Son of William Dobson and Alice Pickup
Married Catherine Baty, 15 December 1866, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah
Children - None. They raised adopted children, Addie Quigley and Henry Wolfensberger.
Thomas Dobson and his wife, Katherine Beatty, had no children. In 1881, a friend, Andrew Quigley, was dying of the effects of a wound he had received at the hands of the Indians while proselyting in the Salmon Mission. He brought his daughter, He brought his daughter, Addie Quigley, to Dobson and asked him to care for her. Dobson also adopted a boy who was called Henry Wolfensberger. Thomas was known as a devoted and caring father.
Thomas Dobson adopted the boy Johan Henry Wolfensberger. Henry and his brother Carl were sent ahead of the family from Switzerland to Utah to live with their Aunt Louisa Amanda Lehman. She was the third wife of Edmund Schoenhals, a polygamist. When polygamy became against the law Louisa's marriage was dissolved. She had no means of support for herself or her two little nephews. Carl was adopted by the Guss Backman family. Aunt Louise later married Philip Kloepfer.
Officer Once Danced Frostbite Away
The Deseret News - December 24, 1996
by Twila Van Laer, Deseret News Staff writer
It was a much earlier Christmas Eve than this when Thomas Dobson had one of his many great adventures as a law officer in Salt Lake City. It was a Christmas Eve in the late 1880s and Dobson, pounding his beat as the city's official night watchman, noticed two men breaking into the safe in the Madam Button's Millinery Shop.
He cut through the saloon next door, where he found two of the city's finest, whom he sent to guard shop while he quietly slipped through the shop's back door.
Confronting the two thieves, he shouted, "Through up your hands, boys," and kept them covered while the policeman made the arrest.
Dobson's feet had talent, it seems for carrying him into such escapades. Ironically, he had almost lost those feet in 1856, when he plodded barefoot in the snow behind a handcart in the Martin pioneer company. He was 19 when he and his mother and a brother and sister set out with the company to join the body of pioneers gathering in Salt Lake Valley.
When his shoes wore out, young Thomas continued behind the handcart, in his bare feet. When relieve supplies reached the company from Salt Lake City, there were no shoes that would fit his frostbitten feet so he struggled on without any. Along the Sweetwater River the group met Eph Hanks, a frontiersman who looked at Thomas' feet and vowed that the next pair of shoes that happened along would be his.
But when the Martin Company, decimated by the early snows and the difficult terrain, pulled into Fort Bridger, none of the available shoes would slip over his swollen and battered toes. It looked as if he would lose the digits, if not both feet. Hanks wrapped his feet in cotton and suggest what would have seem an unlikely cure. If Dobson would stand up and sing the handcart son, his toes would be saved, the frontiersman told Dobson.
In a reunion of the handcart pioneers in 1907, Dobson recounted what happened next. During the night, he awoke to the sound of fiddle music. The trail-weary Saints were dancing to keep from freezing and to brighten their sagging spirits.
"I hobbled out to the fire and stood there listening to the music," he recalled. One of the brethren invited him to "get up there and give a jig."
"Now, I come from Lancashire (England), and maybe you know what that place is for dancing. I'd known how to clog dance ever since I could remember, and when that man told me to dance, I got out there and danced as I never had before. That was the last of my lame feet," he told the gathering of pioneers.
Dobson's adventures didn't end with his safe arrival in Salt Lake Valley. Beginning in 1900, he first drove a six-mule team carrying supplies to mail express and stage stations. Then when a Pony Express rider became ill he took over the man's route between Ruby Valley and Deep Creek. He once carried the mail for 237 miles without any significant break, including one 60-mule [mile] stretch on one horse.
During the summer of 1860, American Indians were harassing the pony riders, according to an account by Addie Quigley Williams, She recorded that a confrontation between soldiers and Indians near Egan Canyon had stirred up rancor. Dobson and another rider, James Cumbo, just happened to be the next while men passing through the area. The Indians pursued them, firing arrows, for 20 miles. Only the arrival of dusk saved the riders. The men later reported the arrows came so close they could feel the breeze they created.
Dobson served as captain of Company 4 in the Utah Militia but never received an official commission because of the actions of the acting governor of the territory, a non-Mormon. During the Indian uprisings in Sanpete County, he led his company into the area and succeeded in heading off several bands of raiding Indians.
