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Early settlers cooked over their fireplace hearths using cast-iron Dutch ovens and kettles. photo by Valerie Phillips

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A collection of antique Dutch ovens and other cast-iron cooking vessels owned by Colleen Sloan of the International Dutch Oven Society. photo by Valerie Phillips

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The disappearance of Robert Daybell is a pioneer mystery that has puzzled his descendants for nearly 150 years.

In August 1866, Robert and Agnes Ann Daybell, Mormon converts from England, had made it to Willow Springs in Wyoming on their trek West. Agnes Ann, who was four months pregnant and also had a seven-month-old baby, was feeling poorly.

As the S.H. Hill company of wagons was packing up that morning, Robert caught sight of antelope grazing on a hillside. He thought if he could just get some fresh meat, it might renew Agnes Ann’s strength.

He and Charles Gardner, one of the wagon train’s best hunters, left on horseback with their rifles. They split up near the hill to approach the antelope from both sides. They planned to meet on the other side, then catch up to the wagon train, hopefully with fresh antelope meat.

But Robert never showed up, and Gardner caught up to the wagon train alone. The company, anxious to reach Utah, pushed on to the next campsite. The next morning, a frantic Agnes Ann insisted she would go no further.

A 15-man search party went back, but found no trace of the missing man, his horse or rifle. And so a pregnant, mournful Agnes Ann arrived in Utah with only her baby daughter. Robert’s parents, who had emigrated several years earlier, rode out to meet the wagon train and met their daughter-in-law for the first time. After Agnes Ann told them her sorrowful tale, they took her home to the Heber Valley live with them.

Robert, through his daughter, Mary Hannah Daybell, is the mystery ancestor of my husband’s family. When you’re talking pioneers, I have plenty on my own side of the family — the apostle Orson Pratt, who traveled with Brigham Young in the vanguard company; William Hyde, who joined the Mormon Battalion and helped settle Hyde Park in Cache Valley, and William Henry Harrison Sagers, who helped settle Tooele.

But none of their stories illustrate so vividly how food — or the lack of it — was a life-and-death issue for pioneers. Many lost their lives as their provisions ran out. Robert Daybell lost his life simply by trying to feed his family.

My brother-in-law, Wynn Phillips of Pleasant View, used his U.S. Air Force investigator skills to try to deduce what might have happened. He even led our extended family on trip to the area where Daybell disappeared. We pondered the possibilities: Did he drown in a stream? Did he run away? Did he have an accident? Wynn concluded that he was killed by a band of Sioux who had been attacking other wagon trains in the area.

As Utahns celebrate those who settled this state, we might offer gratitude for the food and the cooking tools that helped get them here.

And let’s also give thanks for today’s ease of meal management. Too tired to cook dinner after a long day? Consider what it would be like to walk 10-20 miles over rugged terrain, in the hot sun or chilling cold. And then, before you could eat, you’d have to build a fire, haul water, milk cows and maybe hunt for butcher meat in order to prepare dinner. Sorry, no pizza delivery on the trail.

Andrew Jenson, a Danish immigrant in the 1860s, wrote: “At night, when camping, we all had our busiest time. First, we pitched our tents and gathered fuel and fetched water, then we made fires, baked bread, cooked food, and finally ate our meals around the camp fires, sitting on the grass or rocks.”

For pioneer travelers, there were very few places along the journey to buy provisions. There were no refrigerators or freezers. Drying was the only practical food preservation method, as canning was still in its infancy. So travelers packed a supply of dry goods, and supplemented it with whatever wild food they could find along the way. Milk and other dairy products came along on the hoof.

According to Wynn Phillips’ research, finding campfire fuel was a big problem, once they got out on the plains where there were few trees. The solution? Buffalo chips.

He wrote, “One account indicates that it took about three and one half bushels of buffalo chips to make one good campfire. The women, usually with their aprons, would go around collecting the stuff and bring it to use in their individual fire.”

Phillips shared a quote from a letter of Caroline Hopkins Clark, who also came West in 1966:

“I guess you would like to know how we live on the plains. We do not get any fresh meat or potatoes, but we get plenty of flour and bacon. We have some sugar, a little tea, molasses, soap, carbonate of soda, and a few dried apples. We brought some peas, oatmeal, rice, tea, and sugar, which we had left from the vessel. We bought a skillet to bake our bread in. Sometimes we make pancakes for a change. We also make cakes in the pan, and often bran dumplings with baking powder. We use cream of tarter and soda for our bread, sometimes sour dough. At times Roland goes to the river and catches fish and sometimes John shoots birds.”

If Robert Daybell was an unfortunate victim in the pioneer saga, the Dutch oven, also known as a “bake oven,” or “bake kettle,” was a hero. In fact, the Handcart Pioneer Monument includes a Dutch oven in the statue. A “bake oven” was included in Brigham Young’s list of provisions that families should take on their trek from Nauvoo, as printed in the LDS Church’s Nauvoo Neighbor newspaper.

The term “Dutch oven” likely came from the iron casting process developed in Holland. Or it might have come from the “Pennsylvania Dutch” who manufactured and sold pots in colonial America.

Most pans, when set on top of blazing coals, yielded food burned on the bottom and raw on top. But the legs on the bottom of the “bake oven” held the pot above the coals, and the flat, rimmed lid could hold hot coals on top. This made uniform, oven-like heat to bake biscuits or roast meat over a campfire. While it was cooking, any fats from the food would cook into the pores of the cast iron, building up a nonstick surface that would rival any Teflon coating.

Once settlers arrived in the valley and built homes, their “bake ovens” were still handy for cooking over open fireplace hearths, according the book, “Plain But Wholesome” by Mormon food historian Brock Cheney. Pots were often suspended over the coals with tripods or hooks.

Some Dutch ovens were passed down as family heirlooms. When Food Network star Bobby Flay came to Utah to film segments for his “FoodNation” series, Brian Terry of Salt Lake City showed off the 150-year-old Dutch oven. It had belonged to his ancestor, Isaac Behunin, and according to family lore, the outlaw Butch Cassidy once dined from the pot. Terry kept his family tradition alive by winning the International Dutch Oven Society’s World Championship in 1999.

I suspect that many small-town Pioneer Day festivals will include a Dutch oven cook-off. And certain members of the Phillips family will have fleeting thoughts of their ancestor, Robert Daybell, and wonder, once again — what happened?

Valerie Phillips is an award-winning food writer. You can contact her at Chewandchat.com.