Patience Loader was still in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, making mantillas in a clothing store when the first Mormon handcarts set out from Iowa City. On June 9, 1856, a party of some 280 emigrants, nearly all of them from Great Britain, started pushing fifty-six two-wheeled wooden carriages westward. Under the command of thirty-seven-year-old Edmund Ellsworth, a son-in-law of Brigham Young who had been a member of the 1847 pioneer trek, the entourage was reinforced by a mere three wagons carrying the party’s tents and other gear. Two days later, a slightly smaller team of similar composition—220 pilgrims pushing forty-four handcarts, supplemented by a pair of wagons—started west as well. They were led by Daniel McArthur, a thirty-six-year-old American of Scottish heritage who was also a veteran of the 1,300-mile-long trail, having traversed it in 1848 in the second season of Mormon emigration to Salt Lake City.
During the nine years since the founding of the new Zion in the wilderness, tumultuous events had buffeted the would-be autonomous colony. From the very start, Young’s abiding goal had been to enlarge and expand what would soon become a mini-empire. Though still in poor health, he had rested only thirty-four days in Salt Lake City during July and August 1847 before setting out on the return trail to Winter Quarters, so that he might lead as many as 1,600 Saints to Zion in the wake of the vanguard of 148. Every convert in the eastern states or in Great Britain and Europe must be gathered to Zion as soon as possible—for who could know how soon the apocalypse might arrive, subjecting every denizen of Babylon to the tribulations of the Last Days.
There were political as well as spiritual reasons for building up the frontier theocracy. In settling the Great Basin while it was still technically part of Mexico (though that country’s hold on its northernmost provinces was feeble to the point of impotence), the Latter-day Saints had hoped, as they never could in New York, Ohio, Missouri, or Illinois, to flourish in splendid isolation, beyond the reach of their Gentile persecutors. But in the stroke of a pen, on February 2, 1848, the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo rendered Great Salt Lake City a breakaway colony planted on U.S. soil.
In March 1849, Brigham Young and his co-leaders declared the establishment of the State of Deseret (which Joseph Smith claimed meant “honey bee” and is pronounced DEZ-er-ette), with a “free and independent government.” The grandiosity of Mormon ambitions spoke in the very size of the domain the Saints claimed for Deseret—a region a thousand miles long from north to south (from the Wind River Range in Wyoming to the Gila River in Arizona) and eight hundred miles from east to west (from central Colorado to the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada of California). Deseret was twice as big as Texas.
In an uneasy 1850 compromise, the U.S. Congress whittled Deseret down to an official Utah Territory—still colossal, at 220,000 square miles two and a half times as large as the state of Utah today. The compromise appointed Brigham Young to a four-year term as the territory’s first governor.
The dream of Mormon autonomy, however, would be dashed not by Congress so much as by a completely unforeseeable event—the California gold rush. For the hordes of fortune-seekers who streamed west in 1849, the most logical route to the gold fields was the Mormon Trail through Salt Lake City. Young tried at first to divert this throng of roughnecks toward an alternative route that passed through Fort Hall, the Hudson’s Bay Company outpost in what is today Idaho. But it soon became clear that there were huge economic benefits to be gained from trade with miners who, desperate to get to California, found Salt Lake to be the only viable resupply point on the long and arduous trail. Charging these “golden pilgrims” what they regarded as exorbitant rates for flour and other basic foodstuffs, Utah settlers and merchants grew prosperous. In 1849 alone, more than ten thousand gold-seekers passed through Zion.
The official U.S. census for 1850 recorded the non-Indian population of the Utah Territory as 11,380. Only about half the inhabitants were living in Salt Lake City itself, for almost from the start Young had ordered the Saints to build new towns elsewhere in the territory. Within ten years of the pioneer party’s alighting in the Great Basin in 1847, there were no fewer than ninety-six Mormon villages and settlements, stretching from Fort Bridger in Wyoming to San Bernardino in California, inland from Los Angeles.
Ultimately, Young would never be content simply to establish an independent city-state in the wilderness. From 1830 on, with Joseph Smith’s founding of the religion after he had “translated” the Book of Mormon from the golden plates, the goal of the Saints was to convert the whole world. Young sincerely believed in such a destiny. In a typical 1855 pronouncement, he proclaimed, “We will roll on the Kingdom of our God, gather out the seed of Abraham, build the cities and temples of Zion, and establish the Kingdom of God to bear rule over all the earth.”
As the gold-miners flooded through Salt Lake City in 1849, and paused there for as little as a day or as long as several weeks to recuperate, curiosity about the odd Mormon sect bred familiarity, and familiarity often gave birth to contempt and alarm. Accounts of life and manners in Salt Lake City began to appear in Eastern newspapers. The government surveyor and explorer Captain John W. Gunnison spent the winter of 1849–50 in Salt Lake City. Fascinated by the religion and the society it had spawned, Gunnison published in 1852 the first book-length account of the colony written by a Gentile outsider, The Mormons, or, Latter-day Saints, in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. A remarkably balanced account, the book credits the Mormons with having established a “peaceful, industrious, and harmonious community.” At the same time, Gunnison unambiguously testified to the practice of polygamy among the Saints, still officially denied by the church: “That many have a large number of wives in Deserét, is perfectly manifest to any one residing long among them.”
In 1853, as he surveyed for a possible railroad route, Gunnison’s party was ambushed in a desolate region of western Utah, near the present-day hamlet of Hinckley. The captain and seven of his men were killed, their bodies mutilated. The so-called Gunnison Massacre was almost certainly perpetrated by a band of Pahvant Utes, in retaliation for the murder of members of their own tribe by a California-bound emigrant train unrelated to Gunnison. Yet because of the revelations in Gunnison’s book, and because the idea of a railroad running through Utah was anathema to Young (since it would jeopardize Zion’s isolation from the rest of the United States), it was suspected at the time—and is still argued today—that the killings were either carried out by Mormons or by Indians acting under secret Mormon orders. Those dark suspicions were given further credence in 1855 when, after a trial conducted by Gentiles but convened in Utah found three Pahvants guilty of manslaughter, they were sentenced to three years in prison and promptly allowed to escape.
Testimonies such as Gunnison’s about life in Utah, and particularly about polygamy, forced Young’s hand. In 1852, after twenty-one years of strenuous official denials, the President finally acknowledged publicly that “plural marriage” was sanctioned by Mormon doctrine. Meanwhile, from 1849 through 1856, with a certain naïveté, Young continued to lobby the U.S. government for the admission of Deseret to the union. Polygamy was too much, however, for the average American to swallow. It will be recalled that John C. Frémont, running for president as the first Republican candidate in 1856—the same Frémont who had surveyed the route the Mormons followed to the Great Basin, and whose report Young carried with him on the pioneer trek—campaigned on the pledge to abolish “those twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy and Slavery.”
As part of his statehood effort, Young conducted his own census of Deseret in 1856 and came up with a population of some 77,000. This number was wildly inflated: four years later, the U.S. census would count the true population of the Utah Territory at 40,273.
By 1855, a number of federal officials assigned to the territory had fled, their reasons ranging from sheer frustration to fear of being assassinated by Young’s shadowy “avenging angels,” the Danites. Tensions in the breakaway theocracy were stretched tighter than at any time since the pioneers had first arrived in the Great Basin. It was widely rumored that the U.S. government, instead of admitting Deseret to the union, would invade Utah with troops. This was no mere paranoid fantasy on the part of the Saints, for in 1857 just such an invasion would be launched by President James Buchanan.
