Lars Petersen

We left Hamburg May 8, 1865, and arrived in New York on June 15. Most of the girls were more or less seasick, Anne Larsen not excepted, and several died and were buried in the ocean. The missionaries had advised all the emigrants, especially the women, to take some provisions with them that they could have to take when they became seasick and would not be able to eat the ship’s fare. Anne had provided a good supply of such things as she thought she could eat in an emergency, but as she had no box of her own, and as she was going to travel in Hans Hansen’s company, she had it put in a box with his name on. But the police took it all, and she missed it badly while traveling on the ocean. Hans Hansen’s wife and son saved nothing but their bedclothes.

What became of the old man we never learned. All that we ever heard about him was that the newspapers had got up a story that his wife and son deserted him in Copenhagen, because they did not want to go with him, and that the Mormon missionaries had cheated him out of fifty thousand dollars.

After the ship had come out of the river Elbe, I expected they would have taken a southwesterly direction and gone through the English Channel, which would have been an almost direct line to New York, but instead of doing that, they started off in a northwest direction. We were wondering at that, but we soon learned that on account of the wind being unfavorable, it being southwest, they had to take the northern route and go north of Scotland. When we left Hamburg the sun was shining warm, and we had to seek the shade under the sails, but after we had sailed a few days, with the sun shining every day, it became so cold we had to lie down in the sunshine to keep warm. After we had passed Scotland, they still kept going in the same direction, the wind still being southwest. It became so cold that delicate women and children could not stand it, but when they changed the sails and turned south, it soon became warm. We could see icebergs to the northwest of us which, of course, helped to make it cold.

The Church chronology says that the ship B. S. Kimball sailed from Hamburg with 557 saints. These were from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, but there was also a German company of emigrants on the same ship. Whether they were Mormons or not I do not know. They had music and dancing every day on the deck, and some of our young people went and danced with them, but of course they could not speak so as to understand each other.

The weather was fine most of the time we sailed on the ocean, though sometimes a little windy. There were two days and nights when we had a hard wind against us and so they had to hoist all the sails down to roll them in. All they could do was to keep the front end of the ship against the wind and drift with it. The captain said after the storm was over that we had drifted back 200 miles. After we had got started to go forward again, we met a steamship coming from America. They went so close to us that they threw a bundle of newspapers over on our ship in passing, from which we learned that the Civil War had ended and that Jefferson Davis had been taken prisoner. We had learned that Abraham Lincoln had been killed before we left Denmark.

When we arrived in New York and the ship laid up by the Castle Guard, a place for emigrants, there came an emigration agent from Utah. I think his name was Stuart or perhaps Stainer. He told us that we had better have our gold money changed to paper money as there was a premium on gold. He said we could do that ourselves if we wanted to, but he had got the promise from a certain bank that if we would let him get all the money that we had to be exchanged, he would get us a little more in greenbacks for it than we would be able to get ourselves, so we let him have it all. When we came into the Castle Guard there was a provision store with lots of good things to eat and drink, but we had not received our money back, so we could not buy a thing, and our hungry and seasick women felt awful badly over it, but there was nothing to do.

We soon got started on the railroad to Albany, and while on the cars we received our money, so when we reached Albany we had to try and find something to eat, and we found it too, but we had a little difficulty on account of the language. Four of the girls gave me all of their money, also one boy, to take care of and buy for them what they wanted and needed, because they were afraid to buy for themselves.

After a little while we started on the road again for Niagara Falls, and here we crossed into Canada. Here also, we had to change our baggage from one train to another, which took a little while. Here Anne felt again like being seasick, and I think some of the other girls did too, and they wanted me to go to a provision store there and buy them some coffee and some cakes. I took a tin can and went in. The store was full of people and all wanted to get something. There were several clerks, but none of them understood Danish. One of them could speak Dutch, but none of us understood that. The clerks were very accommodating, but the clerks and customers could not understand each other. I got my coffee and cakes and started to go when a Swedish girl came and asked me to help her. She got what she wanted, but she had handed the clerk a dollar and he had forgotten to give her change back. She pointed to the clerk that had waited on her and then I said to him, “This lady says she gave you a dollar, but you forgot to give her any money back.” Then he came and looked over what she had got and counted it up and gave her change back. But when the other people and the clerks, too, learned that I could speak a little English, they all wanted me to help them. Some of them said they had stood there a whole hour without being able to get anything. Then I said, “Let me go to my folks with what I have first and then I will come back again and help you.” But they held onto me to get this first and that first, so before I could come out to the girls with the coffee it had got nearly cold, and the girls were not very well pleased because I stayed in the store so long.

