James and Marie Davidson

Peter Reid and Diana Davidson are my Great-Grandma Barlow's grandparents. Diana's parents, James and Marie Davidson, were expert weavers in Scotland. A little more than ten years after Diana came to America, the Davidsons decided to come across the ocean and settle with the Saints in the Salt Lake Valley. With their expert weaving skills, they quickly found work at the woolen mills at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon. Unfortunately, tragedy struck the Davidson family only a couple of years later.

James and Marie Davidson and their twelve year-old son, Joseph, left Salt Lake and went down to the southwest area of the Territory (currently Nevada) to visit their married daughter, Maggie, and possibly settle there themselves. After the visit, they mounted their horse-driven wagon and started back on the 60 mile trail to St. George. Along the way, their wagon wheel broke and they were quickly getting short on water in the deadly June heat. Possibly knowing they would all not make it with the little water they had left, James and Diana sent their 12 year-old son on horseback with the canteen to fetch some water at the well-known watering well along the trail which was several miles away.

During the night on June 12, 1969, three men were at the watering well when a famished horse came straggling into the camp. One of them back-tracked the horse's trail and found the young boy's body only a scant ½ mile away from the well, so swollen and distorted from the heat that recognition was impossible. The empty canteen by his side bore eloquent testimony as to the cause of his death. Four days later, fearing what they would find, they found the bodies of the boy's parents, lying side by side under a blanket propped up against a desert palm for shade against the deadly summer heat.

This tragic story of Grandma Barlow's great-grandparents was written in the 1915 church magazine, "The Improvement Era". It is also recorded in the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Lessons. All three were buried there in the Nevada desert, and there is now a marble and rock gravesite set up for them there. There is a lot more to this story. You can read about it from these sources:

https://books.google.com/books?id=H3AwAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA513&lpg=PA513&dq=James+Davidson+Nevada+desert&source=bl&ots=MgFVfIHJtq&sig=XEiFORvOVso9Ypg2ejEcanFZTC4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uF6pVIDLFoiuyQStmYCYAw&ved=0CD4Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=James%20Davidson%20Nevada%20desert&f=false

https://dcms.lds.org/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE3197126

http://www.utahsdixie.info/hs/y02-davidson.html