In Young’s mind, the best deterrent against such a conquest was sheer numbers. In Great Britain, and increasingly in Scandinavia (particularly Denmark), thousands of converts longed to gather to Zion. Only their own poverty stood in the way.
It was in this fraught climate of fear and defiance that Brigham Young came up with the “divine” handcart scheme.
BETWEEN THE PIONEER trek of 1847 and the last wagon train in 1855, no fewer than 150 separate companies of Mormon emigrants made the long voyage across the plains to Salt Lake City. Some of these parties carried mainly freight, but the majority of them brought the tens of thousands of faithful Saints to the only place on earth where they would be safe from the iniquities of Babylon. Every such journey was perilous, and it was the rare exception for a party to come through without suffering several or more deaths. Disease far outweighed accidents as a cause of mortality. John Unruh, whose The Plains Across (1979) is the seminal study of overland migration to the West between 1840 and 1860, concludes that in 1850 and again in 1852, more than two thousand emigrants (both Gentile and Mormon) died of cholera on the Oregon and California Trails, most of them before they reached Fort Laramie.
The dead were usually hastily buried by the wayside. One 1852 emigrant bound for Oregon recorded in her diary the location of 401 fresh graves along the trail, estimating that she had discovered only about one-fifth of these dolorous sites. Taking the twenty-year period from 1840 to 1860 as a whole, Unruh calculates that the average mortality rate for an emigrant party was about 4 percent.
For the ever pragmatic Young, however, the critical flaw in the mechanism of gathering to Zion was not the mortality rate, but an economic one. Saints arriving in the Midwest from the Eastern states or from Europe faced the necessity of buying wagons and oxen to continue their journeys beyond the reach of Mississippi and Missouri River steamboats or of the railroad to Iowa City. By the mid-1850s, a wagon typically cost $90, a yoke of oxen $70. Since it took three yokes to pull a fully loaded wagon, the cost of outfitting a family for the trail easily reached $300. This sum was beyond the means of most Saints, especially the working-class converts in Britain and Scandinavia, who had to pay for their journeys from Liverpool to New York or Boston and their transportation to Iowa or Missouri before even contemplating the purchase of a wagon train.
To solve this problem, in 1849 Young and his fellow leaders invented the Perpetual Emigration Fund. In effect, the PEF lent the necessary money for the journey to Zion as an advance to the indigent emigrant, who once in Salt Lake City would pay off his debt through labor. Church officials characterized the PEF as an altruistic outpouring of funds to enable emigration. Its backers promised the recipients, “This will make the honest in heart rejoice, for they love to labor.”
What those backers failed to mention (and what PEF apologists today still minimize) were two mitigating circumstances. The first was that while church coffers supplied much of the money, a substantial part of it was raised by dunning all the less-than-impoverished Saints—especially in Britain and Scandinavia—to donate every shilling or krone they could spare to the PEF. Even more onerous was the fine-print stipulation that the loan would accrue an interest rate of 10 percent in Utah. Many a Saint would spend the rest of his life in the territory unable to pay back his PEF loan.
In sheer practical terms, the PEF worked: by the end of 1855, it had assisted 3,411 emigrants to get to Utah. But in that year Young reckoned the PEF debt as $100,000, owed to the church by 862 Saints who had not yet been able to pay back their advances. To the Prophet, this was an untenable situation.
As the Forty-niners had streamed through Salt Lake City on their way to the goldfields, the Saints had been astonished to see the odd but undeniably doughty fortune-seeker heading westward with nothing more than a shapeless pack on his back, or, even more bizarrely, pushing a wheelbarrow laden with his belongings. These tough eccentrics planted the germ of an idea. As early as 1852, Young had toyed with the handcart scheme, but it was not until 1855 that he announced it to his flock. As Apostle Franklin D. Richards, president of the European Mission, would rationalize the wheelbarrow-handcart comparison, “Many men have traveled the long and weary journey of 2000 miles from the Missouri river to California on foot, and destitute, in order to obtain a little of the shining dust—to worship at the shrine of Mammon. Who that appreciates the blessings of the Gospel would not be willing to endure as much and more, if necessary, in order to dwell with the righteous and reap the riches of eternal life?”
Adding urgency to Zion’s looming economic crisis was a disastrous crop failure in 1855. Not only drought but a plague of “Mormon crickets” (wingless grasshoppers) ravaged the corn and wheat fields, reducing the harvest to as little as a third of the normal yield. By winter, many residents were near starvation, digging up thistle roots and pigweed to fill their bellies. In 1848, a similar infestation of grasshoppers had threatened to wipe out the crops, but as if out of nowhere, hordes of seagulls had descended upon the fields and gorged themselves on the noxious insects, saving the fledgling colony. The advent of the seagulls, considered a divine miracle at the time, did not recur in 1855. (The state bird of Utah today is the California gull, Larus californicus.)
On October 29, 1855, in the Thirteenth General Epistle (a kind of Mormon state-of-the-union address issued once a year), Young and his two chief counselors announced the handcart plan. A month before that, the Prophet had written Franklin D. Richards in Liverpool a letter outlining the scheme in detail. In the December 22 issue of the Millennial Star, Richards published the letter along with his own extended editorial on the matter. His audience—the British Saints who would make up the vast majority of the handcart companies—would be far more directly affected by the consequences of the plan than the Saints who had already made it to Utah. (It was that issue of the Star that Patience Loader’s family had failed to read, as they sailed toward New York aboard the John J. Boyd in December.)
Whatever his faults, Brigham Young is widely credited with being a practical genius. Yet in retrospect, his September 30 letter to Richards reads as a triumph of starry-eyed wishful thinking over common sense. Retrospect may be an unfair lens through which to scrutinize what we now know as a catastrophe; but there is a strong and persistent belief in Mormon circles today that there was nothing intrinsically unsound about the handcart plan—that only the domino effect of a series of unlucky and unlikely events produced the disaster.
“I have been thinking how we should operate another year,” Young mused in his letter to Richards.
We cannot afford to purchase wagons and teams as in times past, I am consequently thrown back upon my old plan—to make hand-carts, and let the emigration foot it, and draw upon them the necessary supplies, having a cow or two for every ten. They can come just as quick, if not quicker, and much cheaper—can start earlier and escape the prevailing sickness which annually lays so many of our brethren in the dust.
From this guardedly optimistic prelude, Young soared into wild fancy:
If it is once tried you will find it will become the favourite method of crossing the plains; they will have nothing to do but come along, and I should not be surprised if a company of this kind should make the trip in sixty or seventy days. I do know that they can beat any ox train crossing the plains.
The Prophet seems to have forgotten that in 1847 it had taken his handpicked pioneer party, nearly all of whom were men in the prime of life, 108 days to travel from Winter Quarters to the Great Salt Lake, over a trail three hundred miles shorter than the one the handcart pioneers would be required to traverse.
Onward into delusion:
Fifteen miles a day will bring them through in 70 days, and after they get accustomed to it they will travel 20, 25, and even 30 with all ease, and no danger of giving out, but will continue to get stronger and stronger; the little ones and sick, if there are any, can be carried on the carts, but there will be none sick in a little time after they get started. There will have to be some few tents.
