Green drove the first wagon into Emigration Canyon, and by the time Young arrived in the valley a few days later, Green had already planted crops. When Brigham Young lay ill at the head of Emigration Canyon, nearly at the threshold of the Salt Lake Valley, Green was one of a select few chosen to forge ahead to prepare the road into the valley. įlake made particularly significant contributions during the final days of that trek. These African American men made vital contributions during the pioneer trek, with Flake acting as Brigham Young’s personal wagon driver. The journals kept by company members, therefore, consistently referred to Flake, Crosby, and Lay. (Flake, at the time, weighed nearly two hundred pounds and was respected as a laborer.) Brigham Young instructed that his vanguard party, which would be followed by the rest of the saints fleeing Nauvoo later in the spring, should include the slaves Green Flake, Oscar Crosby, and Hark Lay to chart the path into the Salt Lake Valley and to prepare homes for the oncoming families. When Young led the first LDS wagon companies out of Nauvoo in 1846, three Mormon families from Mississippi volunteered their enslaved men – Green Flake, Oscar Crosby, and Hark Lay – to go along as laborers. The Flake household, which pledged to follow in Young’s footsteps, traveled first to Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1844, where the church accepted Green’s labor as part of the Flake family tithing. After Smith’s assassination just two months later, Brigham Young assumed leadership of the church and, a year later, began organizing a mass migration of the Latter-day Saints to resettle in the American West.
#GREEN FLAKE FREE#
I also baptized two Black men, Allen & Green, belonging to Brother Flake.” Green Flake had joined the church during a time when Church President and Prophet Joseph Smith proposed to free all the slaves in the United States. John Brown, a Mormon missionary assigned to Mississippi, noted in his diary on 7 April 1844 that “we ordained two elders the same day, brother James M. While in Mississippi, the Flake family and their enslaved servants met Elder Benjamin Clapp, a Mormon missionary, and joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They intended to help colonize land that had been opened to white settlers following the government’s forced removal of several American Indian communities to present-day Oklahoma. James and Agnes moved shortly thereafter to Mississippi with their three-year-old son, taking along Green and their other slaves. His master, Jordan Flake, gave ten-year-old Green to his son James Madison Flake as a wedding gift when he married Agnes Love in 1838. Green Flake was born into slavery on 6 January 1828 on the Jordan Flake Plantation in Lilesville, Anson County, North Carolina.
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