Pioneer: 2010 Vol.57 No.2

Pony Express.” 1 Thus begins a
brief account, written by Thomas
Owen King, Jr., a Pony Express
rider in Utah in 1860. Although
short and sketchy King’s remembrances
are rich history since few
riders wrote personal accounts
and few records were kept by the
Pony Express Company. The little
information that exists comes primarily
from newspapers and magazines
written in 1860 or 1861. 2
T. O. King, Jr., joined the
Pony Express when he was barely
twenty years old. It was not his
first experience with the rigors of
“cowboy life” although his early
life made him an unlikely candidate
for such adventurous occupations.
T.O. was born five miles
from Cambridge, England in the
village of Sawston, on April 27,
1840. His granddaughter explained
that prior to emigrating to
Utah his father, Thomas Owen
King, had “high hopes for his only
son, a young boy of eleven, to inherit
the estate from him, to acquire a private school education,
and go on to graduation from Cambridge.” 3
However, his mother, Hannah Tapfield King, joined
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after hearing
the missionary message from her dressmaker, Lois
Bailey, and was baptized in 1850. Hannah hoped to emigrate
and join Church members in Utah but there was
little hope of doing so until one day the Mormon missionaries
administered to Thomas King after his physician
could not stop a bout of nasal hemorrhaging and
feared he would bleed to death. True to a promise, that if
the missionaries healed him he would move to Utah,
Thomas sold his ancestral estate and the family traveled
to the United States to join the Saints in the West.
It was a challenging transition for the family and they
apparently were not careful in managing the money
Hannah Tapfield King was an educated
and cultured woman, a
champion of women’s self improvement,
a woman of unwavering devotion to her
religion, and a competent successful poet.
In Utah, Hannah was quick to win
the friendship of Eliza R. Snow, Zina D.
Young and other leading women.
Hannah had published two small books of
her poetry while still in England, as well
as some material in the Millennial Star.
Her artistic and literary temperament became
widely known and admired.
earned from the sale of their
estate. In England they were respected
members of the gentry
with position, prestige and a full
household staff to attend to their
needs while in Utah the family
found itself in reduced circumstances,
surprised at the austere
frontier conditions. When they
arrived in Salt Lake City, “The
people were all about as rich as
one another—no body having
very much and a stove a curiosity.
. . . The people traded with each
other what they had for what they
needed. Tallow candles were as
good as gold for a ticket to the
Ball.” 4 The terrain, the city, new
customs and primitive circumstances—compared
to their life in
England and the comforts it afforded—made
the transition difficult
for Thomas Owen and his
wife Hannah, although she never
regretted her decision to join with
fellow Saints in Utah.
T.O. King, Jr., however, seems
to have settled comfortably into pioneer life and became
“known as a good ‘cowboy’ in his youth.” 5 He quickly realized
the need to help the family as well as fend for himself.
In later reminiscences he described some of the ways
he earned a livelihood as a young man. At age fifteen, “In
1855 I went to Carson Valley as a guard to Judge [Orson]
Hyde.” 6 In the fall of that year, “I went to Humboldt Well
to arrest Alfred Harvo accused of murder. Fall of 1856
[and 1857] I went on a Gov. Surveying Expedition under
Chas. Morgan [of Sevier and Sanpete Valleys]. . . . In May
of the same year I joined Young’s Express Co. Just before
spring broke in 1858 [I] was called out with a large company
to follow Indians west that had run off a lot of
horses.” 7 The group eventually lost the trail in a blinding
snow storm and returned empty handed. Before age
twenty, T. O. was an Indian War Veteran and during the
—Ardis E. Parshall, Utah historian
Hannah Tapfield King
26
PIONEER ◆ Vol. 57, No.2 ◆ 2010
Hannah Tapfield King photo courtesy Utah State Historical Society.