Young never claimed that the handcart plan was divinely inspired. Unlike Joseph Smith, who received direct revelations from God with startling frequency, Young would record only one in his lifetime—the original vision that the Saints would find their lasting Zion somewhere in the West.
Yet in the same issue of the Star, Richards leapt to the divine conclusion: “The plan is the device of inspiration,” he told the British Saints, “and the Lord will own and bless it.” Within months of its inception, the handcart scheme was widely believed by Mormons to have been passed down to Young in a revelation from God. Thus in the lyrics of a song written by Emily Hill Woodmansee (a twenty-year-old member of the fourth handcart company in 1856)—one of many songs the handcart pioneers would sing along the trail:
Oh, our faith goes with the hand-carts,
And they have our hearts’ best love;
’Tis a novel mode of traveling,
Devised by the Gods above.
Chorus:
Hurrah for the Camp of Israel!
Hurrah for the hand-cart scheme!
Hurrah! Hurrah! ’tis better far
Than the wagon and ox-team.
And Brigham’s their executive,
He told us the design;
And the Saints are proudly marching on,
Along the hand-cart line.
In his December 22 editorial in the Star, President Richards eagerly expanded upon Young’s enthusiasm for the “novel mode of traveling.” His rhetorical device was to evoke the tribulations endured by the pioneers who had employed the old method of crossing the plains:
They alone can realize what it is to get up on a sultry morning—spend an hour or two in driving up and yoking unruly cattle, and while impatiently waiting to start on the dusty, wearisome road, in order to accomplish the labours of the day in due time, hear the word passed around that some brother has an ox missing, then another hour, or perhaps half a day, is wasted, and finally, when ready to start, the pleasantest time for travelling has passed, during which a company with hand-carts would have performed the greater part of an ordinary day’s journey.
With only a few animals among their numbers, the handcart companies, Richards predicted, would present far less of a temptation to Indian raiders. The emigrants ought to be able to average fifteen miles a day, and so cover the trail in seventy days. (A curious calculation, this, for seventy times fifteen equals 1,050 miles—some 250 short, as Richards well knew, of the 1,300 miles that stretched between Iowa City and Salt Lake.) Like Young, Richards predicted that the handcart Saints would grow so fit they would actually speed up as they neared their goal, topping twenty miles per day. “We believe,” the Apostle wrote, “that experience will prove sixty days to be about the medium time that it will require to cross the plains.”
Above all, Richards emphasized, it was the sacred duty of the British Saints to travel by handcart. Invoking Muslim pilgrimages to Mecca and Hindu self-sacrifices in worship of their religion’s “imaginary deity,” he preached, “Then shall not the Saints, who have the revelations of heaven—the testimony of Jesus—the preludes of eternal joys…be ready to prove by their works that their faith is worth more than the life of the body—the riches of the world—the phantoms of paganism.”
About one advantage of the handcart plan, Richards and Young were dead right: it was substantially cheaper than emigration by wagon and ox team. LDS scholar Andrew D. Olsen calculates that, compared to the $300 a family needed to spend to buy a team and wagon, a handcart for five cost only $10 to $20.
With the plan announced to the Saints in Utah, to the Saints in the Eastern states (via a bulletin published in the New York–based The Mormon on December 1, 1855), and to the British Saints in the Millennial Star, the great “experiment” (as it was alternatively called, even by Young) was launched. The Prophet put Franklin Richards in charge of organizing the emigration from Liverpool. Apostle John Taylor, the president of the Eastern Mission, based in New York City, was to be in charge of receiving the European Saints upon their arrival in the New World and sending them on their way to Iowa. Taylor, who had been severely wounded in the Carthage jail when the mob had burst in and killed Joseph and Hyrum Smith in 1844, took his duties seriously. At once he dispatched Elders William H. Kimball (Heber Kimball’s son) and George D. Grant to Iowa City to superintend the building of the first hundred handcarts, then Elder Daniel Spencer, a missionary just returned from England, to take charge of the whole Iowa operation.
In the spring of 1856, however, at the very launching of the great handcart experiment, things started to go seriously wrong.
MORE MYTHOLOGIZING: according to a persistent legend, Edmund Ellsworth, who was finishing his two-year mission in England in 1855, had a dream in which he was called to lead a handcart party to Utah—this, before Young had announced his plan. Ellsworth’s prescient vision would serve for the Saints to buttress the idea that the scheme was indeed of divine origin.
In this case, the source of the myth was Ellsworth himself, who spoke to a huge gathering in Salt Lake City only two days after his company arrived there. With Young in the audience, he quoted the Prophet’s advice in the dream of more than a year before: “He further said, ‘The powers of the wicked would be exerted against me, and the force of the elements would be combined to overthrow me, as was the case with the companies which first left Nauvoo’; and asked, ‘Can you be faithful before God, and lead your brethren home to Zion by means of hand-carts?’”
Most of the British Saints in the Ellsworth and McArthur Companies sailed to America aboard the Enoch Train, arriving in Boston on April 30, 1856. By steamer they reached New York the following day, and the day after that set off by train for Iowa City, where they alighted, ready to begin their handcart trek, on May 12.
Except that there were no handcarts waiting for them—despite the efforts of Apostle John Taylor and other Mormon officials to contract for the building by local carpenters of that initial fleet of one hundred carriages. No scholar has yet explained this monumental oversight. Daniel Spencer had arrived in Iowa City on April 23, almost three weeks before the Ellsworth and McArthur emigrants. That very day, he wrote cryptically in his journal, “Examined the handcarts contracted by G. D. Grant which I did not much like.” Did Spencer simply discard or refuse to pay for these inadequate vehicles?
In any event, after the five hundred Saints in the two companies reached Iowa City, they would be forced to linger there for four weeks as they built their own handcarts. Even the more sharp-eyed diarists among these pilgrims seem to have accepted this glitch with a glum fatalism. Thus Archer Walters, a skilled carpenter who would perform much of the building of the handcarts, to his diary:
Monday [May] 19th Went into the city of Iowa. Short of lumber…. [Tuesday] 20th Went to work to make hand carts. Was not very well. Worked 10 hours.
The most serious consequence of the handcart shortage was that the new, hastily constructed contraptions had to be built of green, not seasoned, timber. On the trail, the wood would warp, split, and shrink, necessitating frequent stops for jury-rigged repairs.
It is a testimony either to the converts’ loyal obedience to their leaders, or to their utter ignorance of just what kind of ordeal lay ahead of them, that in all the diaries and reminiscences from the first two handcart companies later collected in the LDS Archives, there is scarcely a word of complaint (not to mention recrimination) about the failure of the officials to have handcarts ready in Iowa City, or about the obligation for the emigrants to build the carts themselves out of unseasoned wood. At last, on June 9, Ellsworth’s party set off; McArthur’s followed two days later.
Ellsworth would prove himself something of a tyrant on the trail, as well as a fanatic proponent of handcart travel once he reached Salt Lake City. McArthur seemed, in contrast, to lead by charismatic example. His team earned the nickname of the “Crack Company,” in homage to its members’ pluck, fitness, and high spirits. Ellsworth had demanded that his company be allowed to move out first, a preemption that McArthur bore with good grace. Even on the trail, Ellsworth had to be at the head of the caravan. On July 1, Archer Walters, the English craftsman whose diary rarely has a harsh word for anyone, complained about “Bro. Ellsworth always going first which causes many of the brothers to have hard feeling.”
