In April 1852, four brothers—Wesley, Samuel, James, and Steven Hill—left Paris, Monroe County, Missouri, for California with their families, 62 people in all. Two deaths occurred along the Platte River, and on the Hamsfork Plateau Nancy Janne Hill, the second eldest of the six children of Wesley and Elizabeth Hill, died of cholera on July 5, 1852, at age twenty. Her uncle James Hill wrote that she had been in good health on Sunday evening, became unwell that night, was worse in the morning, and was a corpse by nine o'clock at night. On the Forty Mile desert in Nevada, Nancy's father, Wesley Hill, died on August 24, 1852, and was buried at Ragtown on the Carson River. The Hill train settled in Soscol Valley, Napa County, California, and legend holds that Nancy Jane's fiancé returned three times over a period of 53 years to tend her grave.