The Daily Notes of

Sarah Pratt

INTRODUCTION

One of the convictions that has come home to this editor of Covered Wagon Women is that there are still many, many such documents in private hands. They may be family treasures kept in some dark drawer or covert closet. These added to those in libraries and in museums make up a treasure of American historical records.

In giving speeches and lectures on the subject of overland diaries and letters of women, several times some person has come up to say, “My neighbor upstairs has one,” or “My friend down the street knows of one.”

In our introduction to the “Letter to Mother” of Lucia Loraine Williams in Volume III, 1851, we told of phoning Radio Station KGO, the massive talk station in San Francisco, and of the exciting responses that have resulted from such calls.

It was in the autumn of 1979 that the first KGO call was made in the wee small hours of the night. The announcer allowed us time to tell about the project. We had hardly hung up the telephone when it rang. The caller was William Briggs of Sacramento. He said, “We have the 1852 diary of my great grandmother, Sarah Pratt.”

The upshot has been that he and his sister, Barbra Briggs, have given us full access to the precious record which follows.

The ancestor who wrote the diary was Sarah Pratt. She was listed in the 1850 Federal Census of Liberty, Jackson County, Michigan, as being 18 years old, birthplace, New York. Her parents were Silas and Sally Pratt. Silas was a farmer. The four other children listed were as follows: An older brother, Cavanne (spelling not certain), age 22, a school teacher; sister, Eliza, 20; brother, Edgar, 16; a brother, Darwin, eight years old.

In the diary “Pa” is mentioned countless times, with never an appearance by the mother, Sally. Darwin is not mentioned at all. Eliza was along, as was Edgar, who is referred to as “Ned” many times.

The overland journey of the Pratts differed from most in that it was later in the year. They crossed the Missouri River at Kanesville (Council Bluffs) on June 7 and started with some Mormon and other associates to Salt Lake City, where they arrived on Tuesday, August 10. They did not go on farther west until Saturday, August 21. The remainder of their journey was via the so-called “Mormon Corridor” south and west of Great Salt Lake over hot deserts and through the Cajon Pass to the newly-founded community of San Bernardino.

Sarah was evidently a young woman with an active, probing mind, but she was not, nor did she become, a Mormon. She did hear Mormon sermons and observe baptizings. However, her comments are those of an independent thinker observing other persons’ religious practices.

She was in favor of resting from their journey to observe the Sabbath, however. Family tradition has it that they and their ancestors have been “variously Protestant.”

There is one tantalizing allusion in her entry for Sunday, November 14, after arriving at San Bernardino on the ninth: “some of the co[mpany] attended church, I read A. J. Davis works.” The author of the book she read was Andrew Jackson Davis, one of the leading spiritualist writers of that day. She could have been reading his Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, which had been published in 1847.

It was on Friday, December 10, 1852, that she wrote another interesting entry in her diary: “Mr Miner starts for Pueblo [Los Angeles].” There is a family tradition that her romance with her future husband, Morris Miner, a native of Austria, went on during the covered wagon journey; however this is her only mention of him in the diary. They were married in San Francisco in 1853.1

Morris Miner (often mis-spelled “Minor”) is mentioned in the published Journal History of the Church as being a Mormon elder, a single man, both on April 7 and on June 18, 1851. He was a member of a mission directed by Parley Parker Pratt (no relation to Sarah) from Salt Lake City to San Bernardino, also in 1851. It is our own good fortune that Parley Pratt’s own diary for that journey has been published. The entry of special interest is that of May 21, 1851: Pratt told how on Tuesday, May 20, Miner said he was dissatisfied with the leadership and the other members of the “Pacific Mission.” He “had a falt finding Spirit, and requested to be released from the Mission and remain a member of the Church.” A council was called, and, after hearing Morris Miner’s case, they reproved him and “gave him Leave to Resign his papers of Recommendation and appointment to the Mission and remain at the settlement.” So it was that Miner left the company with some packers who were “mostly profane and wicked unprincipled men.”2

Parley Pratt’s own biographer, Reva Stanley, in The Archer of Paradise,3 wrote of this episode, “The truth of the whole matter was that Miner didn’t want to be a missionary. He wanted to go to California to hunt for gold.”

So Sarah Pratt, a young woman with a probing mind, became the wife of a man who was from Austria, spoke with a German accent, and was in revolt against the Mormon connection. After the San Francisco marriage in 1853, they lived for awhile in Martinez and then moved to the beautiful Napa Valley just a few miles north of San Francisco Bay.

The censuses of the following decades are revealing about the growth of the Miner family. They were in their Napa Valley home on July 12, 1860, when the Census taker visited their farm — listed Morris Miner as a “Farmer,” 34 years old with a financial value of $4800. There were three children: Edward P., five years old; Nancy, four, and Edney, one year old.

During the next decade Morris Miner died, as it was reported in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, in its issue of October 29, 1866, “In the Rodeo Valley, Contra Costa county, Oct. 26th, Morris Miner, formerly of this city.”

Sarah was now a widow and would live on with her family around her for many years in Napa. The 1870 census told of two more children, Alida, age 9, and Esiah, age 7. The mother, Sarah, at age 41, was “Keeping House,” had real estate valued at $6,000 and personal property worth $2,145.

Alida,4 the nine-year-old daughter listed in the 1870 census, grew up in Napa, and in 1883 she became the wife of Edmund Wilson Fogg in San Pablo, California. They became prominent citizens of Oroville, California, where Fogg was a banker. It was their daughter, Edleda, who became the wife of William A. Briggs of Sacramento, who’s children, William A. Jr., and Barbra, were the persons who supplied the little three by five inch book that was the diary of their great grandmother. It is with their kind permission that it is printed here.

 

1 “Obituary,” Alida Miner Fogg, Sacramento Bee, March 20, 1946.

2 Reva Holdaway Stanley and Charles L. Camp, “A Mormon Mission To California in 1851,” Calif. Hist. Soc. Qtly., XIV, No. I, (March, 1935), PP. 59–73. This reference is on page 67, entry for May 21, I851.

3 (Caldwell, Idaho, 1937), P. 249.

4 Alida is pronounced a-LYE-dah. There are several references to the Foggs: “Obituary,” Alida Miner Fogg, Sacramento Bee, March 20, 1946; George C. Mansfield, History of Butte County, California, With Biographical Sketches (Los Angeles, 1918), PP. 683-841 687; J. W. Wooldridge, History of the Sacramento Valley, California, 3 vols., (Chicago, 1931), vol. III, PP. 254-56.