The Crack Company soon caught up with Ellsworth’s slightly balkier entourage, and the two parties traveled together across Iowa. A friendly but heated rivalry between the two teams developed early on, accentuated by the makeup of their personnel—Ellsworth’s mostly English Saints, McArthur’s nearly all Scots. Indeed, the first and second companies would play a grueling game of tag and catch-up all the way to Salt Lake City.
The 270-mile passage across Iowa, known by now to be by far the easiest segment of the long trail, nonetheless unfolded in a grim procession, as with alarming regularity pilgrims (mostly children) died by the wayside. Archer Walters, whose duty it was to craft coffins for the victims, recorded their deaths (which began even before the party left Iowa City) in laconic diary entries:
Friday [June] 6th Made another child’s coffin….
Sunday 15th Got up about 4 o’clock to make a coffin for my brother, John Lee’s son name William Lee, aged 12 years. Meetings as usual, and at the same time had to make another coffin for Sister Prator’s child…. Went and buried them by moonlight at Bear Creek….
Tuesday 17th Traveled about 17 miles; pitched tent. Made a little coffin for Bro. Job Welling’s son and mended a hand cart wheel….
Saturday 21st…Bro. (Jas.) Bower died about 6 o’clock; from Birmingham Conference. Went to buy the wood to make the coffin but the kind farmer gave me the wood and nails….
Wednesday [July] 2nd Rose about 5 o’clock after sleeping in wet clothes, and made a coffin for Bro. Card…for his daughter named ______ Card, aged ______….
Thursday 3rd Ever to be remembered. Bro Card gave me ½ dollar for making his daughter’s coffin.
With regularity, Walters records the nearly daily stops to repair broken handcarts. Ever the realist, McArthur was well aware of the inadequacy of his flimsy carriages. In a memoir written just a few months after he arrived in Salt Lake, the leader of the Crack Company vividly evoked this ordeal by repair:
Our carts, when we started, were in an awful fix. They mowed [moaned] and growled, screeched and squealed, so that a person could hear them for miles. You may think this is stretching things a little too much, but it is a fact, and we had them to eternally patch, mornings, noons and nights.
Edmund Ellsworth, in contrast, was hard put to admit that anything was amiss. “June 9th 1856. At 5 P.M. the carts were in Motion proceeding zion wards,” he crowed in the official journal, kept by scribe Andrew Galloway. “The Saints were in excellent spirits bound zion wards. the camp travelled about 4 Miles and pitched their tents. all well.”
And when the Saints were not in excellent spirits, Ellsworth responded with a tongue-lashing. As John Oakley, a sub-captain of the company and Ellsworth’s unwavering yes-man, recorded on June 11:
Prest E spoke said he did not want to hear any more grumbling from this time on that the Em[igratio]n had cost more than expected consequently Prest Spencer was short of means so that we could not expect Sugar & Meat &c plentifully. said much depended on the success of this Co. if we failed it would throw a damper in the gathering of Israel we are responsible for it will be our own faults if we fail for the Prophet Brigham has Said it can be done. said he would rather the people of this camp would cut open his heart & drink his hearts blood than to hear any more grumbling for the judgements of the almighty would be upon us.
According to Oakley, who no doubt mirrored Ellsworth’s views on the matter, when the handcarts broke down, it was due not to faulty design but to carelessness on the part of their handlers.
Along with deaths by the wayside, both parties suffered losses in the form of what Mormon leaders called “dropouts” or “backouts”—men, women, and children who, finding the toil unsupportable or their faith weakening, chose to return to Iowa City (or later, to stay in Florence) rather than complete the trek. That pressure from peers and leaders not to abandon the pilgrimage was intense emerges in the poignant early entries of one of the McArthur Company’s most faithful diarists, Twiss Bermingham, an Irish Saint about twenty-six years old who was accompanied by his wife and three children aged eight and younger. On June 12, only the second day of his party’s journey,
We traveled 12 miles, starting at 9:30 o’clock and camped at 1 o’clock. The day was very hot and windy. The dust flew so thick that we could not see each other 1 yard distant…. This day was so very severe that Brother Larens and myself with our families thought we could not go on with safety to ourselves and families and drag hand carts with about 250 lbs. of luggage on them, and so determined to return to Iowa City to try and procure a [wagon] team to go through with.
Bermingham paid a teamster $5 to carry his family back to Iowa City. There, on the following day, a fellow Saint exhorted the man to get back on the trail. Without further comment in his diary, the Irishman harnessed his family back to their handcart. On June 14, the Berminghams caught up with the McArthur train, thirty-six miles out of Iowa City.
Since no comprehensive rosters of any of the handcart companies were ever compiled, it is very hard to calculate the number of dropouts. Combing genealogical records, historians LeRoy and Ann Hafen assert that the Ellsworth Company had thirty-three dropouts among its 280 emigrants. In a letter to the New York newspaper The Mormon, one J. H. Latey, a loyal Saint resident in Florence, estimated that the average back-out toll was “from five to fifty in a company of 300.” Latey was disgusted by these defections, editorializing,
Those weak in the faith soon find those who will make them weaker; those who have backed out before them come up with their long faces, smooth words, and melancholy tone, prating away their words of comfort (?), and if they will only go away with them there is no end of the money and comfort they are going to have, and a team, ONLY NEXT SPRING, to ride in and go to the Valley.
Since observers such as Latey and the Hafens were at pains to minimize dropping out, the actual number of backouts was probably higher than their estimates.
Among the leaders of the handcart companies, there was a prevalent conviction that the process of dropping out was the Lord’s way of separating the chaff from the wheat. John Oakley, Ellsworth’s sub-captain, captures this sanctimonious leitmotif as he records the sermons in which emigration officials harangued his company on June 6, three days before its departure from Iowa City:
Eld: Spencer Tyler & Furgesen spoke of the high anticipation thought & solicitude for the hand cart co. & how thankfull those ought to be who were about to start out. Prest S said how softly we all ought to walk before the Lord & before angles who are watching us with most anxious solicitude especially for this company. Bro. Fergusen said shame on him or her who would propecy that the H Cart Co. would not go through when Bro. Brigham had said they shall—said it seem it may be now as it has been the Lord has killed off one half of the people to scare the other half to do right.
This vein of righteousness, which Brigham Young himself was wont to employ in his speeches in Salt Lake City, readily produced a kind of circular argument: whoever dropped out or even showed faintness of heart was judged to have been morally deficient from the start. Thus on June 20, in Oakley’s diary, “One Bro Loyd and family (Welsh) Complained that the Hand Cart pulling was too hard & stoped after pulling to the top of a hill Bro. L likes a full belly & plenty of Whiskey.” Five days later, Oakley joined another sub-captain and Ellsworth to deliver a homily on “lousiness” to that evening’s camp meeting: “Cautioned against to freequent talking. & the purpose of the Lord in having us travel in this way it was not that He had not sufficient Cattle &c but He wished to decipline & prove us.”
