There were six children in the family when we left Scotland. My brother, Henry, was two or three years old and my youngest sister, Fannie, was but three months old when we left in the spring of 1855. A sister of my mother who had married an Irishman by the name of Gillouly had emigrated and settled in the state of Rhode Island. She had written to my mother that work was abundant and wages good in the woolen and cotton mills in that locality. I am not sure but that they loaned us some money to help emigrate with, which was promptly paid back after our getting settled at work in America. We took passage in the sailing ship Dreadnought, and we made a very [p.14] quick passage across the sea, being only twenty-eight days from Liverpool to New York, which was considered at that time a good quick passage. Of course, we were all in the steerage with several hundred other steerage passengers, mostly Irish. I have little recollection of the inconveniences that must have been experienced, except that a certain storm had been encountered which made the sea very rough, so much so that most of the people thought that we were going to the bottom and the cries and prayers and curses of those wild Irish people are still well remembered.

Landing at New York we took train for Providence, Rhode Island and from there, eight miles out in the country we located at my aunt's place of residence, a little village called Greenville, where my father, my two sisters and elder brother, James, soon got work in the woolen mills there. They made fair wages and every penny was scrupulously and frugally, almost stingily, taken care of and tolled out, that is, as much of it as had to be tolled out, to exist upon. There was no branch of the church in that neighborhood, none nearer than Boston, I think. For the five years we lived in Rhode Island we never attended a Latter-day Saint Church . We children attended services mostly at the Baptist Church and so I forgot all about Mormons and [p.15] Mormonism. I attended a little village school for a season or two which was practically all the schooling I ever had. At nine years of age I was at work in the woolen mill tending "bobbins" as they called it, some light work for a boy of my size and years. Our relatives in Rhode Island were Roman Catholics and we had little in common with them, although they were kindly disposed towards us.

We were all pretty steadily at work during those five years except in the panic of 1857, when most of the mills in that section were shut down for a part of the year.

By the spring of 1860 my ever thrifty and prudent mother must have had saved away some two or three thousand dollars. There was nothing but war talk in the United States that spring and lest my father and older brother should be drafted into the war which was just then beginning, it was thought that we had better pack up with what means we had and start for the west rather than wait longer to try and accumulate any more. Accordingly we auctioned off our belongings in the month of May, 1860, and started for the west. We first went to Boston where we joined a company of emigrating Saints, from Boston to Albany, New York, then up the Mohawk Valley over the present New York Central Railroad route to Buffalo, Niagara Falls and on the [p.16] Michigan Central Railroad through Canada and Detroit to Chicago. From Chicago we traveled by rail to Hannibal, thence onto St. Joseph on the Missouri River. That was the farthest west that any railroad had extended in 1860. At St. Joseph we took the boat up the river to a place called Florence which is six miles above Omaha.

Here we met large numbers of emigrating Saints congregating there and outfitting for the travel across the plains . . . . [p.17]

On Monday, September, September 3rd, we came out of the canyon and onto the bench near Fort Douglas, and I can very well remember with what joy and pleasure each one of the company, and even I, myself, looked upon the little growing city in the wilderness. We felt that all of our troubles and trials were practically at an end, when as a matter of fact, they had only just begun. For all the changing vicissitudes of pioneer life had to be undertaken and gone through with. Many things were difficult to learn and carry on.

We camped in the city on what was later the Eighth Ward Square, where the City and [p.22] County Building now stands. My parents had known and had ministered to many of the traveling Elders in the old country, and some of them like Robert L. Campbell, the father of Rob Campbell, came and hunted us up, took us to their homes, gave us food to eat, and looked after us as well as they could . . . . [p.23]

BIB: Nibley, Charles W., Reminiscences, Charles W. Nibley, 1849-
1931 (privately printed, 1934) pp. 14-17,22-23 (CHL)
(source abbreviations)