Margaret S. Grant

Margaret S. Grant is the youngest of two children born to Jedediah Morgan Grant and Caroline Van Dyke of New York. Jedediah and Caroline were married in 1844 in Nauvoo, Illinois.

The Grant family traveled west with the 1847 Jedediah M Grant and Willard Snow Company. Exhaustive travel conditions, disease, injury, lack of food and medicine, premature birth, and extreme weather were some of the greatest threats to pioneers. Along the journey, 3-month-old Margaret passed away from unknown causes.

According to the company journals and personal family history, as well as an article in the Deseret News, printed January 3, 1976, the following account was given:

“On the night of September 2, his baby girl Margaret died and his wife was so sick that she could not even watch as the weeping father buried his baby under a pile of rocks. On Sunday Morning, September 26, 1847, Jedediah and his company were camped on the Bear River. His wife had been failing steadily since the death of their daughter, and on that morning she died quietly after telling her husband that she wanted to be buried in the Promised Valley and also that she wanted him to go back and bring the body of Margaret. In great sorrow, Jedediah put the body of his wife into a wagon, after 3 days and 2 nights he arrived in the valley and buried his beloved wife. She was the first white woman buried in the Salt Lake Valley. After seeing that his company was safely into the valley, Jedediah and Joseph Bates Noble, rode eastward again, this time to recover the body of little Margaret, only to find that the grave had been robbed and her remains scattered by the wolves.”