Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 19, Number 1-4, 1951

T H E JOURNAL O F H E I N R I C H L I E N H A R D July 26-September 8, 1846 INTRODUCTION J_ J_AVING followed the Bryant-Russell party the whole length of the Hastings Cutoff and seen them through to the relative security of the Humboldt Valley, we must return to Fort Bridger and take up the fortunes of the immigrants to whom Edwin Bryant said his farewell on the morning of July 20, 1846. The HarlanYoung company, with their wagons, are distinguished in having made the Hastings Cutoff a traveled road, and it was their example, when all is said, that induced the Donner party to enter so blithely upon the new route.

According to the story his nephew tells, George Harlan had probably known Hastings in Michigan in 1844, presumably having met him after Hastings' return from his visit to the Pacific. When, a year later, a copy of the Emigrants' Guide came into Harlan's hands, he concluded to sell his farm and migrate to California.

The Harlans set out for the frontier in October, 1845, their party consisting at first of 14 persons—Harlan himself, his wife, his mother-in-law, then 90 years of age and blind, his two married daughters and their husbands, Ira and John Van Gordan, two younger children, two nephews, G. W . and Jacob W . Harlan, two nieces, Sarah and Malinda Harlan, and "some others." They were joined along the way by a Mr. Clark, and by spring had reached Westport, near Independence, prepared to begin the long journey. 1 In Missouri the Harlan company was further enlarged to include Peter L. Wimmer and his family. Wimmer had married Harlan's daughter, Polly, and although he remarried after her death, taking the widow Elizabeth Jane (Cloud) Bays as his wife, he remained on cordial terms with his father-in-law. The addition of the Wimmers and their 5 children to the Harlan party is the more interesting in that they are said to have been Mormon converts, and thus were among the small number of Saints privileged "Jacob Wright Harlan, California '46 to '88, pp. 20-28. The Mr. Clark mentioned is perhaps the same Clark in whose presence J. Quinn Thornton interviewed the survivors of the Donner party at San Francisco in the fall of 1847.