Brigham Young and Wilford Woodruff crossed the plains in the first 1847 Latter-day Saint wagon company with three enslaved African American men sent ahead to the valley by their enslavers, and by the time Woodruff wrote to Thomas L. Kane about local dislike of slavery, Southern converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had already taken more than fifty enslaved people to the Great Salt Lake Valley. Over the next decade, other converts, merchants not associated with the church, officers in the US Army, and appointed federal officials would take additional enslaved people into the territory. By early 1851, the number of enslaved in the territory was around sixty, but with the departure of Southern families for California, the number was around thirty by the end of the year and stayed between thirty and forty for the next decade, except for an additional uncounted number of enslaved servants of army officers in the territory during the Utah War or other military expeditions.