Featured on my Facebook page, and posted here for archiving.

We have opened our definition of “pioneer” in this generation to embrace the first of any kind: The first to accept the gospel in time, or from a place, or in our personal ancestry, or from some social condition or occupation or type: We welcome them all. As Neal A. Maxwell once said, “If with quiet heroism they can make their way across the border into belief, surely we can cross a crowded foyer to extend the hand of fellowship.”

One pioneer was Mary Ann McNiece Clayburn (1840-1915) – who has been difficult to research because her name has been spelled so many ways – Cla(i)(y)b(o)(u)rn(e), or even as “Clibburn.” She was a pioneer Mormon of Ireland, who decided to bring her 5 surviving (of 12) children to Utah in 1889. Was she a widow by then, or separated from her husband? When and where and why had she joined the Church? I don’t know.

I first see her and her children boarding the s.s. Wisconsin on August 31, 1889, at Queenstown, Ireland, the last tip of land before the ship sailed into the broad Atlantic Ocean. Her two teenage sons were assigned to quarters in the “fore steerage” while Mary Ann and her two daughters and small son were assigned to “port aft.” They joined more than 150 other Mormon emigrants and returning missionaries (the number varies by account), who landed at New York on September 11.

The Mormon agent stationed in New York put them aboard a coastal steamer that took the immigrants to Norfolk, Virginia, from which place the agent had negotiated railroad transportation to Utah. About 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, September 14, their train pulled out of Norfolk. It was a chartered train, running about 20 minutes ahead of the regularly scheduled train, and consisted of an engine and its tender, followed by a baggage car, followed by three passenger cars.

It was raining when they left, and continued to rain all afternoon and into the night. In the darkness, the engineer did not see that a flooding creek had undermined a bridge. The engine shot across the chasm and wrecked on the far side of the creek. The baggage car carrying the emigrants’ luggage almost reached the far side, but smashed, with the destruction of belongings. Two passenger cars plunged 30 feet into the water below, with passengers, seats, heating stoves, and other wreckage landing atop each other in the waist deep creek. Missionaries from the third passenger car, which derailed but did not wreck, scrambled down the bank, fearing the worst when they at first heard no sound of human voices in the wreckage.

Mary Ann Clayburn, inside the wreck, recalled:

“I was awake … when the car went over, but most of the party were asleep. I was thrown about ten feet on top of a dozen people, and it was several minutes before any of us realized what had happened. Water was running into the car, and we all thought that we had been plunged into a river, and expected every minute to be our last. Not a word was spoken, and the only whisper I heard was from a poor woman near me who murmured, ‘My babies! May God take care of my babies!’ It seemed an age after the accident occurred to when Elder Payne called out to us, and then the silence was broken, and oh, how glad we were to say that we were alive.”

There were serious injuries and broken bones, but no loss of life. The next day, the passengers bravely boarded the train that had been sent to their rescue, along with what baggage had been salvaged, and they continued on their way. As they neared Memphis, Tennessee, the unimaginable happened: Their train was struck from behind by another train, derailing their last passenger car. The passengers were badly rattled, but able to continue when another car was brought up to them from Memphis.

Mary Ann and her children set up housekeeping a few blocks from Temple Square. Most of the children eventually married, with some moving on to California; Mary Ann continued living with her oldest son, William, who did not marry but supported Mary Ann the rest of her life.

If Mary Ann and her fellow passengers were brave when they boarded their second train, I can’t imagine the courage it took to board the third. Surely they were pioneers as much as any who walked beside an ox-drawn wagon, or any who pulled a handcart.