AS WAGONS trundled to a halt and weary travellers prepared for another night under the vast skies of Wyoming, Mary Ann Dunkerley must have felt a long way from the mill towns of her native Lancashire. Among the thousands of Mormons who made the epic journey west in the middle of the 19th century, Mary and her husband John Gregory walked over 1,300 miles before they arrived in Utah in 1852. A year later, they moved on to settle in California.
Following in the footsteps of some of the first pioneers to explore America’s frontier, Mary’s intrepid spirit helped her survive one of the most gruelling and iconic journeys in American history.
“One feels an immense respect for the effort they put in to achieve a better life,” says Philip Dunkerley, Mary’s great great nephew. “There is a huge amount of romance in the idea of the wagon trains rolling west, the wilderness and the Indians. Through the story of my great great grandfather’s sister, I have been able, in some small way, to better understand those historic journeys.”
One of ten children, Mary was brought up in Oldham, where she began work in the local cotton mill at the age of nine. She married John Gregory, a coal miner, in November 1844, by which time they had both converted to Mormonism. “They probably felt they were getting a raw deal in England,” says Philip. “The free passage offered by the Mormons gave them, like many other working-class people, the hope of a better future.”
Philip first came across Mary in the 1841 census. She then disappeared from the records and her life was a mystery until he was contacted by a direct descendant in America. “It was brilliant to see the story unfold,” says Philip. “I was sent scans of letters from the 1920s including recollections from Mary and John’s children about their parents and the journeys they had made.”
Just six weeks after their marriage, in January 1845, Mary and John set off from Liverpool on the Palmyra, which narrowly avoided disaster in a storm in the English Channel before arriving in New Orleans 53 days later. Philip has found a description of the passage from a girl who sailed on the very same ship. The correspondent described how, “wave dashed on wave, and storm on storm, every hour increasing; all unsecured boxes, tins, bottles, pans,... danced in wild confusion, cracking, clashing, jumbling, rolling.., thus we continued for eight days — no fires made — nothing cooked — biscuits and cold water.”
Mary and John arrived just as the Mormon capital at Nauvoo, Illinois, was being abandoned after resentment of the settlers had turned violent. Faced with persecution, Mormon leaders decided to establish a new settlement in the West.