Partner Luke Carter
Queer Places:
Fort Kearney, 1020 V Rd, Kearney, NE 68845
Charles Edmonds (October 17, 1799 - September 13, 1856) sailed to America in 1856 on the ship Horizon. His death date is confirmed by the Binder journal. He was part of the Edward Martin Company (1856).
Josiah Rogerson, who had been a young man in the disastrous Martin Handcart Company of Mormon pioneers, wrote the following account of his experience crossing the plains to Utah pushing a handcart on foot:
Charles Edmonds Dies.
About 10:30 this morning we passed
Fort Kearney, and as one of the most singular deaths occurred on our journey
at this time, I will give a brief and truthful narration of the incident. Two
bachelors named Luke Carter, from
the Clitheroe branch [of the church], Yorkshire, England, and Charles Edmonds
from Manchester, England, each about 50 to 55 years of age, had pulled a
covered cart together from Iowa City, Ia., to this point. They slept in the
same tent, cooked and bunked together; but for several days previous
unpleasant and cross words had passed between them. Edmonds was a tall,
loosely built and tender man physically, and Carter more stocky and sturdy. He
had favored Edmonds by letting the latter pull only what he could in the
shafts for some time. This morning he grumbled and complained, still
traveling, about being tired, and that he couldn’t go any further. Carter
retorted: “Come on. Come on. You’ll be all right again when we get a bit of
dinner at noon.” But Edmonds kept begging for him to stop the cart and let him
lie down and die, Carter replying, “Well, get out and die, then.”
The cart was instantly stopped. Carter raised the shafts of the cart. Edmonds walked from under and to the south of the road a couple of rods, laid his body down on the level prairie, and in ten minutes he was a corpse. We waited (a few carts of us) a few minutes longer till the captain came up and closed Edmonds’s eyes. A light-loaded open cart was unloaded. The body was put thereon, covered with a quilt, and the writer [Rogerson] pulled him to the noon camp, some five or six miles, where we dug his grave and buried him a short distance west of Fort Kearney, Neb.
Charles Edmonds died 13 September 1856 near Ft. Kearney, Nebraska. Luke Carter died in November 1856 in Wyoming.
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