Iva Beckstead contribution

Thanks for your new blog entry.  Do you know if this journal entry was written in his own handwriting?  If so, Do you happen to have a copy of it?  I have a typed copy that was given to me years ago (can't remember by whom) but it isn't quite the same as your blog entry.  Yours has more detail.  Do you know if a complete journal exists for Isaac John Wardle?

I have attached some research that I have done.

Iva Beckstead

hollandtulips@earthlink.net

According to The Journal of Langley Allgood Bailey, edited by Allen C. Christensen, “I was taken down with a hemerage (hemorrhage) of the bowles (bowels).  I was unable to walk.  Had to be hauled on Bro. Isaac J. Wardle and my brother, John’s cart.  After reaching Florence (Nebraska), a Doctor was consulted.  (The Doctor) said I must not go another step or I would die and be buried on the road side.  A captain named Tune would not administer to me—said he did not have faith enough to rais(e) the dead.  Mother, on hearing that Apostle F. D. Richards and C. H. Wheelock had arrived in camp, got them to administer to me.  They promised me I would live to reach the vallies (valleys).  All this time I was uncounsis (unconscious) of what was going on.”

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One account written by a granddaughter of Isaac, Ollie Palmer Parkinson, states: “I remember grandfather telling us how he left bloody tracks in the snow as they came across the plains, and how he prayed for a pair of shoes and he came on to a pair by the side of the road.  They were small for him and hurt his feet, but how good they felt to him, and he knelt and thanked his Heavenly father for them.”

Another time Ollie states that her grandfather said, “They almost starved to death and more than once they singed the hair off the hides and chewed that.  The longer they chewed, the larger it got.  They would take it out of their mouths and cutoff another piece and chew again.”

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They had to cross streams and rivers that were filled with ice chunks.  On page 5 of the book Of Dugouts and Spires by Ronald R. Bateman, 1998 published by the South Jordan City Corporation it states, “Isaac J. Wardle helped bury twenty people in a single grave in that desolate white wilderness.”