Dobson's encounters with Indians continue when he was transferred to the stage line on the road between Salt Lake City and Pacific Sprngs, near South Pass, Wyo. Then he undertook a job driving a mule team back and forth to Los Angeles, a perilous route that tried the best of drivers. One trip convinced him it was no way to make a living. In 1879, the Salt Lake Herald praised him for his bravery and devotion to duty. He earned the sobriquest "Mormon Messenger" and a reputation for being the best in the business.
His feet, however, were due to take another beating. As Salt Lake's night watchman, he walked an estimated 21,353 miles in his repeated circuits of the area between Main and Commercial Streets and along 100 South over more than 30 years.
One night he witnessed an altercation in a saloon between "Dutch John" and a man named Wiggin. Wiggin left the saloon just as Dobson passed by in his accustomed rounds, and they walked together until they caught up with the drunk Dutch John sitting on a carraige stoop. Wiggin asked the officer to wait a minute, then took and gun and shot Dutch John through the heart. Dobson made an immediate arrest.
On another occasion, he came upon three hobos robbing a man in the alley between Maine and Commercial. When he ran to help the victim, there was a scuffle and the brigands escaped. Yet again, he was walking the best when a man called "Stop, thief." When Dobson took out after the escaping man, he raised his pistol and fired it so near the officer's face that he had powder burns on his cheek. Persisting, Dobson grappled desperately with the man and they rolled into an open water main ditch under excavation. A patrolman who had heard the ruckus, including the pistol shot, hurried up and made the arrest.
Even politics could prove dangerous to the man on the beat. In a conversation with a Republican (Dobson became a Democrat) the exchange became so heated that the night watchman sent for a police wagon to take the hapless Democrat into custody.
Dobson was on the committee for handcart reunions for four years in the early 1900's and was always welcomed for his wit, humor and energy-and for his dancing.
On August 20, 1894, a news account of the annual gathering at Saltair noted the he had danced "The Fisher's Hornpipe," the same dance he had performed on the tailgate of a wagon in 1856 in the cold and dark of the Wyoming night.
Dobson's story is retold in as an issue of the History Blazer, a publication of the Utah State Historical Society.
Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel, Edward Martin Company (1856, Approximate age at departure: 19
Married Catherine Baty, 15 December 1866, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah
Children - None. They raised adopted children, Addie Quigley and Henry Wolfensberger.
Thomas Dobson and his wife, Katherine Beatty, had no children. In 1881, a friend, Andrew Quigley, was dying of the effects of a wound he had received at the hands of the Indians while proselyting in the Salmon Mission. He brought his daughter, He brought his daughter, Addie Quigley, to Dobson and asked him to care for her. Dobson also adopted a boy who was called Henry Wolfensberger. Thomas was known as a devoted and caring father.
Thomas Dobson adopted the boy Johan Henry Wolfensberger. Henry and his brother Carl were sent ahead of the family from Switzerland to Utah to live with their Aunt Louisa Amanda Lehman. She was the third wife of Edmund Schoenhals, a polygamist. When polygamy became against the law Louisa's marriage was dissolved. She had no means of support for herself or her two little nephews. Carl was adopted by the Guss Backman family. Aunt Louise later married Philip Kloepfer.
Officer Once Danced Frostbite Away
The Deseret News - December 24, 1996
by Twila Van Laer, Deseret News Staff writer
It was a much earlier Christmas Eve than this when Thomas Dobson had one of his many great adventures as a law officer in Salt Lake City. It was a Christmas Eve in the late 1880s and Dobson, pounding his beat as the city's official night watchman, noticed two men breaking into the safe in the Madam Button's Millinery Shop.
He cut through the saloon next door, where he found two of the city's finest, whom he sent to guard shop while he quietly slipped through the shop's back door.
Confronting the two thieves, he shouted, "Through up your hands, boys," and kept them covered while the policeman made the arrest.
Dobson's feet had talent, it seems for carrying him into such escapades. Ironically, he had almost lost those feet in 1856, when he plodded barefoot in the snow behind a handcart in the Martin pioneer company. He was 19 when he and his mother and a brother and sister set out with the company to join the body of pioneers gathering in Salt Lake Valley.
When his shoes wore out, young Thomas continued behind the handcart, in his bare feet. When relieve supplies reached the company from Salt Lake City, there were no shoes that would fit his frostbitten feet so he struggled on without any. Along the Sweetwater River the group met Eph Hanks, a frontiersman who looked at Thomas' feet and vowed that the next pair of shoes that happened along would be his.
