"Dr. Death" may not have been such a bad guy after all.
The University of Utah has paid $44,000 for the 157-year-old diary of Dr. George B. Sanderson, controversial non-Mormon physician of the Mormon Battalion, who was nicknamed "Dr. Death" by Battalion members.
The previously unknown and never-before-published diary was obtained by the special collections department of the J. Willard Marriott Library through an auction by Dorothy Sloan Rare Books in Austin, Texas, on Feb. 5. With an asking price range of $30,000-$60,000, the U. beat out other auction seekers, including Brigham Young University.
"It's a very, very important document," said. Gregory C. Thompson, assistant director of the Marriott Library for special collections. "Our feeling was it needed to be made available in this area."
Sanderson of Platte, Mo., an assistant surgeon with the U.S. Army, was assigned to accompany the approximately 500 Battalion members from Fort Leavenworth to California. The Battalion marched some 2,000 miles — the longest march in U.S. military history — from 1846 to '47, being asked by the U.S. government to help in the war with Mexico, though it never faced any battles.
Sanderson wrote a 66-page, 20,000-word diary in ink with day-to-day entries on the trek, which started on Aug. 24, 1846, in Missouri and ended on Jan. 21, 1847, near San Diego. The journal is considered important to not only Western and California history but also to trail and military history.
Thompson said there's nothing negative about the church in the diary, though Sanderson was generally disliked by Battalion members. James B. Brown, a Battalion leader, characterized Sanderson as a cruel, tyrannical quack.
"The doctor often talked to the men as if they were brutes," Brown wrote. "He was very unfeeling, and the men would not respond to his sick call when it was possible for them to walk alone."
Thompson said the library plans to make the diary available to researchers and hopes to eventually publish it in its entirety.
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