Heartless though it seems, Oakley’s scorn for dropouts extended with a kind of Orwellian logic to those who were so faithless as to collapse and die along the trail. Thus:
Sun. [September] 7th…A Bro. Geo. Liddiard was taken verry ill & remained back some 5 mi. I took the horse & went after him found him dying. I hasted back to camp it was then dark—& came back in com. with Bro. Ira Hinkley & Thos Fowler with a waggon & fetched the body he died an hour after we put him in the waggon…. According to Bro. Liddiard’s own testimony he has been a soldier in the British Army & lived a verry life of debauchery My opinion is that the remains of venereal disease & want of his accustomed stimulous drinks was the cause of his stopping here.
Sat. [September] 13th…A sis Mary Mayo died of disentery She had little faith & had grumbled much (age 65).
W. [September] 17th Bro Jas Birch died of disentery (age 28) burried him by the side of the road near the river on the bluff Came 11 mi. he had murmured considerable.
Adding to the emigrants’ hardships were the chronically insufficient rations. The main daily staple for adults in the Ellsworth Company was between one-half and one pound of flour. In addition, the pilgrims were each given two ounces of rice, three ounces of sugar, and one-half pound of bacon per week. Children got even less food. Obviously, such a diet was far too little to maintain health even in sedentary humans, much less in those exerting themselves to the utmost every day.
Archer Walters’s clipped diary entries capture the agonies of constant hunger. “Very faint for the (lack) of food,” he reports himself on June 26, only a little more than two weeks along the trail. On July 1: “My children cry with hunger and it grieves me and makes me cross.” At Fort Laramie on August 24, Walters traded a dagger he had carried all the way from England “for a piece of bacon an salt.” He also spent a dollar and a quarter to buy bacon and cornmeal, “and Henry [Walters’s sixteen-year-old son] and me began to eat it raw we was so hungry.”
By August, hunger had driven some of the Ellsworth emigrants to stealing food from their supply wagons. When their leader discovered the thefts, he flew into a rage. John Oakley dutifully recorded Ellsworth’s tirade on August 10: “Prest E told the camp he would lead them no further unless they would do better accused them of stealing one anothers provisions hipocritically pretending sick to ride & c & c told them to put the coat on if it fitted & he knew it did some…. The Camp voted to do better.” Apparently the pilfering continued, however, for on August 24, Archer Walters quoted the company president as vowing that “those that had robbed the hand carts, or wagons, unless they repent their flesh would rot from their bones and go to Hell.”
All five 1856 handcart companies suffered comparable shortages of food. What was the ultimate rationale for feeding the emigrants such inadequate provisions? In an iconoclastic study, historian Will Bagley declares that the bottom line was Brigham Young’s “obsessive pennypinching.” But it may be that woefully short rations were built into the divine handcart scheme, since the carriages could carry only so much baggage and the few wagons that accompanied the trains were too full of tents and other crucial gear to take on the burden of additional tons of flour and sugar and bacon and rice. Archer Walters thought (or perhaps was told) as much, for on August 11 he sighed, “Very weak myself. I expect it is the short rations: ¾ of a lb. of flour per day. It is but little but it is as much as the oxen teams that we have could draw from St. Florence.”
Similarly, all the handcart pioneers were strictly limited to seventeen pounds of personal baggage per man or woman, and as little as ten pounds per child. This draconian regulation would contribute even more fundamentally to the catastrophe that would soon unfold than would the shortage of food. One searches the voluminous documentary record of the handcart emigration in vain for a clear statement of how the seventeen-pound limit was arrived at, or who first imposed it. That it was rigorously enforced, however, emerges in many a diary entry. The punitive John Oakley, who performed some of the weighing, railed against “those whom we suspected of Keeping more than the 17 lbs & had Idols such as Boxes Books &c.”
Nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Jones, however—one of two young Mary Anns who would marry Captain Ellsworth shortly after arriving in Salt Lake City—could see a certain humor in the Saints’ struggle with the weight limit:
We were allowed 17 lbs. of baggage each, that meant clothes beding cooking utensils etc, When the brethern came to weigh our things some wanted to take more than alowed so put on extra clothes so that some that wore real thin soon became stout and as soon as the weighing was over put the extra clothes in the hand cart again but that did not last long for in a few days we were called upon to have all weighed again & quite a few were found with more than alowed. One old Sister carried a teapot & calendar [collander] on her apron strings all the way to Salt Lake. Another Sister carried a hat box full of things but she died on the way.
ON JULY 8, the first two handcart companies finally reached Florence. They had been thirty (Ellsworth) and twenty-eight (McArthur) days on the trail across Iowa, averaging not the fifteen (or twenty or thirty) miles a day the Prophet had predicted, but only about nine. “On the arrival of the company in Florence,” Twiss Bermingham of the McArthur Company dryly recorded, “the emigrants were, as a rule, very tired. We found some of Bro. Ellsworth’s Company lying insensible on the road.”
In Florence, the last bastion of Mormon settlement before Salt Lake, the Ellsworth Company laid over for nine days, as the Saints tried to fix their dilapidated carts. While in Florence, John Oakley engaged in an impromptu debate with several “apostates” and “half Mormons” who, appalled by the hardship of handcart travel, tried to “entice whom they could to stop in their glorious place showing especial regard for the sisters—one said to me God never required such hard things as drawing a hand cart.” Oakley had a ready rejoinder: “I told him he had not read his Book right He required (what he the apostate would call hard) his Only Begotten to do a harder thing than draw a hand cart.”
In Florence, the McArthur party tarried even longer than Ellsworth’s—sixteen full days—as they repaired carts and nursed their bodies back to health. Once again, the company’s leader gallantly acceded to Ellsworth’s insistence on going first on the trail. When McArthur’s party headed west on July 24, the Scots were a full week behind their English rivals.
Unlikely though it may seem, no author would publish a history of the handcart emigration before LeRoy and Ann Hafen’s 1960 volume, Handcarts to Zion. The Hafens (brother and sister) performed a valuable service in gathering together original documents, although since 1960 many more primary sources have come to light. Their narrative, however, is cursory at best, and the whole book is vitiated by the Hafens’ partisan point of view: they consistently minimize the horrors of the emigration, while striving to see it as a heroic rather than a tragic saga. (As a Swiss girl of six, the Hafens’ mother had come to Zion in the last of all the handcart companies, in 1860.)
Sadly, we can be sure that nothing like a comprehensive history of the strangest “experiment” in all the annals of westward migration will ever be written. Too many details and episodes have fallen for good between the cracks. Yet in gathering together every scrap of firsthand testimony researchers can find, and in making those documents available to the general public (as they were not, for instance, in the 1960s, when Wallace Stegner wrote his mildly skeptical The Gathering of Zion), the LDS Archives in Salt Lake City have performed a noble service in the name of disinterested scholarship.
Thanks to those archives, and to the sharp eyes of weary pilgrims, poignant aspects of the handcart ordeal can be rescued from oblivion. In the McArthur Company, for instance, only a single diarist—Thordur Didriksson, from Iceland—bothered to record an aspect of the daily regimen that must have been heart-wrenching for every Saint in the party:
There were 30 children in the company and early every morning they were sent on ahead of the grownups all in one bunch. Some of them had very little clothing but they all wore hats. They were driven along with willows and had to keep walking as long as they could. No use to cry or complain. But along during the day when it was hot they were allowed to rest and were given food. They were often 2 or 3 miles ahead of us. It was hard for parents to see their little 5 and 6 year olds driven along like sheep.
