One of ten children, he went to work at age 10 to help support the family, hauling brick at a kiln during the summers and chopping wood with his father in the winters.

On the night of November 12, 1833, one of the more spectacular Leonid meteor showers on record (dubbed the "Falling Stars Phenomenon") hit the East Coast of the United States.

"[3] At the age of 24, Peterson hauled coal for a man in Burlington who told him "of a strange people, whom he had just visited in Illinois."

On the way, they met short-lived leader John C. Bennett on a steamboat in Ohio, who warned Peterson that Joseph Smith would take his wife as soon as he arrived.

Stricken by grief, Peterson wondered how he could look after the children and continue to provide them a living, which included working most of the day and fishing at night.

In 1849, he began practicing plural marriage when he married Mary's younger half-sister, Ann, in Iowa.

Unlike most other Utah settlements at the time, Charles wasn't sent by Brigham Young to begin a new community.

To get their wagons into the valley, Peterson and his sons dug and graded a new road through a narrow entrance to Weber Canyon known as "Devil's Gate".

In 1846, early adopters of the Hastings Cutoff had used the same entrance only in reverse, as an exit on their way from Fort Bridger to California.

[4] Passing through was so difficult that Hastings advised the Donner Party to avoid it in the hope of saving time.

In his early sixties, Peterson moved to Fielding, Utah, in the hope of setting up a large farming operation for his families.

In November 1881, Peterson was the first in a search party to spot David Patten Kimball, the head of the church in Arizona who had become lost near Seymour[8] in the Salt River Valley.

When Udall was convicted on perjury charges the next year (after serving three months in federal prison, he was granted a full pardon by Grover Cleveland), Charles moved with his families to Mexico.