But when the Martin Company, decimated by the early snows and the difficult terrain, pulled into Fort Bridger, none of the available shoes would slip over his swollen and battered toes. It looked as if he would lose the digits, if not both feet. Hanks wrapped his feet in cotton and suggest what would have seem an unlikely cure. If Dobson would stand up and sing the handcart son, his toes would be saved, the frontiersman told Dobson.
In a reunion of the handcart pioneers in 1907, Dobson recounted what happened next. During the night, he awoke to the sound of fiddle music. The trail-weary Saints were dancing to keep from freezing and to brighten their sagging spirits.
"I hobbled out to the fire and stood there listening to the music," he recalled. One of the brethren invited him to "get up there and give a jig."
"Now, I come from Lancashire (England), and maybe you know what that place is for dancing. I'd known how to clog dance ever since I could remember, and when that man told me to dance, I got out there and danced as I never had before. That was the last of my lame feet," he told the gathering of pioneers.
Dobson's adventures didn't end with his safe arrival in Salt Lake Valley. Beginning in 1900, he first drove a six-mule team carrying supplies to mail express and stage stations. Then when a Pony Express rider became ill he took over the man's route between Ruby Valley and Deep Creek. He once carried the mail for 237 miles without any significant break, including one 60-mule [mile] stretch on one horse.
During the summer of 1860, American Indians were harassing the pony riders, according to an account by Addie Quigley Williams, She recorded that a confrontation between soldiers and Indians near Egan Canyon had stirred up rancor. Dobson and another rider, James Cumbo, just happened to be the next while men passing through the area. The Indians pursued them, firing arrows, for 20 miles. Only the arrival of dusk saved the riders. The men later reported the arrows came so close they could feel the breeze they created.
Dobson served as captain of Company 4 in the Utah Militia but never received an official commission because of the actions of the acting governor of the territory, a non-Mormon. During the Indian uprisings in Sanpete County, he led his company into the area and succeeded in heading off several bands of raiding Indians.
Dobson's encounters with Indians continue when he was transferred to the stage line on the road between Salt Lake City and Pacific Sprngs, near South Pass, Wyo. Then he undertook a job driving a mule team back and forth to Los Angeles, a perilous route that tried the best of drivers. One trip convinced him it was no way to make a living. In 1879, the Salt Lake Herald praised him for his bravery and devotion to duty. He earned the sobriquest "Mormon Messenger" and a reputation for being the best in the business.
His feet, however, were due to take another beating. As Salt Lake's night watchman, he walked an estimated 21,353 miles in his repeated circuits of the area between Main and Commercial Streets and along 100 South over more than 30 years.
One night he witnessed an altercation in a saloon between "Dutch John" and a man named Wiggin. Wiggin left the saloon just as Dobson passed by in his accustomed rounds, and they walked together until they caught up with the drunk Dutch John sitting on a carraige stoop. Wiggin asked the officer to wait a minute, then took and gun and shot Dutch John through the heart. Dobson made an immediate arrest.
On another occasion, he came upon three hobos robbing a man in the alley between Maine and Commercial. When he ran to help the victim, there was a scuffle and the brigands escaped. Yet again, he was walking the best when a man called "Stop, thief." When Dobson took out after the escaping man, he raised his pistol and fired it so near the officer's face that he had powder burns on his cheek. Persisting, Dobson grappled desperately with the man and they rolled into an open water main ditch under excavation. A patrolman who had heard the ruckus, including the pistol shot, hurried up and made the arrest.
Even politics could prove dangerous to the man on the beat. In a conversation with a Republican (Dobson became a Democrat) the exchange became so heated that the night watchman sent for a police wagon to take the hapless Democrat into custody.
Dobson was on the committee for handcart reunions for four years in the early 1900's and was always welcomed for his wit, humor and energy-and for his dancing.
On August 20, 1894, a news account of the annual gathering at Saltair noted the he had danced "The Fisher's Hornpipe," the same dance he had performed on the tailgate of a wagon in 1856 in the cold and dark of the Wyoming night.
Dobson's story is retold in as an issue of the History Blazer, a publication of the Utah State Historical Society.
Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel, Edward Martin Company (1856, Approximate age at departure: 19
Son of William Dobson and Alice Pickup
Married Catherine Baty, 15 December 1866, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah
Children - None. They raised adopted children, Addie Quigley and Henry Wolfensberger.
Thomas Dobson and his wife, Katherine Beatty, had no children. In 1881, a friend, Andrew Quigley, was dying of the effects of a wound he had received at the hands of the Indians while proselyting in the Salmon Mission. He brought his daughter, He brought his daughter, Addie Quigley, to Dobson and asked him to care for her. Dobson also adopted a boy who was called Henry Wolfensberger. Thomas was known as a devoted and caring father.
Thomas Dobson adopted the boy Johan Henry Wolfensberger. Henry and his brother Carl were sent ahead of the family from Switzerland to Utah to live with their Aunt Louisa Amanda Lehman. She was the third wife of Edmund Schoenhals, a polygamist. When polygamy became against the law Louisa's marriage was dissolved. She had no means of support for herself or her two little nephews. Carl was adopted by the Guss Backman family. Aunt Louise later married Philip Kloepfer.
Officer Once Danced Frostbite Away
The Deseret News - December 24, 1996
by Twila Van Laer, Deseret News Staff writer
It was a much earlier Christmas Eve than this when Thomas Dobson had one of his many great adventures as a law officer in Salt Lake City. It was a Christmas Eve in the late 1880s and Dobson, pounding his beat as the city's official night watchman, noticed two men breaking into the safe in the Madam Button's Millinery Shop.
He cut through the saloon next door, where he found two of the city's finest, whom he sent to guard shop while he quietly slipped through the shop's back door.
Confronting the two thieves, he shouted, "Through up your hands, boys," and kept them covered while the policeman made the arrest.
Dobson's feet had talent, it seems for carrying him into such escapades. Ironically, he had almost lost those feet in 1856, when he plodded barefoot in the snow behind a handcart in the Martin pioneer company. He was 19 when he and his mother and a brother and sister set out with the company to join the body of pioneers gathering in Salt Lake Valley.
When his shoes wore out, young Thomas continued behind the handcart, in his bare feet. When relieve supplies reached the company from Salt Lake City, there were no shoes that would fit his frostbitten feet so he struggled on without any. Along the Sweetwater River the group met Eph Hanks, a frontiersman who looked at Thomas' feet and vowed that the next pair of shoes that happened along would be his.
But when the Martin Company, decimated by the early snows and the difficult terrain, pulled into Fort Bridger, none of the available shoes would slip over his swollen and battered toes. It looked as if he would lose the digits, if not both feet. Hanks wrapped his feet in cotton and suggest what would have seem an unlikely cure. If Dobson would stand up and sing the handcart son, his toes would be saved, the frontiersman told Dobson.
In a reunion of the handcart pioneers in 1907, Dobson recounted what happened next. During the night, he awoke to the sound of fiddle music. The trail-weary Saints were dancing to keep from freezing and to brighten their sagging spirits.
"I hobbled out to the fire and stood there listening to the music," he recalled. One of the brethren invited him to "get up there and give a jig."
"Now, I come from Lancashire (England), and maybe you know what that place is for dancing. I'd known how to clog dance ever since I could remember, and when that man told me to dance, I got out there and danced as I never had before. That was the last of my lame feet," he told the gathering of pioneers.
Dobson's adventures didn't end with his safe arrival in Salt Lake Valley. Beginning in 1900, he first drove a six-mule team carrying supplies to mail express and stage stations. Then when a Pony Express rider became ill he took over the man's route between Ruby Valley and Deep Creek. He once carried the mail for 237 miles without any significant break, including one 60-mule [mile] stretch on one horse.
During the summer of 1860, American Indians were harassing the pony riders, according to an account by Addie Quigley Williams, She recorded that a confrontation between soldiers and Indians near Egan Canyon had stirred up rancor. Dobson and another rider, James Cumbo, just happened to be the next while men passing through the area. The Indians pursued them, firing arrows, for 20 miles. Only the arrival of dusk saved the riders. The men later reported the arrows came so close they could feel the breeze they created.
Dobson served as captain of Company 4 in the Utah Militia but never received an official commission because of the actions of the acting governor of the territory, a non-Mormon. During the Indian uprisings in Sanpete County, he led his company into the area and succeeded in heading off several bands of raiding Indians.
