BOX CANYON HISTORICAL MARKER A great event in the history of Western trails will be commemorated when the Mormon Battalion Marker recently erected by the San Diego County Historical Markers Committee at Box Canyon on Imperial Highway in teh Colorado Desert, is dedicated Sunday, January 17, 1954. Details of the program will be released by the Markers Committee, a county Agency of which Cletus W. Gardener is Secretary. Sponsored by the Board of Supervisors and the Historical Markers Committee, and also by the Historical Society and the Latter Day Saints of Southern California, the event will mark the 107th anniversary of the opening of the first wagon road to the Pacific via the southwestern route later to be known as the Butterfield Trail. Mrs Charles W. Porter, 1365 Pacific Street, was a special guest at the dedication of this historical marker at Box Canyon. Greeted in memory of the Mormon Batallion who came to California from Iowa in 1846, accomplishing the longes infantry march in history. Mrs. Porter, whose father, Willard Gilbert Smith, was a drummer with the batta¬lion and one of its youngest members, is one of the few remaining children of batta¬lion members and was the only one at the ceremony yesterday. The marker was unveiled by the president of the San Diego County Historical Society who erected it as a California State Monument. With Mrs. Porter at the ceremony were her husband, Dr. Porter; her son-in-law and daughter, Mr. and Mrs. M. G. Adams of Redlands; another daughter, Mrs. John A Worley of Glendale; a grandson, Richard P. Adams and Mrs. Adams of Glendale and a granddaughter, Mrs. Arthur Sprague and Mr. Sprague of San Diego. Box Canyon takes its historic significance from the March of the Mormon Batta¬lion from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to San Diego at the outset of our war with Mexico. Five hundred men of the Mormon faith were recruited for garrison duty in California, at or near Council Bluffs, and were incorporated as a special infantry battalion into General Stephen W. Kearny's Army of the West. From Santa Fe to San Diego the unit was commanded by Lt. Col. Phillip St. George Cooke, an officer of Kearny's First Dragoons. At the end of the long 2000-mile hike to San Diego, Cooke issued, on January 30, 1847, one of the most famous unit citations in American military-history, congratulating his Battalion on the completion of the longest sustained infantry march on record. By orders of General Kearny the Battalion was required to explore a wagon road to the Pacific. Ten wagons (three privately owned by Battalion men) were dragged across mountain and desert to the Colorado River. Christmas Eve, 1846, was spent on ghe Gila River, eating pumpkin, beans and melons with the Pima Indians whom the Mormons greatly admired. From there to Warner's Ranch the rations were mighty skimpy. When miles gave out, two wagons were abandoned at Alamo Mocho, west of Yuma. Eight reached Vallecito, hauled by exhausted mules and weak, discouraged but determined men. Only one wagon (a small Sonora vehicle) had ever been known to pass through Box Canyon's narrow mule trail prior to the Battalion's arrival there on January 19, 1847. With Col. Cooke setting the example, tired Mormons took axes, picks, sledges, crowbars and shovels, and went to work on precipitous canyon walls. In two or three hours they had hewed away enough of the solid rock wall to permit the wagons to pass. Eight wagons croaked their way on across the desert, past Warner's Ranch, around the north side of Palomar, and down original 395 to San Luis Rey and San Diego. All honor to the determined heroes of the unique and well-nigh forgotten military outfit who brought the first wagons to the shore of the South Sea!