We traveled on Canadian ground until we came to Detroit, Michigan where we had again to change trains. From Detroit we went to Chicago, but we did not stop there long, perhaps half an hour. From there we went to Quincy, Illinois, and when we came there we could get no further. We were to go from there to St. Joseph, Missouri, but heavy rains had washed the railroad track away in Missouri, so we had to wait two days for the water to settle a little so they could get us over the gap in the railroad in some small boats. After we came to St. Joseph, we sailed up the Missouri River in a steamship to a place in Nebraska, a few miles from Omaha. We sailed on the river a couple of days and nights, and the weather was very warm. We had bought something to eat in St. Joseph, but we had nothing to drink. The ship stopped at different places to take on wood, but only a few minutes at a time. Some of us would take our cans and go inland to see if it would be possible to find some water fit to drink, but to no use, we never found any. We were all very thirsty, but then I saw one of the sailors draw up a bucket of water from the river and take a drink of it. I went and tasted that, too, and it tasted good. It was black with mud, like black coffee, but it tasted better than black coffee. I went and told the girls, and they, too, tasted it and found it good. From that time on we did not thirst any more while on the river; we called it coffee.

We landed in Wyoming, Nebraska, June 26, late in the afternoon and our baggage was thrown up on the ground by the side of the river, and the ship went further up. Now we got busy hunting up our things, and prepared for a good night’s rest. We had slept very little since we left the big ship that took us across the Atlantic Ocean, but we were fooled again, for a heavy rain came up, and instead of sleep we got a good soaking before morning. Next day the weather was fine again and we got busy getting our clothing and bedding dry. The women folks mostly attended to that while the men and boys had to prepare for tents and huts to sleep in the next night. We were four girls and one boy, besides myself, that stuck together like one family, and we stuck together yet about making a temporary habitation. Anne had a pair of bed sheets made of heavy home made flax cloth. The boy also had a pair made of cotton cloth, but we could not get time to make a tent that day, so we had to build a hut of wood first and then hang our sheets over that when it rained, and it rained a great deal. The water in the Missouri River was very dirty, but there was a small river running into the big river at that place called Weeping River that was nearly clear.

After we had rested a few days, the girls started washing at that place. It was a warm day and there was no shade. Anne said she drank lots of water that day, and the next day she was very sick, very sick with a kind of fever they called climate fever. There were many sick with it, and many died. I think it resembled typhoid fever. Anne said when she saw them carrying out one that had died, “I guess I’ll be the next one.” But she survived. Her time had not yet come, and she had a mission to perform in this life. She was the only one of her relatives that would listen to the Gospel as revealed in this time and generation. There were hundreds of her progenitors in the spirit world looking to her for assistance to enter into the Kingdom of God, and if she did not live long enough to do the work for them, she still lived long enough to raise a family that will and must do it for her. I am one of them. After she had been sick a few days, I got her a bottle of “Perry Davis Pain Killer” and that seemed to cure her. She said when she got the first dose that she could feel the effects of it clear out in her toes. We found it was a good medicine and we have hardly ever been without it since we came here.

We lived here a whole month waiting for our wagons to come from Chicago, so we did not get started on the road across the plains until the first of August. It went very slowly for a long time, for we had to break in both the cattle and the teamsters to drive them. I was one of the teamsters to be broken in. We traveled many miles on the south side of the Platte River, but finally we had to cross over to the north side. The weather was fine and the water was warm. The river was quite wide at that place, I think it was about one half mile wide. We all had to wade across, except the old and the sick, as we were heavily loaded. The women folks were advised to set up their skirts so as to keep them out of the water, because it would be hard to stand against the water with the skirts down around their legs. Anne said she came very nearly going with the water there as she was yet weak after her sickness. The journey across the plains was very hard on her, as it was on the old and feeble.