Captain Yount's Dream

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 31, 1871

Captain Yount's Dream.

A STRIKING instance of the mysterious working of God to accomplish his providential deliverances, is related by Horace Bushnell, in the fourteenth chapter of his work on “Nature and the Supernatural, as together constituting the one system of God.”

“As I sat by the fire,” says Dr. Bushnell, “one stormy November night, in a hotel parlor, in the Napa Valley of California, there came in a most venerable and benignant looking person, with his wife, taking their seats in the circle. The stranger, as I afterward learned, was Captain Yount, a man who came over into California, as a trapper, more than forty years ago. Here he has lived, apart from the great world and its questions, acquiring an immense landed estate, and becoming a kind of acknowledged patriarch in the country. His tall, manly person, and his gracious, paternal look, as totally unsophisticated in the expression as if he had never heard of a philosophic doubt or question in his life, marked him as the true patriarch.

“At my request, he gave me his story. About six or seven years previous, in a mid-winter’s night, he had a dream, in which he saw what appeared to be a company of emigrants, arrested by the snows of the mountains and perishing rapidly by cold and hunger. He noted the very cast of the scenery, marked by a huge perpendicular front of white rock cliff; he saw the men cutting off what appeared to be tree tops, rising out of deep gulfs of snow; he distinguished the very features of the persons, and the look of their particular distress. He woke profoundly impressed with the distinctness and apparent reality of his dream. At length he fell asleep and dreamed exactly the same dream again. In the morning he could not expel it from his mind. Falling in, shortly, with an old hunter comrade, he told him the story, and was only the more deeply impressed by his recognizing, without hesitation, the scenery of the dream. This comrade came over the Sierra by the Carson Valley Pass, and declared that a spot in the pass answered exactly to his description. By this the unsophisticated patriarch was decided. He immediately collected a company of men, with mules and blankets, and all necessary provisions. The neighbors were laughing, meantime, at his credulity. ‘No matter,’ said he, ‘I am able to do this, and I will; for I verily believe that the fact is according to my dream.’ The men were sent into the mountains, one hundred and fifty miles distant, directly to the Carson Valley Pass. And there they found the company, in exactly the condition of the dream, and brought in the remnant alive.

“A gentleman present said, ‘You need have no doubt of this; for we Californians all know the facts, and the names of the families brought in, who now look upon our venerable friend as a kind of saviour.’ These names he gave, and the places where they reside, and I found afterward that the California people were ready, everywhere, to second his testimony.

“Nothing could be more natural than for the good-hearted patriarch himself to add, that the brightest thing in his life, and that which gave him greatest joy, was his simple faith in that dream. I thought also I could see in that joy the glimmer of a true Christian love and life, into which, unawares to himself, he had really been entered by that faith. Let any one attempt now to account for the coincidences of that dream by mere natural causalities, and he will be glad enough to ease his labor, by the acknowledgment of a supernatural providence.”

The Christian, of Boston, commenting on this incident, remarks:

“So much we learn from Dr. Bushnell, but who can tell the rest? Such histories are never fully written; the inside view is only seen by God himself. Who knows what prayers went up that night from fathers, mothers, wives, and friends in far-off Eastern homes, in behalf of those emigrants who had set forth upon their long and dangerous way? Who can tell the midnight groans and secret sighs of hearts that held communion with the Lord, and craved his blessing over the absent ones? And who can tell the uttered or unspoken pleadings that arose from that storm-beleaguered band, who, perishing amid the rigor of that awful winter’s cold, looked up to God when every earthly hope and help had failed? Doubtless, if those rescued ones were called to tell their tale, we should find in this account not only a story of the wise direction of God’s guiding hand, which selected perhaps the only man in California who had means to send deliverance to these distressed ones, and faith enough in the unseen to heed a divine monition, but also a most striking record of the wondrous virtue of prevailing prayer, poured out by souls in sore and deep distress.”