Dobson's encounters with Indians continue when he was transferred to the stage line on the road between Salt Lake City and Pacific Sprngs, near South Pass, Wyo. Then he undertook a job driving a mule team back and forth to Los Angeles, a perilous route that tried the best of drivers. One trip convinced him it was no way to make a living. In 1879, the Salt Lake Herald praised him for his bravery and devotion to duty. He earned the sobriquest "Mormon Messenger" and a reputation for being the best in the business.
His feet, however, were due to take another beating. As Salt Lake's night watchman, he walked an estimated 21,353 miles in his repeated circuits of the area between Main and Commercial Streets and along 100 South over more than 30 years.
One night he witnessed an altercation in a saloon between "Dutch John" and a man named Wiggin. Wiggin left the saloon just as Dobson passed by in his accustomed rounds, and they walked together until they caught up with the drunk Dutch John sitting on a carraige stoop. Wiggin asked the officer to wait a minute, then took and gun and shot Dutch John through the heart. Dobson made an immediate arrest.
On another occasion, he came upon three hobos robbing a man in the alley between Maine and Commercial. When he ran to help the victim, there was a scuffle and the brigands escaped. Yet again, he was walking the best when a man called "Stop, thief." When Dobson took out after the escaping man, he raised his pistol and fired it so near the officer's face that he had powder burns on his cheek. Persisting, Dobson grappled desperately with the man and they rolled into an open water main ditch under excavation. A patrolman who had heard the ruckus, including the pistol shot, hurried up and made the arrest.
Even politics could prove dangerous to the man on the beat. In a conversation with a Republican (Dobson became a Democrat) the exchange became so heated that the night watchman sent for a police wagon to take the hapless Democrat into custody.
Dobson was on the committee for handcart reunions for four years in the early 1900's and was always welcomed for his wit, humor and energy-and for his dancing.
On August 20, 1894, a news account of the annual gathering at Saltair noted the he had danced "The Fisher's Hornpipe," the same dance he had performed on the tailgate of a wagon in 1856 in the cold and dark of the Wyoming night.
Dobson's story is retold in as an issue of the History Blazer, a publication of the Utah State Historical Society.
Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel, Edward Martin Company (1856, Approximate age at departure: 19
Married Catherine Baty, 15 December 1866, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah
Children - None. They raised adopted children, Addie Quigley and Henry Wolfensberger.
Thomas Dobson and his wife, Katherine Beatty, had no children. In 1881, a friend, Andrew Quigley, was dying of the effects of a wound he had received at the hands of the Indians while proselyting in the Salmon Mission. He brought his daughter, He brought his daughter, Addie Quigley, to Dobson and asked him to care for her. Dobson also adopted a boy who was called Henry Wolfensberger. Thomas was known as a devoted and caring father.
Thomas Dobson adopted the boy Johan Henry Wolfensberger. Henry and his brother Carl were sent ahead of the family from Switzerland to Utah to live with their Aunt Louisa Amanda Lehman. She was the third wife of Edmund Schoenhals, a polygamist. When polygamy became against the law Louisa's marriage was dissolved. She had no means of support for herself or her two little nephews. Carl was adopted by the Guss Backman family. Aunt Louise later married Philip Kloepfer.
Officer Once Danced Frostbite Away
The Deseret News - December 24, 1996
by Twila Van Laer, Deseret News Staff writer
It was a much earlier Christmas Eve than this when Thomas Dobson had one of his many great adventures as a law officer in Salt Lake City. It was a Christmas Eve in the late 1880s and Dobson, pounding his beat as the city's official night watchman, noticed two men breaking into the safe in the Madam Button's Millinery Shop.
He cut through the saloon next door, where he found two of the city's finest, whom he sent to guard shop while he quietly slipped through the shop's back door.
Confronting the two thieves, he shouted, "Through up your hands, boys," and kept them covered while the policeman made the arrest.
Dobson's feet had talent, it seems for carrying him into such escapades. Ironically, he had almost lost those feet in 1856, when he plodded barefoot in the snow behind a handcart in the Martin pioneer company. He was 19 when he and his mother and a brother and sister set out with the company to join the body of pioneers gathering in Salt Lake Valley.
When his shoes wore out, young Thomas continued behind the handcart, in his bare feet. When relieve supplies reached the company from Salt Lake City, there were no shoes that would fit his frostbitten feet so he struggled on without any. Along the Sweetwater River the group met Eph Hanks, a frontiersman who looked at Thomas' feet and vowed that the next pair of shoes that happened along would be his.
