The Hadwen Family of Lancashire

The KING families
While we do not have reliable information about how Eleazer KING, Sr., crossed the Iowa Plains, given his age and the closeness of the King family we speculate that he was with his son John Morris. It is known that Eleazer, Sr. was endowed in the Nauvoo temple on January 22nd, as if in preparation to move west with the first group of Saints in February. In that month, John Morris King left Nauvoo with the Twelve, crossed the river into Iowa and camped on Sugar Creek. He began moving west on March 1st. From John's memoirs, sometimes referred to as his journal, we learn that he traveled with Orson Pratt during the exodus from Nauvoo, and that he left Orson at Bloomfield, Iowa, and returned to Nauvoo. Gathering up his family, which perhaps included his father, he hastened back along the trail to rejoin the pioneers. Then, at a campsite called Richardson's Point, he left his wife and children and went on to find the main company which by then was on the Chariton River. Certainly John would have felt more at ease in leaving his family temporarily as he did, if his father and/or brother, Eleazer, Jr., were there to look after things.
After John caught up with the initial pioneer company, he was sent back to Nauvoo again by Brigham Young on a matter of Church business. He was able to visit his family on the way and upon returning from Nauvoo he "arrived at the place where I had left my family and after a few days, I hired a house at a place called Stringtown for six weeks, in which time I worked for one Otheto Wells who ............." At this point John's writing ends as if something interrupted him. He never returned to the task of documenting the account of how his family crossed the plains, but the Kings were in Council Bluffs by July, where John Morris enlisted in the Mormon Battalion. [A Note on the Kings and Bennetts: Winter Quarters was abandoned by the Mormons in 1848, and most Saints not moving west removed to the east side of the river. However, some settlements were developed on the Nebraska side of the Missouri. While it is fairly certain that James and Ellen [PINCOCK] BENNETT lived in what is now Council Bluffs, Iowa, less is known of the whereabouts of Eleazer KING, Sr., and his sons, from 1846 to 1852. They were in the area, but whether on the east or west bank of the river is unknown.]
Leaving his family in Council Bluffs, perhaps in the care and keeping of his father, Eleazer, Sr., and/or his brother, Eleazer, Jr., John marched to San Diego with the Battalion. The Battalion fought no battles, except with a herd of wild bulls, and had a colorful and interesting trip to California and on to the Great Basin. The pay which John and the other recruits received for their services was turned over to the Church and proved very beneficial to the impoverished Saints.(4)
After being discharged in Los Angeles 16 July 1847, some men of the Battalion proceeded to Salt Lake City via Las Vegas along the general route now defined by Interstate 15. Others went north to Sacramento, then east following the present route of Interstate 80 over the Sierras, where they viewed the aftermath of the Donner Party tragedy. Travelling down the Truckee Rive,r which the Donner Party had come up with such difficulty the winter before, the former soldiers of the Mormon Battalion found "wagons, clothing, tool chests, trunks, books, medicines, household articles, and the skeletons of cattle." Other veterans of the Battalion stopped at Sutter's Fort where they were working when gold was discovered there in January, 1848. It is not known which of these groups John associated with, or how he made it to the Valley of the Salt Lake.
While the Battalion veterans were making their way east to Salt Lake, Brigham Young, who had been leading the Saints in his capacity as President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles since the death of Joseph Smith, left Winter Quarters in April, 1847, and started west along the north bank of the Platte River with an advance party of Saints. Near Fort Kearney, Nebraska, the pioneers began to parallel the Oregon Trail which came up from Kansas to the south, and followed the Platte River along its southern bank.(5) The Mormon train could have crossed the river and taken the easier Oregon Trail at this point, but there were many Missourians traveling that trail, some of whom had been involved in atrocities against the Saints. Brigham did not want any more difficulties; the pioneer band blazed its own trail on the north bank.
At Fort Laramie, in eastern Wyoming, where it became impractical to continue up the north side of the river, the pioneers crossed the Platte and proceeded along the Oregon Trail to Fort Bridger. There they followed the faint year-old tracks of the Donner party down Echo Canyon and over the Wasatch Range into the Valley.