Similarly, in Florence the Ellsworth Company took on some thirty new recruits. They are glancingly referred to as “Italian Saints,” but the names of the few that have been preserved look French (e.g., an emigrant recorded as “Peter Stalle,” whose real name was something like Jean-Pierre Staley). How the “Italians” got to Florence is lost to history: most likely they had come up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers by steamboat. Their addition to the party is not even mentioned in the official Ellsworth Company journal, nor are their names on the partial roster in that journal.
The cold-eyed John Oakley, however, recorded on July 17, “Some 30 Italians were added to our Com. 14 cows added to our fit out also 9 beef cattle & team.” Then, on August 17:
One Bro. Rosing an Italien much reduced for want of his accustomed beverage (Brandy) was left behind the teams having taken a different road I went back having taken the horse out of the team to do so intending to put him on the horse but found him to feeble after a thougher trial so I came to the waggons (1 mi.) took one the mule teams & came to get him had to lift him in he died an hour after I lifted him in the waggon.
It would remain for a single informant—a descendant of Jean-Pierre Staley named Margaret Barker, who was interviewed many decades later—to flesh out the picture of this shadowy cadre of “Italian” Saints:
The Mr. Ellsworth who had charge of the company, for some reason, badly mistreated the French saints, even depriving them of food. It is claimed, by the children of Pierre (Peter) Stalle that he died of starvation. It is claimed that Mr. Ellsworth sold part of the food that should have gone to the saints. When Pierre Stalle was dying, his wife climbed to the wagon to have a few last words with her husband. Ellsworth came with a rope and cruelly whipped her until she was forced to get down. This was verified by the French families who came. “The captain was a very mean man. At one time a man died and they whipped and kicked him and threw him under the tent. His wife took his shoes to wear and some lady called her a dirty Italian.”
In this reminiscence, Margaret Barker was no doubt calling upon tales handed down by family and friends among the French contingent, and so her own testimony about Ellsworth’s brutal treatment of these foreigners may itself be unreliable. Yet even the loyal sub-captain John Oakley corroborates such a portrayal of Ellsworth, as in his September 12 diary entry: “I whiped a man for stubbornly refusing to walk this according to my presidents orders.”
As July waned, both companies trudged on, following the Platte River, the Ellsworth party staying a few days ahead of McArthur’s. The good trail the Saints had followed across Iowa gave out, as the emigrants battled with the notorious sand hills of Nebraska. In the worst of the going, the handcarts sank up to the wheel hubs in sand. The toil was terrible, as Twiss Bermingham’s diary entry for August 3 makes clear:
We started at 5 o’clock without any breakfast, and had to pull the carts through 6 miles of heavy sand. Some places the wheels were up to the boxes, and I was so weak from thirst and hunger and being exhausted with the pain of the boils that I was obliged to lie down several times, and many others had to do the same. Some fell down.—I was obliged to take the children and put them on the handcart and urge them along the road in order to make them keep up.
On July 26, Henry Walker—a fifty-eight-year-old English laborer in the Ellsworth Company—was struck and killed by lightning. Wrote Archer Walters, “I put the body, with the help of others, on the hand cart and pulled him to camp and buried him without coffin for there was no boards to be had.” Walker left his wife and children to push on toward Zion without him. Three other emigrants were injured by the lightning bolt, including a boy who was badly burned, but they survived and were able to continue.
On August 16, the McArthur party suffered what Twiss Bermingham called “the most severe day’s journey we have had since we started”—twenty miles of arduous pulling across sand hills interspersed with frequent fords of streams tributary to the Platte. On that same day, a double calamity turned into what many of the Saints regarded as a double miracle.
First, an elderly Scotswoman named Mary Bathgate was bitten by a rattlesnake. “Before half an hour,” Bermingham averred, “her leg had swelled to four times its thickness.” In his account of the journey written a few months after arriving in Salt Lake, Daniel McArthur detailed the emergency treatment of the victim:
Sister Bathgate sent a little girl back to me as quickly as possible to have me and Brothers Leonard and Crandall come with all haste, and bring the oil with us, for she was bitten badly. As soon as we heard the news, we left all things, and, with the oil, we went post haste. When we got to her she was quite sick, but said that there was power in the Priesthood, and she knew it. So we took a pocket knife and cut the wound larger, squeezed out all the bad blood we could, and there was considerable, for she had forethought enough to tie her garter around her leg above the wound to stop the circulation of the blood. We then took and anointed her leg and head, and laid our hands on her in the name of Jesus and felt to rebuke the influence of the poison, and she felt full of faith.
We then told her that she must get into the wagon, so she called witnesses to prove that she did not get into the wagon until she was compelled to by the cursed snake. We started on and traveled about two miles, when we stopped to take some refreshments. Sister Bathgate continued to be quite sick, but was full of faith.
Another member of the party, one Mary B. Crandal, wrote a beguiling portrait of the Scotswoman in a memoir published almost forty years after the trek. “We all called her Mother Bathgate, for she must have been upwards of sixty,” Crandal wrote. “She told me she had been in the coal-pits for forty years. She would travel on ahead and swing her cane and shout, ‘Hurree for the handkerts.’” After she reached Salt Lake City, Mary Bathgate lived on for many years. “She was a natural poet,” Crandal recalled. “She composed some verses on her miraculous healing from the bite of the snake. I promised to write them for her but never did so. She could not write herself. How many things we neglect that we wish in after years we had not!”
Compounding the near-tragedy was the reckless act of Bathgate’s best friend. In McArthur’s telling,
As the word was given for the teams to start, old Sister Isabella Park ran in before the wagon to see how her companion was. The driver, not seeing her, hallooed at his team and they being quick to mind, Sister Park could not get out of the way, and the fore wheel struck her and threw her down and passed over both her hips. Brother Leonard grabbed hold of her to pull her out of the way, before the hind wheel could catch her. He only got her out part way and the hind wheels passed over her ankles. We all thought that she would be all mashed to pieces, but to the joy of us all, there was not a bone broken, although the wagon had something like two tons burden on it, a load for 4 yoke of oxen. We went right to work and applied the same medicine to her that we did to the sister who was bitten by the rattlesnake, and although quite sore for a few days, Sister Park got better, so that she was on the tramp before we got into this Valley, and Sister Bathgate was right by her side, to cheer her up.
Among the emigrants in both the Ellsworth and McArthur Companies, there were quite a few such spunky, cheerful, and doggedly determined souls. Many of them were women. Twenty-one-year-old Mary B. Crandal (Mary Brannagan at the time), from Ireland, was one. Retrospect may have added a rosy glow, but in 1895 Crandal would look back on the trek and vow, “We all felt well and I enjoyed myself as well as I ever did in my life, only sometimes I would have liked something more to eat.”
DESPITE THE JAUNTY memoirs of such pioneers as Crandal, it is clear that somewhere near the boundary between today’s states of Nebraska and Wyoming, toward the end of August, both the Ellsworth and McArthur Companies were in serious trouble. What saved the parties was the single most vital (and most foresighted) component of the divine handcart plan.
In Salt Lake City, Brigham Young and his chief counselors had anticipated that the rations issued to the first two handcart companies would be inadequate to sustain them on the 1,300-mile journey to Zion. To relieve the shortage, the authorities had sent out wagon teams laden with supplies (mostly flour), traveling east along the Mormon Trail in expectation of intercepting the handcart companies.
