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Chapter Four

From Scotland to Zion

James Johnston & the Pioneer Journey, 1836 – 1903

Born in Scotland

In 1836, the year Queen Victoria’s reign was about to begin, a boy named James Johnston was born on Graemsay — a tiny island in the Orkney archipelago off the northern tip of Scotland — to Hugh Johnston and Cecelia Yorston. When LDS missionary William Petrie reached Orkney in the early 1850s, the Johnston family were among the very first on the island to hear the message and believe it.

The LDS Church sent missionaries to Britain beginning in 1837, and they found remarkable success among working-class Scottish and English families. Thousands converted, drawn by the promise of a new community in the American West. The Johnston family were among them.

Baptized — June 22, 1852

On June 22, 1852, at age fifteen, James Johnston was baptized into the LDS faith by a missionary named Thomas William Brewerton. The family had heard the gospel from William Petrie, and they were among the first on Graemsay to accept it. Within two years, they would leave the island forever.

The Family Leaves Together — January 23, 1854

On January 23, 1854, the Johnston family left Graemsay together. Hugh Johnston was 53. His wife Cecelia Yorston was 55. Their daughter Margaret was 24. Their son James was 17. Their youngest son William was 14. They crossed the North Sea, made their way to Liverpool, and boarded the sailing ship John M. Wood — bound for America with nearly 400 Mormon converts from England, Denmark, France, and Italy.

Nine months of travel lay ahead of them. They would cross the Atlantic, travel overland to Missouri, outfit for the trail, and walk 1,300 miles across the American wilderness. None of them had ever left Orkney before.

The Crossing — What the Record Shows

We know this not just from family tradition — we know it because the original LDS emigration application book for the John M. Wood has survived, and the Johnston family is in it.src The Church History Library holds the passenger registry for this exact sailing. On page 41, in careful Victorian handwriting, you can read the entry: Hugh Johnston, occupation Fisherman, with his wife (age 55), Margaret (age 24), James (age 17), and William (age 14), listing Edinburgh as their address before Liverpool. The ages match perfectly — Cecelia Yorston would have been exactly 55 in March 1854, and James would not turn 18 until November. Hugh’s occupation as a fisherman is exactly what you’d expect of a man from the Orkney Islands.

One detail worth noting: the manifest records Hugh’s wife as “Annie” rather than Cecelia. Given that the ages and every other detail match, this is almost certainly the same woman — possibly a middle name, a nickname, or simply what the Liverpool clerk heard when a thick Orkney accent gave him an unfamiliar name. small open question

On the same page of the registry, listed immediately after the Johnston family, is Peter Sinclair — age 22, occupation Sailor. Their Graemsay neighbour was on the same page of the same book, sailing on the same ship. The document that proves your family crossed the Atlantic also proves they did not cross alone.

The family appears to have paid their own way — at the “£13 Company” fare, one tier above the famous “Ten Pound Company” used by poorer emigrants who relied on church assistance. For five passengers at roughly £13 each, Hugh Johnston would have paid around £65 total — a substantial sum, likely the savings of years of fishing off the Orkney coast. The Johnstons were not wealthy, but they were not destitute either. Hugh had provided for the crossing.

The crossing itself took seven weeks — March 12 to May 2, 1854. Diaries kept by fellow passengers describe what the family would have lived through. The first two weeks in the Irish Channel were brutal: violent storms, the ship blown nearly back to Liverpool, hundreds of passengers seasick for days. But Hugh Johnston — a fisherman who had spent his life in the waters around Orkney — would have known rougher seas than most of the English converts around him. While landlocked mill workers and miners suffered below decks, an Orkney fisherman may well have been one of the steadiest men on the ship.

Once past the Irish coast, the ship settled into the Atlantic. Passengers recorded a fire in the cooking galley (quickly put out), a woman dying of consumption in mid-ocean, a baby girl dying of inflammation of the chest, and — on April 19 in the Gulf of Mexico — the birth of twins to a Mrs. Poulter, which became a celebration for the whole ship. Six people died on the ocean crossing in all.

After landing in New Orleans on May 2nd, the company transferred to a Mississippi River steamboat for the journey north to St. Louis and Kansas City. Think about what Hugh Johnston saw standing on that deck. Six months earlier he had been mending fishing nets on Graemsay — an island of fewer than thirty people, ringed by the grey North Sea. Now he was on the mighty Mississippi, watching a continent roll past him: trees draped in Spanish moss, sugar and cotton plantations to the horizon, grand houses set back from the bank with the slave quarters visible behind them. It was a world so far from Orkney it might have been another planet.

