(Picture titled “As Sisters in Zion” by William Whitaker of Julia and Emily Hill.)
When Emily Hill was 12 years old, she became interested in the Church, but her parents were very opposed to her interest. She was finally baptized when she was 16, along with her 19-year-old sister, Julia. Four years later, Emily and Julia left England to gather with the Saints. After reaching America, they traveled to Iowa City and started west with the Willie handcart company. Although the journey seemed daunting, Emily steeled herself for it. “I made up my mind to pull a handcart,” she wrote later. “A foot journey from Iowa to Utah, and pull our luggage, think of it!” Julia was unable to walk for part of the way and had to be carried in a handcart.
Emily became a poet of some accomplishment and left a record of her handcart journey in a poem she wrote in 1881 titled “Hunger and Cold.” The poem described the Sixth Crossing camp, when the last of the company’s rations had “utterly vanished”:
Not a morsel to eat could we anywhere see, Cold, weary and hungry and helpless were we.
The surroundings were “desolate,” with nothing in view but “snow covered ground.” She wrote that the company could just as well have been adrift in the middle of the ocean, “shut off from the world” as they were. Nevertheless, they maintained hope and trusted in God:
On the brink of the tomb few succumbed to despair. Our trust was in God, and our strength was in prayer.
When the rescuers arrived, Emily remembered hearing their shouts and cheers as they entered the camp:
Oh, whence came those shouts in the still, starry night, That thrilled us and filled us with hope and delight?
The “Boys from the Valley” were their “saviors,” and the camp cheered them loud and long. These rescuers had soft hearts and courage “like steel” to leave their homes and undertake such a difficult task. “They rushed to our rescue, what more could they do?” Emily asked. When the rescuers saw the condition of the people, they wept “like children.” They quickly started cooking fires and preparing “nourishing food.” Emily never forgot the selfless sacrifice of these men:
God bless them for heroes, the tender and bold, Who rescued our remnant from hunger and cold.
Years later, Emily said that she never would have reached the “city of the Saints” had it not been for the “compassionate people of Utah,” who donated food and clothing, and for the rescuers, who sacrificed so much to help them.
During her life in Utah, Emily had 10 children and became a prolific poet. She wrote the words to the hymn “As Sisters in Zion.”