Rodney Badger - Salt Lake City, UT - Graves Mentioning a Cause of Death on Waymarking.com

This is an interesting headstone, as the verbiage -- "was drowned" -- is a little more 19th century, and while it is obviously newer, it has a mid-19th century feel to it. It could be a replacement headstone, it could be someone's doing a remarkable job of channeling those times. It is a rectangular slab of red granite, with the top corners cut out a bit to provide some relief, with some ivy below the inscription. It reads:

In
Memory of
Rodney Badger

who was born Feb. 4th 1824
and was drowned while
trying to rescue
a woman and six children
from the Weber River
on the 29th of April 1853
Aged 29 Years

----*----

Rodney Badger was a person of local significance, important enough to merit a Wikipedia article, and there is a statue of him at the state capitol building in Salt Lake. A Mormon convert -- he had lived with Hyrum Smith as a boy -- he was part of Brigham Young's Vanguard Company which arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, and he turned back on one occasion to help other travelers and rejoin his own family. He was very active in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and served as a deputy sheriff in Salt Lake County. He was the first Utah law enforcement officer to die in the line of duty.

In 1853, Badger was charged by Governor Brigham Young to travel to the Weber River to assist travelers from California. On April 29, he spotted a family whose wagon was stuck in the river, its members in the water. Badger swam out to them and was able to rescue the mother and four of the six children. For whatever reason, probably worn down by the raging current, Badger went under and drowned along with the other two children. Their bodies were found eighteen months later on a sandbar downstream.

Type of Death Listed: Accident Cause of death inscription on headstone: Drowned Website (if available): [Web Link]

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Date Logged Log   03/10/2021 lesdubois visited it