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Guardian Angels of West: Three Nephites Tales
| Article
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20552 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1992 |
4,527 Words |
| Author
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Carylon Campbell
Carolyn Campbell is a free-lance writer living in Salt Lake
City, Utah. |
In December 1895, a party of Mormon pioneers made a pilgrimage from a settlement in Mexico to St. George, Utah. The trip across the frozen winterlands was arduous and slow. Thirst and hunger plagued the people. With nothing but bleak, icy plains in sight, the men, women, and children in the traveling party pushed onward, longing to reach a desert watering place they had heard lay ahead. But when they discovered the site, their hopes were dashed still further--there was only enough water to fill one five-gallon keg and a bucket for the horses.
Despite having traveled during the cold of winter, every member of the group felt near death from thirst. A baby was racked with convulsions from dehydration. At the height of their anguish, a man suddenly appeared ahead of them on the path. He greeted them, and when they asked where they might find water, he pointed out a small patch of green on the mountain. "If you will camp near there," he said, "you will find enough water to supply all of your needs, until you reach the next spring, which is forty miles away."
The pioneers advised the stranger not to head in the direction they had come, for there was no water that way. He seemed unconcerned, walked past one wagon, then disappeared before reaching the second. "He's gone!" one man exclaimed. "He was one of the Three Nephites!"
In a similar story told in recent times, the owner of an A & W Restaurant near the Brigham Young University campus in Provo, Utah, was working in the drive-in one summer afternoon when a bearded old man approached him and asked for something to eat. Nothing that the old man seemed to be both hungry and poor, the owner offered him an ice-cream cone. After finishing the treat, the old man said, "You'll always have all that you need if you share what you have and live righteously."
The owner turned away to comment to one of his employees, and when he turned back, he saw that the man had disappeared. Rushing out of the store toward the street, he searched for but could not find the stranger. Looking in very direction, he realized there was no way for the man to vanish so quickly from the open space that surrounded the freestanding drive-in. He concluded that his visitor was one of the Three Nephites.
For more than a century, hundreds of stories of the Three Nephites have been told in settings ranging from solemn religious assemblies to late-night campfires to root beer restaurants. In localities in Utah, Idaho, and
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