But the beauty of the river masked its danger. The water was so silted that passengers poured alum into it just to make it drinkable, and the cholera that had shadowed the ocean crossing now struck in earnest — people eating breakfast in apparent good health and buried before nightfall. The company was quarantined on a sandbar island near St. Louis, digging graves in the sandy soil day after day. Hugh Johnston — who would himself be dead within four months, on a Wyoming riverbank — dug graves on that island, or stood by while others did. James, seventeen years old, stood beside him.

The William Empey Company — The Last of 1854

At Westport (Kansas City), Missouri, the outfitting point for the trail west, the Johnston family was placed in the William Empey Company — the eighth and last pioneer company of the 1854 season. Within the company, they were assigned to William Taylor’s Ten — a sub-group of roughly ten families who traveled, camped, and shared provisions together. Their tentmate was Peter Sinclair, a fellow convert from Graemsay.

On July 15, 1854, the company set out. Forty-three wagons. Three yoke of oxen each. Ahead of them: 1,300 miles of prairie, river crossings, desert, and mountain.

On August 15, the company met Apostle Erastus Snow heading east. Snow noted the company was in ‘excellent condition’ — but they still had a thousand miles to go.

The overland trail was a gauntlet. Pioneer companies crossed it through blazing summers and early mountain winters. People died along the way from cholera, exposure, exhaustion, and accidents. Families sometimes buried children in the morning and kept walking by noon.

James Johnston arrived in Salt Lake City on October 24, 1854, after 101 days on the trail. He was seventeen. His father was buried somewhere in the Wyoming desert behind him. But he was not alone — his mother Cecelia, his brother William, his sister Margaret, and her husband David Finlayson walked beside him. They had lost Hugh, but they had not lost each other.

The Journey — Full Timeline

• Jan 23, 1854 Johnston family departs Graemsay, Orkney Islands, Scotland
• ~March 1854 Cross the Atlantic on the ship John M. Wood (~400 Mormon converts aboard)
• ~June 1854 Arrive Kansas City (Westport), Missouri — the outfitting point
• July 15 Join the William Empey Company (43 wagons, 8th and last company of 1854). Placed in William Taylor’s Ten.
• Aug 4 Cross the Big Blue River, Nebraska
• Aug 15 Meet Apostle Erastus Snow heading east. Company in ‘excellent condition’ — 1,000 miles to go.
• Sep 1 Peter Sinclair’s journal records ‘four Johnstons together’ sharing tent provisions with him near the Wyoming crossing.
• ~Sep 22 Company reaches the Green River, Wyoming area. Hugh Johnston falls ill.
• Sep 29 9:30 PM — Hugh Johnston dies near Green River, Wyoming. Age 54. Buried the same day on the trail.
• Oct 24 Empey Company (43 wagons) arrives at Pioneer Square, Salt Lake City. Cecelia and children met by the Knowlton family.

Independence Rock — The Great Register of the Desert

Roughly midway through that journey, somewhere in the vast emptiness of central Wyoming, James Johnston’s company passed one of the most famous landmarks on the entire trail: Independence Rock.

Independence Rock is a massive granite dome rising 130 feet from the Wyoming plain beside the Sweetwater River — a whale-shaped monolith so large and so solitary that it was visible for miles in every direction across the treeless prairie. It became the great clock of the Oregon and Mormon trails. Pioneer wisdom held that if you reached Independence Rock by July 4th, you would make it over the Rocky Mountains before the winter snows closed the passes. If you arrived late, the mountains might kill you.

The pioneers called it the Great Register of the Desert. For thirty years, travelers had been carving their names into its red-granite face — mountain men, soldiers, missionaries, wagon trains. By the time James Johnston’s company passed by in the summer of 1854, thousands of names covered the rock. Father Pierre‑Jean De Smet, the famous Jesuit missionary, had noted the inscriptions in 1840 and marveled at the sheer number of human signatures already etched into the stone.

Maybe you will feel a fraction of the joy Lydia Allen Rudd felt on July 5, 1852:

It is entirely possible — even likely — that James Johnston, age seventeen, scratched his name into Independence Rock as he passed. Thousands of emigrants did. If he did, that inscription still exists somewhere on the granite face, weather-worn and faded, waiting to be found.

Peter Sinclair — The Neighbor from Graemsay

We know more about Hugh Johnston’s final weeks than almost any pioneer death, because a fellow traveler kept a detailed journal — and that traveler was not a stranger. Peter Sinclair was born February 27, 1832, in Hoy or Graemsay, Orkney Islands, Scotland. He was from the same tiny island as the Johnston family. He and Hugh Johnston were neighbors before they were trail companions. They sailed the Atlantic together, walked a thousand miles together, and shared a tent together.

On September 1, 1854 — less than four weeks before Hugh’s death — Sinclair made a journal entry that places the Johnston family directly beside him:

Hugh Johnston was alive on September 1. Twenty-eight days later, he was gone.

