The Enslaved Man Who Drove the Lead Wagon
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
Two days before Brigham Young's wagon crested the Wasatch Range, the lead wagon entered the Salt Lake Valley. It was driven by a nineteen-year-old man named Green Flake. He was not there by choice. He was enslaved.
Green Flake was born in January eighteen twenty-eight on a plantation in Anson County, North Carolina. When he was a child, he was separated from his parents and given to James and Agnes Flake, who converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and joined the western migration. James Flake sent Green ahead with the advance company to serve Brigham Young as a wagon driver and to help prepare the valley for the families who would follow. Green Flake crossed the continent not as a pilgrim seeking Zion but as the property of a man making that journey for himself.
He was not alone. Hark Lay and Oscar Crosby were also enslaved Black men who traveled with the eighteen forty-seven pioneer company. Jane Manning James, a free Black woman who had converted to the LDS faith in Connecticut in eighteen forty-two, made the crossing on foot with her family. She would spend decades in Salt Lake City petitioning church leaders for expanded spiritual standing within the institution she had walked across a continent to join.
By eighteen fifty, Salt Lake City's recorded population included fifty-nine Black residents, twenty-nine of them enslaved. Utah Territory did not abolish slavery until the beginning of the Civil War. The founding narrative of Mormon pioneer sacrifice, which is genuine and documented across thousands of journals and diaries, was built in part on the unrecompensed labor of people who had no say in the journey.
The monument at This Is the Place Heritage Park that acknowledges Green Flake, Jane Manning James, Hark Lay, and Oscar Crosby by name was dedicated in July twenty twenty-two, one hundred seventy-five years after they arrived. It stands at the place where the road came down from the mountains into the valley, at the foot of the Wasatch, near the spot where the lead wagon crossed into what its driver was not free to call home.
