Digital Commons Network^™

Recollections Of Past Days: The Autobiography Of Patience Loader Rozsa Archer, Sandra Ailey Petree

All USU Press Publications

For visitors to the Martin's Cove historic site in Wyoming, Patience Loader has become an icon of the disastrous winter entrapment of the Martin and Willie handcart companies. Her record of those events is important, but there is much else of interest in her autobiography. In fact, it is a bit unusual that someone such as her would have left such an engaging record of her life. The daughter of an English gardener, Patience Loader became a boarding house servant, domestic maid, and seamstress. Converted to Mormonism, she shipped with her parents to America. They joined the ill-fated Martin company, …