Shortly after he said "This is the Place," Brigham turned the work of settlement over to others and started back to the Missouri River with a company of seasoned pioneers. Many members of the Mormon Battalion had reached the Valley by then, and traveled with them, anxious to return to their families which had remained in Garden Grove, Mt. Pisgah, and Winter Quarters. John Morris King was likely in that company. But John did not move his family west until 1852. It may be that inasmuch as he had been in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake and had seen conditions there, that he decided his family was just as well off in Council Bluffs as in Salt Lake City. Maybe the family was in no financial position to move, or perhaps he remained in Iowa by assignment, assisting the Saints on their way to the Valley.
Enoch and Mary Bigg [WARE] KING, meanwhile, remained in Nauvoo when the first company of Saints left in February, and were there for the dedication of the temple 30 April and 1 May, 1846. It may be that Enoch was on the crew assigned to stay and complete construction. But on 6 May, they left Nauvoo with their two sons, Enoch George and Hyrum Smith KING, arriving in Mt. Pisgah, Iowa, later that summer. This second pioneer camp established on the Iowa prairie to assist the Saints across the plains, was their home for two and one-half years. We do not know what specific role the couple played in the maintenance of the place, except that Mary no doubt sang away many cares of the weary travelers who stopped to rest there. Enoch George King, their oldest son, died at Mt. Pisgah in October. He was three.
Nothing remains of the Mt. Pisgah waystation now except the pioneer cemetery where Enoch George is buried. Two sons were also born while the Kings were living in Mt. Pisgah -- Alonzo Marvin King on 3 February 1847, and Joseph Smith King on 24 January 1849. Enoch also married a second wife, Jane Hacking, at Mt. Pisgah in 1848.
In May of '49, having spent three years in Iowa, Enoch, Mary, Jane and the boys started for Salt Lake City. There was a brief King family reunion at Council Bluffs where Eleazer, Sr., Eleazer, Jr., and John Morris and their families were living, but Enoch's families were soon on their way again across Nebraska. Mary was ill much of the way, at times to the point of helplessness. It would be interesting to know the extent to which Jane assisted her and helped care for the children. If examples of like situations in the polygamous days of the Church hold true, she was a comfort and a true sister. The Kings arrived in the Valley 24 September 1849.
For a few years the family lived in the 19th Ward of Salt Lake City, during which time three more children were born to Mary -- Eleazer on 10 June 1850, John Lorenzo on 22 May 1852, and the first of three daughters, Nancy Emmaline, 7 September 1854. Meanwhile, back in Council Bluffs, John Morris King was appointed counselor to John Tidwell, captain of a pioneer company, in the spring of 1852. Eleazer KING, Sr., Eleazer King, Jr., John Morris and their families, then crossed the plains to Salt Lake City with the Tidwell Company. The Kings arrived in the Valley in October, 1852, the same month that the Bennetts did, and moved on to Sanpete County, Utah.
John Morris King seems to have been the leader of the family, spiritually and otherwise. Enoch KING seems to have marched to the tune of a different drummer. Beginning in Nauvoo, he cut his own swath and was not baptized until his marriage. He did not move west with the family, he did not enlist in the Mormon Battalion, and he did not settle near his father and brothers in Sanpete County, Utah. His brother, Eleazer, Jr., seems to have been that way also, and was something of a rebel and troublemaker on the trek from Winter Quarters to Utah.(6)
On 3 January 1853, a son, David, was born to Enoch and his second wife, Jane. On 13 April, Enoch was excommunicated from the Church for failure to pay his tithing. The following February, Jane [Hacking] King, divorced Enoch and married his brother, John Morris King. It appears that the Kings had maintained some degree of contact with each other. Jane's marriage to John kept the whole business in the family and obviated the inconvenience of Jane having to get used to a different last name. The marriage did not endure, however, as Jane and John Morris King later divorced.
Eleazer, Sr., died in Spring City, Sanpete County, Utah, in May, 1854. We are not acquainted with the circumstances of his death. He is buried in the old cemetery there. In September, sometime after the birth of their daughter, Nancy, Enoch and Mary moved to Davis County, settling in Kaysville where Mary was one of the first school teachers. It would have been awkward for them to live in Sanpete County where Jane [Hacking] had remarried to Enoch's brother.