(The return of History Friday at Chicagoboyz – a break from current events!)
Last week my daughter picked up a lavishly-illustrated book at a thrift store that she thought I might be interested in, and it turned out that I was, since the next book (a YA adventure, and sequel to West Towards the Sunset) will touch on interesting doings in the far west – in California, the Nevada Territory and the Mormon colonies in the Utah Territory. We had lived in Utah for three years when I was assigned to Hill AFB. Utah is rather like Texas in that both states have a rather distinct culture and off-beat origin story, at least in comparison to most other western states. The epic journey of the pioneer handcart companies from the jumping-off places in the mid-west to Salt Lake City is one of the cultural underpinnings to the LDS Iliad, the foundation-cornerstone of Deseret, and an epic of faith, and self-organizing heroism not very well-known outside the LDS church. And thereby hangs the tale related in this volume.
The epic of the handcart companies followed on the initial founding of Salt Lake City, and the various other settlements in Utah Territory – a stretch of wilderness between the Great Salt Lake and the Wasatch Mountains, first encountered in 1846 by early travelers to California following a new route established by would-be explorer Lansford Hastings.
Brigham Young may not have been the dazzlingly charismatic, mesmerizing visionary that Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon or LDS church (Latter Day Saints) had been – but his talent for organization and giving scope to the talents of other people with the same set of skills and vision approached the supernatural. There were many off-beat religious movements, sects and idealistic communes in existence in the US in the first half of the 19th century – Millerites, Owenites, Shakers, the Onida and Amana Colonies, various Fourier societies – but the LDS which Brigham Young led was the most successful and longest-lasting of them all; it is still vigorous and growing, unlike most of the other 19th century idealist communities.
During the 1840s and 1850s, wagon train pioneers heading west to California and Oregon usually transported family, goods and required supplies in wagons most often pulled by two or three pairs of draft animals. That was also the means most often utilized in the first decade of emigration by LDS converts and believers to Utah. However, by the mid-1850s straited circumstances and shortages of funds hampered efforts to bring LDS emigrants to Utah, while at the same time an enormous backlog of converts built up in the British Isles and on the continent. Hundreds had come by ship to the east coast, and then by train as far as the mid-west – but then, how would they make the last 1,300 miles? Brigham Young conceived the notion of light two-wheeled carts, pulled by the converts themselves on the last leg between the railhead at Iowa City and Salt Lake City. Each cart company would be accompanied by a few regular wagons, carrying supplies, bedding and tents. And most wagon-train emigrants in earlier years had walked much of the trail anyway … so there was a cheaper solution for LDS believers, eager to get to their Zion.
So potent was the desire to bring these converts to Utah, matched by the organizing skills of the leadership, that it was accomplished. Not without some hardship and the usual setbacks, but three companies, for a total of 800 souls departed on their long journey in the summer of 1856. They were all shepherded by experienced teamsters, or returning LDS missionaries, all on foot and pulling their few possessions in carts (four or five persons to a cart was the estimation). Unfortunately, two more handcart parties, the Willie and Martin companies (so called for their leaders, James Willie and Edward Martin) departed in mid- or late August … against advice, and too late in the year to make it to Salt Lake City before winter set in. There were about a thousand men, women and children in the two groups, most being recent immigrants, unaccustomed to the frontier, and scantily equipped for bad weather.
A cascade of miscalculations by the various authorities at either end of the trail, bad decisions by leaders in the companies, and misfortune along the trail resulted in nine hundred men, women, children and babies becoming stranded by winter near present-day Caspar, Wyoming. One company lost the draft animals to pull their supply wagons to a stampede of buffalo. They had to lighten their carts – of heavy clothing and bedding that might have provided more shelter against winter … when winter then closed down on them. They were cold, starving, sickened and worn down by exposure to the elements and the hardships of walking and pulling the carts. A survivor later wrote that fathers pulled the carts with their small children on them, right up until the day before they died.
There was one fortunate aspect to this purgatory of cold and misery – rescue was on the way. A fast-moving small party of LDS missionaries returning to Salt Lake City had overtaken the two lagging parties. They arrived in Salt Lake City early in October, and informed LDS leaders that there were two more large parties still on the trail. Brigham Young and his leadership council were sensible men – and were horrified to receive this intelligence. They could look at the calendar and read a map. Volunteers for a rescue party were called for at once, and dispatched east along the trail. The Willie company was found first, camped on the Sweetwater River near South Pass. Half the rescue party stayed with them, while the other half pushed on to find the Martin company, a hundred miles farther east. The surviving members of that company had eaten nearly the last of their meagre rations, were exhausted, sick and starving, many of them crippled by frostbite. It was a tale of suffering with a toll of casualties only second to the Donner-Reed party, but without the gruesome element of cannibalism. At least 200 of the Willie and Martin companies died and were buried in mass graves along the way. Only an equally heroic rescue effort kept the toll from being even higher. It seems that most survivors rose above their suffering, viewing it later as a test of their faith and dedication. While only about 3,000 LDS converts journeyed to Salt Lake City in handcart companies before the arrival of the railway made that means of travel redundant, the experience of the handcart companies remains, as I mentioned earlier, a kind of LDS Iliad.
Through many dangers, toils, and snares,
I have already come;
’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.
John Newton – Amazing Grace