George Washington GIBSON gravestone at Grafton, UT (ghost town)
Mormon Pioneer ancestor of Kirt DeMar WOOD
From BR Sixth Generation back to
GIBSON, George Washington age 47 / b. 1800 Union County, South Carolina. / m. First Spouse, Mary Ann SPARKS 1822 Union County, South Carolina and Second Spouse Ann Elizabeth NEWMAN 1857 Salt Lake City, UT. / d. 1871 Duncan Retreat, UT, buried Grafton, UT.
Known places of residence are: Union County, South Carolina / Monroe County, Mississippi / Pueblo, CO Winter 1846-47/ Old Salt Lake City Fort, UT 1847-48 / Big Cottonwood, UT 1848-61 / Grafton, UT / Duncan Retreat, UT.
BAPTIZED: Dec 1843 Mississippi.
ENDOWED: 6 Nov 1855 EHOUS
SS: 6 Nov 1855 EHOUS, Mary Ann SPARKS
SS: 15 Mar 1857 POFFI, Ann Elizabeth NEWMAN
SP: 23 Mar 1950 ARIZO, Robert GIBSON and Mary EVANS
BY LAND: John Brown Company - Mississippi Saints
Departure: Mississippi, 8 Apr 1846
Wintered 1846/1847 in Pueblo, CO
Arrival in Salt Lake Valley: 29 July 1847
Pioneer information: George Washington GIBSON traveled his wife Mary Ann Sparks and their children.
Gibson, George Washington (46)
Gibson, Mary Sparks (44)
Mary Densia (23) married in Pueblo and stayed there. She died within a year
Gibson, Robert M. (22)
Gibson, Lydia E. (20) married in Pueblo, CO, Gilbert Hunt of Mormon Battalion.
Gibson, Robert P. (18)
Gibson, Frances Abigail (14)
Gibson, William (12)
Gibson, Laura Arrilla (9)
Gibson, Moses (6)
Gibson, Manomas Lavina (4)
Gibson, Joseph Smith (1)
Source:
Gibson, George W., 1848, 48, NA, Roster found in Heart Throbs of the West, Volume 9, Pages 469-521
Gibson, George Washington, 1847, 47, Brown, Our Pioneer Heritage, Vol. 2, p.436-440
Gibson, George W., 1852, NA, NA, South Cottonwood Ward; Utah Bishops' Report microfiche 6051208
Gibson, Mary Sparks, 1847, NA, Brown, Our Pioneer Heritage, Vol. 2, p.436-440
Gibson, Frances Abigail, 1847, NA, Brown, Our Pioneer Heritage, Vol. 2, p.436-440
Gibson, Joseph Smith, 1847, NA, Brown, Our Pioneer Heritage, Vol. 2, p.436-440
Gibson, Laura Altha [Arrilla], 1847, NA, Brown, Our Pioneer Heritage, Vol. 2, p.436-440
Gibson, Lydia E., 1847, NA, Brown, Our Pioneer Heritage, Vol. 2, p.436-440
Gibson, Manomas Lavina, 1847, NA, Brown, Our Pioneer Heritage, Vol. 2, p.436-440
Gibson, Moses, 1847, NA, Brown, Our Pioneer Heritage, Vol. 2, p.436-440
Gibson, Robert M., 1847, NA, Brown, Our Pioneer Heritage, Vol. 2, p.436-440
Gibson, William, 1847, NA, Brown, Our Pioneer Heritage, Vol. 2, p.436-440
HISTORY MISSISSIPPI SAINTS:
A group known in Church history as the "Mississippi Saints" left for the distant Salt Lake Valley from Mormon Springs (near Aberdeen), Monroe County, Mississippi, in April of 1846, under the direction of Tennesseean John Brown. The Mississippi Saints became the first since the Spanish friars of 1769 to establish a religious colony in the West, at Pueblo, Colorado. Many of these early converts were marvelous frontiersmen, resourceful colonizers, and shrewd traders. Because of their abilities, nearly all of them were eventually called to lead Latter-day Saint colonies to Colorado, Utah, California, Oregon, and other areas of the West. They were valiant in their love of God, their prophet, and their religion. They helped lead the colonization by Latter-day Saint pioneers of much of the western United States.
(http://www.lds.org/newsroom/showpackage/0,15367,3881-1---3-203,00.html)
Leonard J. Arrington, “Mississippi Mormons,” Ensign, Jun 1977, 46
These little-known Saints from Monroe County chalked up an impressive record of “firsts” as the Church moved west.
The company that came with Brigham Young through Emigration Canyon was an exciting blend of races and nationalities; but among the Danes and the New Englanders and the Canadians was a small group of converts whose soft drawls and black servants marked them as Southerners.
I was amazed to discover two facts about these Southern converts: (1) They went West a full year before Brigham Young and his party; wintered at Pueblo, Colorado, while waiting for the rest of the Saints; joined them at Fort Laramie in June 1847; and entered the Valley with the first company; and (2) these Southern converts established the first Latter-day Saint settlement in the West after Salt Lake City—Cottonwood...
...Monroe County, Mississippi, however, was a little different. Monroe County had been settled, for the most part, by couples with young children who had emigrated to that good cotton country from Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, and Alabama in the late 1830s. As those children grew they intermarried, and practically the whole county was kin. When the missionaries arrived in 1843, the converts spread the gospel among their families, and within a year, a congregation of perhaps 150–200 Latter-day Saints was thriving, including black members as well as whites. It was called the Tombigbee Branch after the river where most of them settled. They were reasonably well-off, with livestock, homes, slaves, and good land....
