In this brief excerpt from his manuscript autobiography, Shaker elder Issachar Bates recalled his “Long Walk” to the west in 1805 and the interview he and Benjamin Seth Youngs conducted with a family of jerkers in Greenville, Virginia. Click here for Youngs’s journal and here for the text of the interview.
Now all things were made ready and it was felt best for us to take one horse to carry our baggage and for us to go on foot and for a brother to take us two days journey in a sleigh with our horse before his two then take ours and go on and the brother return and after having received the council of heaven from our Blessed Mother and the rest of the Elders and their most affectionate farewell and blessing with the kindest farewell and Blessing from the rest of our Blessed friends. On the first day of January 1805, at three [o’clock] in the morning we started and that day we went 12 miles and next day we went 50 miles to Pickskiln. Then our good brother John [blank] returned and we loaded our horse and went on our journey of which I shall not state any particular journal only that it was a tedious cold hard winter. We had to wait two days in the city of Newyork before we could cross to Fowlershook by reason of the ice and then had to keep the main stage road through Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington because the back roads were not passable by reason of ice snow and water for we had rain hail or snow the most of the time. We made no stay of any account except on the sabbath till we got to Kentucky. We found that the revival work had spread into some parts of Virginia. We called and saw them have the jirks and asked them qustions and went on. We passed trough Lexington and Abingdon and at Hawley we turned our course into Tennessee crossed Holston into Green County stayed all night where was a newlight meeting a number of them were exersised with the power and gifts of the holy spirit but were still on the old ground. We crossed Holston back again and went to Beans station and from that over Clinch mountain and so on to the Crab orchard in Kentucky.
Source
[Moses Eastwood], transcr., “A Concise Sketch of the Life and Experience of Isachar Bates, Written by Himself,” ca. 1856, 35–36, box 4, Shakers Collection, MS 003, Dayton Metro Library, Dayton, Ohio.
