Golden Linford couldn't let his great-grandfather's grave go unmarked.
So the the 71-year-old Idaho state representative has devoted the better part of the past three years to researching handcart journals, negotiating with ranchers and orchestrating family members so that a granite boulder could be placed near John Linford's burial site at the Willie Handcart Company rescue camp this Saturday.The boulder will be the first monument to mark the historic sixth crossing of the Sweetwater River and the rescue site of the Willie Handcart Company. The site has been largely overlooked even though it was a major camping and resting place on the Mormon, Oregon and California trails. Even during the widely publicized wagon train events of 1997, almost no one visited this significant segment of the trail, according to Tom Abernathy, the Wyoming rancher on whose land the rescue camp is located.
The site, west of the intersection of Wyoming highways 135 and 287 on the Sweetwater River, has gone unmarked for more than a hundred years because in the past people thought the rescue site was at the base of Rocky Ridge. This misconception was passed down in oral histories and then recorded in family histories and even some books by noted historians, said Linford.
"For years," he said, "we went to the monument at Rock Creek, and my eyes filled up with tears and we said this is where John Linford is buried. But he wasn't anywhere nearby." Linford discovered the 25-mile mistake as he did research on a family history in 1992. As he went to the journals written during the handcart ordeal, he discovered that John Linford was not buried in the mass grave at Rock Creek but at the Willie rescue camp.
And as his research continued, he found that the Willie rescue site was at the sixth crossing of the Sweetwater, not the base of Rocky Ridge. Nearly simultaneously, his cousin, Donna Putnam, had come up with same findings as she worked on family history.
At about the same time, other historians came to the same conclusion independently. Both Lyndia Carter, who is writing books on the Martin Company, the Willie Company and the handcart experience, and Lamar Berrett, who is editor of a comprehensive book on important places in LDS history, agree that the Willie Company rescue site is at the sixth crossing of the Sweetwater River.
"I'm pleased to hear that a marker is being put in the right place. I shudder every time I hear a marker is going in the wrong place," Berrett said. Finding the right spot is important, Berrett said, because people find such inspiration in sacred places. "It's very faith promoting," he said. "It's the same reason we go to Israel."
To the Linford family, John Linford's story is an inspiration. The 43-year-old man came with his wife and three sons to Utah from Gravely, England. (One son remained in England to serve a mission.)
Like many European Mormon pioneers who did not have much money, the Linfords traveled by handcart. Their group, the Willie Company, left late in the summer and suffered miserably when a harsh winter came early on the Wyoming plains. John Linford died the morning the rescue party reached the company.
As he lay dying, his wife asked him if he were sorry that he had come. He said, "No, Maria, I am glad we came. I shall not live to reach Salt Lake, but you and the boys will, and I do not regret all I have gone through if our boys can grow up and raise their families in Zion."
To pay tribute to John Linford, Donna Putnam and Golden Linford have worked tirelessly. For Linford, it's been something short of an obsession. "Placing the marker gives me a sense of closure," he said.