...John’s [BROWN] assignment was to return a third time to Mississippi [from Nauvoo] and gather the Saints and join the main pioneer camp near the Platte River. In the snow and storms of January 1846, John left for Mississippi; he directed the hasty preparations and led forty-three persons in nineteen wagons out on 8 April 1846. He planned to return in the fall of 1846 for the rest.
SEE: Ensign, Jun 1977 for complete article.
The Mississippi Saints’ Trail, 1846-47: Colorado, Wyoming, Ensign, Aug 1979
In April 1846 a group of Mormon converts from Monroe County, Mississippi, started north with the intention of joining the main body of pioneers on the North Platte River, somewhere near Fort Laramie. These Mississippi Saints followed the Mississippi River north to the Iron Banks, near present-day Columbus, Kentucky, and then cut across the Missouri, following existing county roads, to Independence where they picked up the Oregon Trail and followed it to within a few miles of Fort Laramie.
There they discovered that Brigham Young and the pioneers had not been able to start for the Rocky Mountains that year and were in Winter Quarters on the Missouri River. Facing winter themselves, the Mississippi Saints followed a trapper trail dating from the 1830s south to Fort Pueblo on the Arkansas River in present-day Colorado. There, joined by three sick detachments of the Mormon Battalion, they spent the winter....
SEE: Ensign, Aug 1979 for complete article.
Trails of the Scattered Saints, 1846-47. (1) Main Body of Saints (Mormon Pioneer Trail), left Nauvoo on 4 February 1846. (2) Mississippi Company, left Marion County, Alabama, in March 1846 and Monroe County, Mississippi, in April. Spent winter of 1846-47 in Pueblo. (3) Mormon Battalion, left Winter quarters in July 1846. (4) Mormon Battalion Sick Detachments, spent winter of 1846-47 in Pueblo. (5) Saints on the Ship Brooklyn, left New York on 4 February 1846 and arrived at Yerba Buena on 31 July 1846.
Two Groups Arrive in Pueblo
Far southwest of Winter Quarters, Nebraska, two other Latter-day Saint groups ended up wintering in 1846-47 at today’s Pueblo, Colorado: the Mississippi company of Saints and the sick detachments of the Mormon Battalion.
While Nauvoo was being evacuated, leaders instructed members in the South to come northwesterly and to join them somewhere on the Platte River. In late March 1846, Alabamans under John Holladay and Mississippians under William Crosby formed a company of some 60 persons. Guided by 25-year-old John Brown, a Tennessean and former missionary to the South, they headed to Missouri, where they were joined by 16 other members, some connected to the southerners. The group, which came to be known as the Mississippi company of Saints, then set out on the Oregon Trail and arrived at Grand Island, Nebraska, unaware they were already 170 miles west of President Brigham Young and the growing settlement at Winter Quarters. Thinking President Young was west of them, they trekked onward to today’s Laramie, Wyoming, where they learned that the Saints had stopped to create Winter Quarters.
Needing a place to winter themselves, they accepted a mountain man’s invitation to accompany him 300 miles south to Pueblo, Colorado, arriving in early August. There as many as 15 mountain men and their Spanish or Native American wives and families headquartered. The southerners fixed up their own lodgings and prepared food for the winter. One traveler observed these Saints on 20 August and said: “After half an hour’s riding, we saw the white wagons of the Mormons drawn up among the trees. Axes were sounding, trees falling, and log-huts rising along the edge of the woods and upon the adjoining meadow. As we came up, the Mormons left their work, seated themselves on the timber around us, and began earnestly to discuss points of theology, complain of the ill-usage which they had received from the ‘Gentiles,’ and sound a lamentation over the loss of their great temple of Nauvoo.”
In September, John Brown and 6 others headed back to the South to get additional family members. On the way home they met the nearly 500-man Mormon Battalion, whose leaders had come to feel encumbered by the over 80 women and children accompanying the battalion and hampered by some seemingly unrecovering sick battalion soldiers. When battalion leaders learned that 275 miles west at Pueblo was headquartered the Mississippi company, the news was received joyfully. Within four days many of the women and children were sent to Pueblo with the first of three sick detachments of soldiers. Ultimately about 154 soldiers and nearly all of the women and children with the battalion joined the more than 70 wintering southerners to form a community of over 300 Latter-day Saints.
Surprisingly, this group in Pueblo was some 520 miles southwest of President Young and the Saints back at Winter Quarters. No one knows what would have been the sad outcomes for those with the Mormon Battalion had not the Mississippi company of Saints been so fortuitously located in Pueblo to receive, care for, and nurse their incoming brothers and sisters. During their fall-to-spring stay there, they built a church for worship and socials, and at least 9 deaths, at least 7 births, and 3 marriages occurred in this Colorado branch of the Church.
Next spring, an advance party of 17 from the Mississippi company went north in April and waited for two weeks at Fort Laramie before greeting President Young’s advance, exploratory company on 1 June 1847. The rest of the Mississippi company and those associated with the Mormon Battalion who had wintered at Pueblo soon moved north to Fort Laramie and reached the Great Salt Lake Valley five days after President Young. These pieces of the scattered Church became part of the whole again.
SEE: Ensign, July 1997 for complete article.
Kirt DeMar WOOD - John Andrew WOOD pedigree
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