## Walking Two Thousand Miles
The journey from Winter Quarters to the Salt Lake Valley covered approximately 1,700 miles and took several months, the wagon train arriving in the Holladay-Cottonwood area of the Salt Lake Valley on October 10, 1848. For Biddy Mason, the journey was physical labor of a specific and demanding kind.
She walked. The wagon train was a convoy of hundreds of vehicles, and the enslaved people who traveled with it did not ride in the wagons as passengers except under unusual circumstances. The wagons were loaded with supplies, furniture, and the goods that families were transporting to their new homes. Biddy Mason walked at the rear of the caravan, herding the livestock that the Smith party was bringing west: cattle, sheep, and other animals that would become the foundation of their California farm.
Her duties on the trail went beyond herding. She set up and broke down camp. She cooked for the household, using buffalo chips for fuel in sections of the journey where wood was not available. She served as a midwife for other travelers on the route, assisting with births that occurred along the way. She cared for her three daughters, who ranged in age from an infant to roughly ten years old; her oldest daughter helped care for the younger ones.
The physical demands of this march, sustained over several months and covering terrain that included the high plains, river crossings, and eventual mountain approaches, were extreme. She was about thirty years old. She carried out skilled medical work in conditions far removed from anything that word “medical” might suggest to later readers. She did all of this without the legal status to refuse any part of it.