Patience Loader has become an icon for the disastrous winter entrapment of the Martin and Willie handcart companies, who traveled the Mormon Trail in the 1850s. Her autobiography offers an important record of those events, but also of much more. Wife of a Civil War soldier, Patience served as an army laundress in Washington DC and ran a boarding house as well. After the war, her husband died of consumption, and Patience returned to Utah alone, where she became a cook in a mining camp.