September 29, 1854 — Green River, Wyoming

Three hundred miles from Salt Lake City, somewhere in the high desert of what is now southwest Wyoming near the Green River, Hugh Johnston became ill. For seven days he weakened. There was no dramatic cause — no cholera, no accident. The record simply says ‘seven days slow but gradual and fated weakness, no other visible disease.’ He had crossed an ocean, walked a thousand miles, and his body had finally given out. He was 54 years old.

On September 29, 1854, at half past nine in the evening, Hugh Johnston died.

He was buried on the trail the same day. Cecelia Johnston later told her children: ‘they buried Hughie before he was cold.’

That letter — written sixteen months after Hugh’s death, to her son Hugh who had stayed in Wales — was found among Cecelia’s personal effects when she died in 1886. It was typed from the original around 1916. It is one of the only first-person accounts of any event in this entire family history.1

Cecelia Walks On

Cecelia Johnston, now a widow in the Wyoming wilderness, gathered her children — Margaret, James (17), and William (14) — and kept walking. Twenty-five days later, on October 24, 1854, the Empey Company arrived at Pioneer Square in Salt Lake City. Family members were waiting. Sidney Algernon Knowlton and his wife Margaret Slater Yorston Knowlton — Cecelia’s niece — met them and took the exhausted family into their home.

Cecelia Yorston Johnston survived. She eventually married Sidney Algernon Knowlton and lived to the remarkable age of 88, dying in Utah in 1886 — thirty-two years after her husband was buried in the Wyoming desert.

The Church Emigration Record says of those who died on the trail: ‘The resting place of many who started the trek across the plains will never be known to mortals until the trump of the Angel shall sound for the faithful to rise from their tombs, clothed in immortality.’ The record applies this directly to Hugh Johnston by name.2

Hugh Johnston — The Pioneer Who Died on the Trail

Where Hugh Johnston Rests — The Trail Math

Cecelia’s letter says Hugh died ‘300 miles from the Valley.’ Working backward from Salt Lake City along the Mormon Trail route — through Echo Canyon, past Fort Bridger, to the Green River crossing — 300 trail miles puts Hugh Johnston’s death right at the Green River. This perfectly matches the Gertrude Thompson family sketch preserved in the Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum, which says he died ‘near Green River, Wyoming.’3

Pioneers who died on the trail were buried where they fell — in shallow graves beside the wagon track, sometimes marked with a rock cairn or wooden marker that has long since disappeared. Hugh Johnston’s grave is almost certainly within a few miles of the Green River crossing, on the trail approaching or leaving the river.

How to Find the Trail

The drive from Salt Lake City to the Lombard Ferry site takes about three and a half hours on I-80. You pass through Echo Canyon — the same canyon the Empey Company descended in October 1854, twenty-five days after Hugh’s death. The landscape has not changed much in 170 years. The high desert, the sagebrush, the wide sky — it is still the Wyoming that Hugh Johnston saw in his last days.

His grave has no marker. But you can stand at the Green River crossing and know that somewhere very close to where you stand, a family from a Viking island in Scotland buried their father and kept walking toward a life they had never seen.

Building a Life in Utah

James Johnston settled in Salt Lake City. On September 1, 1862, at age 25, he married Bianca Jane Gibson — a Philadelphia-born woman who had also converted to the LDS faith and made her way west. Together they raised a large family. When Bianca passed away in 1916, her obituary named surviving children — Bishop Jacob Johnston, Mrs. Staker, Garfield, Cecilia, Gertrude Thompson of Logan, and Clarence — with records also revealing daughters Ellen, Mary, and Elspie, and another son named Stewart: a family of at least nine or ten children, built over decades in Salt Lake City.src Clarence Earl Johnston, born July 13, 1885, was among the youngest — and would become your grandfather, Jerry’s paternal grandfather.

In 1890, when James was 53 years old, he received one of the great honors of the LDS faith: a mission call. He was set apart by President Heber J. Grant and sent to Great Britain — the same British Isles his parents had left thirty-six years earlier. He spent over a year as a missionary before returning to Salt Lake City.

James Johnston died on September 25, 1903, at age 66. He is buried in the Salt Lake City Cemetery, alongside his wife Bianca, his son Clarence, Clarence’s wife Tessie, and his grandson John Paul Johnston — your father.

After his death, his estate required considerable legal attention — a sign he had accumulated meaningful assets over his lifetime. His wife Bianca filed for probate in Salt Lake County in January 1904. At the same time, several of his older children — Ellen, Mary, and Elspie Johnston — were involved in a separate court case in Weber County (Ogden) over real estate James had owned there. Having property spread across two counties was notable for the era, and likely reflects land rights accumulated through decades of pioneer-era settlement. A guardian was appointed for his two youngest children, Clarence and Stewart, so they could legally participate in the property transfers as minor heirs.src

Next: Chapter Five — The Name You Carry →

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