Peirce, which was part of the Second Fifty headed by Bates Noble. The diary traces the company's travels across the plains and their arrival in the Salt Lake Valley in the autumn of 1847. In Utah Eliza initially shared a cabin with Clara Decker Young and made caps to trade for other goods, and the diary recounts her experiences through September 1849. It also includes her poem "A Song of the Desart [sic]." Individuals mentioned in the diaries include Heber Kimball, Stephen Markham, Parley P. Pratt, Lorenzo Snow, Brigham Young, and Mary Ann Angell Young.