But when the Martin Company, decimated by the early snows and the difficult terrain, pulled into Fort Bridger, none of the available shoes would slip over his swollen and battered toes. It looked as if he would lose the digits, if not both feet. Hanks wrapped his feet in cotton and suggest what would have seem an unlikely cure. If Dobson would stand up and sing the handcart son, his toes would be saved, the frontiersman told Dobson.
In a reunion of the handcart pioneers in 1907, Dobson recounted what happened next. During the night, he awoke to the sound of fiddle music. The trail-weary Saints were dancing to keep from freezing and to brighten their sagging spirits.
"I hobbled out to the fire and stood there listening to the music," he recalled. One of the brethren invited him to "get up there and give a jig."
"Now, I come from Lancashire (England), and maybe you know what that place is for dancing. I'd known how to clog dance ever since I could remember, and when that man told me to dance, I got out there and danced as I never had before. That was the last of my lame feet," he told the gathering of pioneers.
Dobson's adventures didn't end with his safe arrival in Salt Lake Valley. Beginning in 1900, he first drove a six-mule team carrying supplies to mail express and stage stations. Then when a Pony Express rider became ill he took over the man's route between Ruby Valley and Deep Creek. He once carried the mail for 237 miles without any significant break, including one 60-mule [mile] stretch on one horse.
During the summer of 1860, American Indians were harassing the pony riders, according to an account by Addie Quigley Williams, She recorded that a confrontation between soldiers and Indians near Egan Canyon had stirred up rancor. Dobson and another rider, James Cumbo, just happened to be the next while men passing through the area. The Indians pursued them, firing arrows, for 20 miles. Only the arrival of dusk saved the riders. The men later reported the arrows came so close they could feel the breeze they created.
Dobson served as captain of Company 4 in the Utah Militia but never received an official commission because of the actions of the acting governor of the territory, a non-Mormon. During the Indian uprisings in Sanpete County, he led his company into the area and succeeded in heading off several bands of raiding Indians.
Dobson's encounters with Indians continue when he was transferred to the stage line on the road between Salt Lake City and Pacific Sprngs, near South Pass, Wyo. Then he undertook a job driving a mule team back and forth to Los Angeles, a perilous route that tried the best of drivers. One trip convinced him it was no way to make a living. In 1879, the Salt Lake Herald praised him for his bravery and devotion to duty. He earned the sobriquest "Mormon Messenger" and a reputation for being the best in the business.
His feet, however, were due to take another beating. As Salt Lake's night watchman, he walked an estimated 21,353 miles in his repeated circuits of the area between Main and Commercial Streets and along 100 South over more than 30 years.
One night he witnessed an altercation in a saloon between "Dutch John" and a man named Wiggin. Wiggin left the saloon just as Dobson passed by in his accustomed rounds, and they walked together until they caught up with the drunk Dutch John sitting on a carraige stoop. Wiggin asked the officer to wait a minute, then took and gun and shot Dutch John through the heart. Dobson made an immediate arrest.
On another occasion, he came upon three hobos robbing a man in the alley between Maine and Commercial. When he ran to help the victim, there was a scuffle and the brigands escaped. Yet again, he was walking the best when a man called "Stop, thief." When Dobson took out after the escaping man, he raised his pistol and fired it so near the officer's face that he had powder burns on his cheek. Persisting, Dobson grappled desperately with the man and they rolled into an open water main ditch under excavation. A patrolman who had heard the ruckus, including the pistol shot, hurried up and made the arrest.
Even politics could prove dangerous to the man on the beat. In a conversation with a Republican (Dobson became a Democrat) the exchange became so heated that the night watchman sent for a police wagon to take the hapless Democrat into custody.
Dobson was on the committee for handcart reunions for four years in the early 1900's and was always welcomed for his wit, humor and energy-and for his dancing.
On August 20, 1894, a news account of the annual gathering at Saltair noted the he had danced "The Fisher's Hornpipe," the same dance he had performed on the tailgate of a wagon in 1856 in the cold and dark of the Wyoming night.
Dobson's story is retold in as an issue of the History Blazer, a publication of the Utah State Historical Society.
Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel, Edward Martin Company (1856, Approximate age at departure: 19
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