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PLAYED THE FIFE
Musician Story
George had blue eyes, dark hair, and stood about five feet eight or nine inches tall. George worked at carpentry (planning and milling), sawing timber, repairing wagons, and carding and spinning wool. George was a talented musician who could make violins, guitars, fifes, and other instruments. He wrote at least one ballad.
At the age of twenty-nine, George Washington Taggart enlisted in Company B of the Mormon Battalion, one of five hundred men who set out between July 16 and 22, 1846, to commence an unparalleled march of two thousand miles on foot through the barren deserts and across the mountains of the southwest to California. George enlisted as a musician playing a fife that he made himself. The Battalion suffered from a lack of water until their tonsils would swell. George would walk the mules so they might live, until his feet would bleed. Of the original five hundred men, only 335 reached California.
Hyrum Smith and the Prophet Joseph Smith were shot and killed five months later on June 27, 1844, in Carthage Jail, Carthage, Illinois. As a member of the Nauvoo Legion and of the Nauvoo Legion Band (George played the fife), George was one of those who went to meet and return with the bodies of Joseph and Hyrum as they traveled the twenty miles from Carthage to Nauvoo.
According to George's son James: "I have heard him [GWT] tell of going with those that went to Carthage for the two bodies of Prophet Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith to bring them to Nauvoo, and I have heard him play the tunes he helped to play in the band that were played when they marched into Nauvoo with the bodies. This would cause us to picture in our minds the awful event of the martyrdom."(10)