. . . In the latter part of the year 1855 President Brigham Young wrote to Franklin D. Richards then presiding over the British Mission that First [p.1] Presidency had decided to have company of handcarts organized to cross the plains the coming season and that he, Brigham Young, would sell a house and barn and stables if anyone in England would buy them and he would turn the proceeds into the Emigration fund for the benefit of the gathering Saints.

It was thought this would be a little cheaper way of gathering the Saints. I wrote to Brother Richards at Liverpool that I would like to go by this way by handcarts as my money was limited and there was two of us and I had £ 12.10 S or about $60, sixty dollars and if I could not go to Utah I would go to the states. [-] the cost by hand carts was £ 9 or, $45 dollars each so he arranged for us to go by hand carts that is me and my wife. (Written in margin: We were married on the 13th of April 1856 at Oldham church in Lancashire. My wife's name was Mary Craves.) We started on the ship
Horizon and set sail on the 25th of May from Liverpool and arrived in Boston Harbor on the 28th of June.

On the 2nd of July we met Orson Pratt and Ezra T. Benson going to England. We took a train at Boston for Albany, New York, crossed the Hudson ,and took train and passed through Rochester and Utica, on to Cleveland and Toledo and Chicago, from there to Rock Island and crossed the Mississippi and on to Iowa City to the end of the track. We stopped here three weeks waiting for the handcarts that where being built here and our time was spent in herding cattle that were to haul our wagons and other stock that were being brought through. We traveled by handcart through Iowa, three hundred miles to the Missouri River, and crossed into Nebraska to old Winter Quarters, called Florence, on a high hill west of the river. (Written in margins: We traveled in Jessie Heaven's [Jesse Haven]. Company through Iowa and came in Edwards Martin's Company from Missouri River to to [SIC] Devils Gate) [p.2]

[In the] streets [were] waiting friends to take care of us and we were taken down to John Olgers, that is me and my wife and Thomas Socles and family and an old lady that came with us named Ann Wrigley. The next day me and my wife were taken down to Zera Pulsiphers, one of the presidents of the seventies. Next night we camped in the tithing yard and next morning the watchman told us that Jedadiah M. Grant died in the night, this was the 2nd of December 1856. . . .[p.5]

BIB: Platt, Benjamin. Reminiscences, (MS4447 item #1), pp. 1-2, 5. (CHL)
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