On August 31, near Deer Creek, a small southern tributary of the North Platte, the resupply train met the Ellsworth party. The surviving diaries of the handcart pioneers are surprisingly matter-of-fact about this potentially life-saving rendezvous. Perhaps the morale of the company was so low at that point that not even the gift of a thousand pounds of flour could stir the emigrants to exultation. Deaths, in fact, had begun to seem almost routine occurrences. One poor Englishman, fifty-one-year-old Robert Stoddart, had the bad luck to die only an hour before the Ellsworth Company met the resupply train. He was buried at Deer Creek, leaving his wife, his fourteen-year-old son, and his ten-and six-year-old daughters to travel on to Zion without him. Two days later another Englishman, sixty-five-year-old Walter Sanders, died and was promptly buried beside the trail.
Today, on the site of the Deer Creek resupply, stands the sleepy town of Glenrock, Wyoming. Sylvan the place remains, a woody hollow of an oasis in the bleak prairie stretching north and south of the meandering Platte. The only historical monument in Glenrock, however, says nothing about the handcart companies, choosing instead to celebrate the trading post–cum–saloon of former mountain man Joseph Bissonette (built in 1857) and a short-lived Pony Express station from 1860 to 1861.
The resupply expedition was so well organized that another thousand pounds of flour was waiting for the McArthur Company when it reached Deer Creek on September 2. A few months later, McArthur would remember how this sudden (and apparently unexpected) boon had “caused the hearts of the saints to be cheered up greatly.” Not content with a single mission of mercy, the authorities in Salt Lake had sent out a second wagon train a couple of weeks after the first. Thus, farther west along the trail, the Ellsworth and the McArthur Companies each received another thousand pounds of precious flour, the latter only twelve days after their first resupply, as they camped on Pacific Creek, now a mere 228 miles short of Salt Lake City.
Twiss Bermingham, however, recorded in his diary a detail about the resupply mission that neither the authorities in Salt Lake nor the two company captains bothered to mention. Once they arrived in Zion, the Saints would be expected to pay for the flour that had kept them alive, at the rate of 18 cents per pound.
The dates of the Deer Creek resupplies indicate that, having set out from Florence a full week after the Ellsworth Company, McArthur’s Crack Company had been steadily gaining on its rivals, until now it was only two days behind. Exhausted though the emigrants were, stopping regularly to rest and bury their dead, the race between the English and Scottish Saints was on.
In early September, both parties at last left the North Platte to follow the Sweetwater River to its headwaters near South Pass. On September 11, having pushed hard into the night, the hares finally caught the tortoises, on Alkali Creek, about twenty miles west of today’s nearly derelict one-horse town of Jeffrey City, Wyoming. With laconic resignation, Ellsworth dictated this turn of events to his company’s official journal: “About 11 P.M. Brother McArthur’s company came up. They had traveled nearly night and day to overtake us.”
Perhaps magnanimously, McArthur declined to mention his catch-up feat in the reminiscence he wrote a few months later. But that it was a dramatically orchestrated coup emerges in the gloating memory of it that Phyllis Hardie Ferguson, a member of the McArthur Company, reported many years later. Ferguson claimed that her party traveled thirty-two miles that day and night to overtake the Ellsworth team.
When it became quite dark, we reached the top of a high hill, where by Captain McArthur’s instructions we left the handcarts, and quietly walked down towards the blazing camp fires. Just before we reached the Ellsworth company, we all began to shout, “Hurrah for the handcarts!”
Captain Ellsworth, thinking it was the overland mail coach, in which was Franklin D. Richards, the returning president of the European mission, and others who were expected, hurriedly called out the band to give them glad welcome. Imagine his chagrin when he discovered that his welcome was given to the Scotch handcart company, who had overtaken him! But he was a good man, and has long years ago ended his life’s journey. Peace to his ashes! The English people, though just as good and zealous, had not the endurance that we had, and it was difficult for them to be first.
Ferguson goes on to claim that the McArthur party now camped for two weeks at Alkali Creek, once more granting Ellsworth the priority on the trail that he so fiercely craved. This cannot be true, however: McArthur’s own report has his company reaching Pacific Creek, some forty miles west of Alkali, only three days after the surprise rendezvous.
For all the hijinks and spirited competition this race along the trail seems to imply, and despite the invigoration provided by the blessed gift of flour, both parties trudged on as many of their members grew weaker and sicker. Twiss Bermingham, who had so faithfully jotted his party’s doings into his diary from the Iowa City start onward, found himself unable to make a single entry between September 5 and 21, and none after the 21st. Archer Walters, the Ellsworth Company coffin-maker, recorded the Wyoming toll:
Tuesday 2nd Platt River. Travelled 19 miles. Walter Sanderson, aged 56, died….
Sunday 7th Travelled 26 miles. Bro. Nipras died. Left on the road….
Sunday 14th Travelled 3 miles. Camped to mend hand carts and women to wash. Sister Mayer died.
After that September 14 entry, Walters’s own diary breaks off, not to be resumed.
Galvanized by the humiliation of McArthur’s catching him up, Ellsworth drove his company onward with furious resolve. On September 18, a party of missionaries from Salt Lake who were returning to England crossed paths with the Ellsworth entourage. Writing later for the Millennial Star, Thomas Bullock sketched a rousing vignette of this meeting on the trail:
September 18th, we were very agreeably surprised by suddenly coming upon the advance train of hand-carts, composed of about 300 persons, traveling gently up the hill west of Green river, led by Elder Edmund Ellsworth. As the two companies approached each other, the camp of missionaries formed in line, and gave three loud Hosannahs, with the waving of hats, which was heartily led by Elder P. Pratt, responded to by loud greetings from the Saints of the hand-cart train, who unitedly made the hills and valleys resound with shouts of gladness; the memory of this scene will never be forgotten by any person present.
Ellsworth’s pace, however, was taking its toll. On September 17, another English Saint, twenty-eight-year-old James Birch, died of diarrhea; on the 22nd, yet another, identified only as “one man of the Italian brethren.” John Oakley, who had pitilessly attributed the weaknesses and even the deaths of others to moral failings, came close to death himself. On September 24, “I had to go back 3 mi. in the dark to look for one of the teams & waggon & felt all the time that some one might have to come to look after me for I was much exhausted through the severe toil of the day—my head was dizzy.” Oakley attributed his survival to “much assistance from an unseen source.” He did not speculate what sorts of character flaws might have contributed to his own debilitation.
