Alan Wills, of Windermere, recalls a Shap woman's dangerous journey to Utah in 1852

THE Mormons' establishment of a sugar beet factory in Utah was possible due to the turbulent journey undertaken by a Shap-born woman and her fellow converts when they transported the tons of necessary machinery all the way from Liverpool.

Mary Langhorn was born at Shap in 1798, the daughter of John and Eleanor Taylor.

Eleanor's sister, Agnes, would give birth in 1808 at Hale, Milnthorpe, to John Taylor, future president of the Mormon church.

Mary moved in her youth with her widowed mother to Lancaster where Mary married ship's carpenter, William Nuttall. After moving to Liverpool the family was converted by her cousin John Taylor, who was by then a Mormon missionary.

At the behest of Brigham Young he bought a lot of sugar beet processing machinery which went with the Nuttalls and at least thirty other Mormons when they sailed from Liverpool in 1852.

After arriving at New Orleans the group and the machinery went up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the journey to be completed in fifty oxen-drawn wagons.

After ten or twelve miles the wagons either broke down or fell to pieces, so Philip de la Mare, the wagon train's leader, bought forty superior wagons on credit. Each one carried 5,000-9,000 lbs of machinery.

The party soon discovered that their four was inedible due to contamination by worms and Plaster of Paris. With provisions getting alarmingly low they were able to shoot three bisons and dry their meat.

A Welsh convert, Elias Morris, wrote in his diary: 'The day we crossed the Rocky Ridge, we camped on Wilow Creek, near the last crossing of Sweet Water.

We came to camp about 9pm at night. It was very dark and stormy and there were but very little provisions in camp. As soon as the cattle were fed and unyoked, all hands turned to bed tired, cold and hungry.

The morning was no better. A deep snow was on the ground, and still falling, so that we could not kindle fire until noon. The storm ceased. We turned out a search of the cattle. Before going a quarter of a mile from camp we found ten of them dead - about eighty of them had gone astray'.

Although many of the oxen were eventually rounded up some of them had to be shot for food. Fortunately John Taylor, who had gone ahead to Utah, sent them supplies to Wyoming where they were also able to buy fresh cattle from two trappers. Further supplies awaited them further on.

The snow in The Rockies was so deep that the heaviest items of machinery had to be left by the wayside to await collection the following spring which did indeed happen.

Although most of the emigrants stopped in Salt Lake City, the Nuttalls and the machinery continued and arrived eight months after leaving Liverpool in what passed for the town of Provo, where William and Mary farmed and William probably worked as a carpenter.

After he died Mary lived with her son, William Ephraim, in Wallsburg, until she died in 1880.

Another son, Leonard John and his family were the first settlers at Spring Lake, where they made the acquaintance of Black Hawk and his bank of Utes, who could be either friendly or menacing.

When Leonard was returning from Provo one day he came across Black Hawk and friends who announced that they had just been to his farmstead and wiped everybody out. Then they rode away laughing. Leonard dashed home to discover that the Utes were only kidding.