Louisa Eliza Sheen

England and the conversion

Louisa Eliza Sheen was born in 1850 in Gloucestershire, England, the daughter of Robert Sheen and Eliza Taylor. The family lived in the western counties during a decade of intense LDS missionary activity across the British Isles. Between 1837 and 1870, more than fifty thousand British converts would emigrate to the American West. The Sheens were part of this tide. Robert and Eliza heard the message, believed it, and made the decision that would define the rest of their children's lives: they would gather to Zion.

In 1856, the family sailed from Liverpool aboard the ship Enoch Train, a packet vessel that carried a company of Latter-day Saints across the Atlantic. Edmund Ellsworth, an experienced missionary and future militia commander, captained the emigrant company. The Sheens traveled with their young daughters, including six-year-old Louisa and her sister Emma. The crossing took roughly six weeks. They landed in Boston on May 1, 1856, then traveled overland to Iowa City, the staging ground for the journey west.

The name Edmund Ellsworth would surface again in the Goodman family story eighty years later. Ellsworth's son Louis became one of Arizona's largest ostrich farmers and cotton producers. Louis's son Earl Ellsworth married Leona Dana in 1921, and their daughter Earlene Ellsworth married into the Goodman line. The captain who led Louisa Sheen across the plains was the great-grandfather of the woman who would marry Louisa's great-grandson. Two family lines, converging across a continent and nearly a century, rooted in the same 1856 company.

The first handcart company (1856)

The Edmund Ellsworth Company was the first organized handcart company in LDS history. It departed Iowa City on June 9, 1856, with 274 people, 56 handcarts, and three ox-drawn wagons, plus a single four-horse team. Each person was allotted seventeen pounds of baggage. That weight had to cover clothing, bedding, and cooking utensils. Twenty people shared a tent. Four handcarts served each tent.

The route ran from Iowa City across the prairies of Iowa, then along the Platte River through Nebraska Territory, over the Continental Divide at South Pass, and down into the Salt Lake Valley. The company covered as many as twenty-eight miles in a single day, on foot, pulling their possessions behind them. They waded streams. They crossed high mountain passes. They cooked with water dug from buffalo wallows and burned buffalo chips for fuel. On the Platte, one of the oxen died, and Ellsworth asked the brethren what could be done. A steer appeared on a nearby hill, seemingly from nowhere. Ellsworth said the Lord had sent it. They yoked the animal and moved on.

Louisa was six years old during this crossing. She pulled alongside her parents, or rode when she could, through country that offered no shelter and no margin for weakness. Somewhere on the plains, her sister Emma Sheen died. The company buried Emma in an unmarked grave along the trail. There was no time to linger. The handcarts kept moving west.

On September 26, 1856, the company entered Emigration Canyon. A brass band, the First Presidency, and hundreds of Salt Lake residents met them on horseback, in carriages, and on foot. They had walked the entire distance from Iowa City, roughly 1,400 miles. Louisa had crossed an ocean and a continent before her seventh birthday.

St. David and marriage

The Sheen family settled in Utah after the crossing. By the 1870s, Louisa had moved south to the San Pedro River Valley in Arizona Territory, part of the same LDS colonization wave that brought William Nicholas Goodman and Margaret Ann Taylor to St. David. The settlement sat along the San Pedro River in Cochise County, surrounded by mesquite and creosote, with the Dragoon Mountains rising to the east. It was dry, remote, and exposed. Tombstone, the silver boomtown, lay fifteen miles to the southwest. Geronimo's final campaign would pass through this stretch of desert in 1886.

Louisa married Heber Curtis Reed (1847-1902) in St. David. Heber was a freighter who hauled goods into southern Arizona and across the border into Mexico. George Edward Goodman, still a young man, would later drive freight teams for Heber C. Reed on those same routes. The two families were neighbors, co-religionists, and economic partners in the small world of territorial St. David.

Motherhood and the Reed family

Louisa and Heber raised five children in St. David. Their fifth child, Roxanna Othelia Reed, was born on November 2, 1875. Daily life in St. David meant gardening in alkaline soil, drawing water from wells or the river, canning fruit against the long summers, and attending church in an adobe meetinghouse. Women wove, spun, made soap, gathered mesquite beans for animal feed, and doctored their families with whatever herbs grew locally. The nearest proper town was Tombstone, and it was a hard ride away.

Heber Curtis Reed died in 1902. Louisa was fifty-two years old. She had already survived an Atlantic crossing, a sister's death on the plains, and decades of frontier life in one of Arizona's most isolated corners. She carried on in St. David as a widow, surrounded by the same network of LDS families that had sustained her since the 1870s.

Later years and death

On February 13, 1893, Louisa's daughter Roxanna married George Edward Goodman at the Reed family home in St. David. The two families, neighbors for over a decade, were now bound by marriage. George Edward was the son of the carpenter William Nicholas Goodman and the storekeeper Margaret Ann Taylor. Roxanna was the daughter of the handcart girl from Gloucestershire.

Louisa Eliza Sheen died in 1919 at the age of sixty-nine. She had lived long enough to see Roxanna raise a family, long enough to hold grandchildren, long enough to watch the territory become a state in 1912. She did not live to see her grandson George Nicholas Goodman open Apache Drug on Mesa's Main Street or become the city's five-term mayor. She could not have imagined that the Ellsworth line, descended from the very captain who led her across the plains, would one day marry into the same family her daughter had joined.

The handcart crossing flowed downstream through the generations. Thelma Goodman Malloy, Roxanna's youngest daughter, recorded the story in her 1975 life sketch, preserving Louisa's journey and Emma's death as founding events of the family narrative. The six-year-old girl who walked from Iowa City to the Salt Lake Valley became the origin point of a story that would reach across a century and a continent.