With the scent of Zion in his nostrils, sometimes traveling miles ahead of the main body of his company, on September 25 Ellsworth drove his party twenty miles through Echo Canyon, crossing the stream eleven times, and then over a high pass. “Crossed the bigg Mountain in 2 hours & 55 minutes,” he bragged in the official journal. Just how dangerous a passage this was emerges in a vivid account by William Butler, a thirty-year-old sub-captain:
When we got to Echo Kanyon, there came another heavy thunderstorm. litghtening and heavy rains knight coming on and the people very weary travelling. our Captain persisted in continuing our journey over a divide, which made it very hard to ascend and descend a distance of six miles, and all in the dark—and no light only as the lightening flashed the rain pouring down in torrents all the time.—I had been taken sick the day before which made me very weak and unable to follow the train and drive the stock. my wife Emma had to take and drive the stock for me.—I was left behind to travel or die.—after a while I rose on my feet and lifted my voice with uplifted hands in token of the priesthood, and said these words.—having been commissioned by the King of Kings.—I command this spirit to let loose his grasp…. from this very moment the pain left me and I was able to resume my journey, it being very dark, insomuch that I could not see the road. I fell down a great many times over all manner of rocks, steep places and holes, after awhile I came to an Italian with his little girl. I tried to get him to come along with his hand cart, but not understanding his language, nor he mine, so he did not follow me.—he died during the night, and they fetched him into camp in the morning.—soon after leaving the Italian I came across a young english girl by the name of Clark. who was alone and had lost her way—she was crying and in great trouble.—I went to her, and fetched her into Camp,—the gratitude of the girl and her parents and relatives was unbounded towards one for what I had done.—she considered that I had saved her life and next day we gathered up the dead and buried them.
By September 25, word was abroad in Salt Lake that the first handcart party was camped at the foot of Little Mountain, just a few miles northeast of the city. Resident Saints rode out to greet the Ellsworth Company and escort it the rest of the way. Brigham Young had organized a gala welcome. Charles Treseder, a young man living in Salt Lake, wrote his parents in New Jersey a letter detailing the arrival and reception:
Presidents Brigham Young, and H. C. Kimball escorted by the minute men and a company of Lancers, followed by as many of the citizens as could turn out—some in vehicles and some on foot, with the two bands, to welcome the hand-carts and they did not forget to take them something to eat.
President Brigham Young, and Kimball went part way up the little mountain in a buggy and met them coming down. Bro. Brigham was introduced to them as they formed in line, and he was so much affected with the spectacle, he could only say: My good people I am glad to see you, God bless you all. He hurried away, he could say no more. The Salt Lake Brethren then gave the emigrants plenty to eat and they once more went to their hand-carts and made the last start. As they came down the bench you could scarcely see them for the dust. When they entered the city, the folks came running from every quarter to get a glimpse of the long-looked-for hand-carts.
Like many another resident, Treseder was overcome by the joyous spectacle.
I shall never forget the feeling that ran through my whole system as I caught the first sight of them. The first hand-cart was drawn by a man and his wife, they had a little flag on it, on which were the words: “Our President—may the unity of the Saints ever show the wisdom of his counsels.”
The next hand-cart was drawn by three young women…. The tears rolled down the cheek of many a man who you would have thought would not, could not, shed a tear; but the scene was exciting in the extreme and most everybody felt sympathetic and joyous. I could scare refrain from tears. Richard [Charles’s brother] cried like a child, and amongst the women the crying was pretty near universal.
Mary Powell Sabin, a twelve-year-old Welsh girl in the Ellsworth party, later recalled that Brigham Young himself and several Apostles gave the emigrants their first food—watermelons: “Pres. Young told us to eat moderately of the mellon, to eat the pink, not to eat into the green.” The Prophet then spoke to the whole company. “He told us that we had fulfilled a prophecy. He also said that although we had endured privations and hunger on the plains we should never again feel the pangs of starvation if we would do right and live right.”
Only hours behind the Ellsworth train, the McArthur Company entered Salt Lake City in time to share in the celebration. Yet not every handcart pioneer’s heart was filled with joy as he reached Zion. William Aitken, a thirty-six-year-old dentist in the McArthur Company, who had traveled with his eleven-year-old son and fourteen-year-old daughter, would apostatize within the year and flee Salt Lake City the next April. In a letter published in the Edinburgh News in 1857, Aitken described the emigrants as they entered Salt Lake as “wearied and worn down, the bones almost through the skin, not only of myself but of all that were in the company.” He added that the party “were half starved to the bargain, our whole allowance being 12 ounces of flour per day, and we did not even get so much.”
Aitken’s most serious criticism is nowhere corroborated in the surviving records of the Ellsworth and McArthur Companies. It may be merely the bitter exaggeration of a disillusioned apostate. Yet if it is true, it indicates that the kind of sanctimonious judgments reflected in John Oakley’s callous diary entries—if a Saint faltered or died on the trail, it was proof of moral failure—were built into the very handcart plan. “It is the policy of the Church,” wrote Aitken, “to leave the weak, the infirm, and the old by the way, that they may have no paupers to support.”
AN ACCURATE COUNT of the number of deaths within the Ellsworth and McArthur Companies will probably never be made. The official Ellsworth journal lists 272 Saints by name, of whom thirty-three are identified as “backed out,” twelve as “dead.” But as this list omits any mention of the thirty “Italian” Saints—at least four of whom are recorded in various diaries as dying along the way—that roster cannot be complete. McArthur acknowledged “only the loss of 8 souls. 7 died, and one, a young man, age 20 years, we never could tell what did become of him.”
Hafen and Hafen fix the number of deaths as thirteen and seven, respectively. (The admitted disappearance of the twenty-year-old in the McArthur Company is not counted by the Hafens as a death.) Without citing sources, the company narratives in the LDS Archives elevate the numbers slightly, to sixteen deaths in the Ellsworth Company, ten among the McArthur emigrants. In all likelihood, even these counts are too low. None of the diaries, for instance, mentions perhaps the cruelest death of all, that of John McCleve, an Irishman from Belfast traveling with his wife and seven children in the McArthur Company, who gave up the ghost on September 24, only two days short of Salt Lake City.
The original counts of 280 Saints in the Ellsworth Company, 220 in the McArthur, seem reliable. If we take fifty as a minimum estimate of dropouts between the two parties, and accept the LDS Archives’ count of twenty-six dead, then the mortality rate in the first two handcart companies was about 6 percent. If we guess a hundred dropouts, that figure rises to almost 7 percent. Either rate is slightly above John Unruh’s average of 4 percent among all emigrating parties between 1840 and 1860, but it remains a remarkably low toll, given the conditions under which the handcart pioneers traveled. Without the critical resupplies at Deer Creek and farther west, the mortality rate would have been much higher. But the ultimate credit for the Saints’ survival must go to their genuinely heroic perseverance and fortitude.
In the days and weeks after the first two handcart companies reached Salt Lake, the colony engaged in an orgy of joy and self-congratulation. The Deseret News baldly asserted, “This journey has been performed with less than the average amount of mortality usually attending ox trains.” In an emotional speech in the bowery meeting hall only two days after the companies’ arrival, Heber C. Kimball, the church’s First Counselor and Brigham Young’s closest confederate, gave vent to a characteristically apocalyptic vision of future emigration:
I am very thankful that so many of the brethren have come in with hand-carts; my soul rejoiced, my heart was filled and grew as big as a two-bushel basket. Two companies have come through safe and sound. Is this the end of it? No; there will be millions on millions that will come much in the same way, only they will not have hand-carts, for they will take their bundles under their arms, and their children on their backs and under their arms, and flee; and Zion’s people will have to send out relief to them, for they will come when the judgments come on the nations.
At the same meeting in the bowery, Young basked in the success of his “experiment”:
I think it is now proven to a certainty that men, women and children can cross the plains, from the settlements on the Missouri river to this place, on foot and draw hand-carts, loaded with a good portion of the articles needed to sustain them on the way.
To me this is no more a matter of fact this morning, after seeing the companies that have crossed the plains, than it was years ago.
The Prophet elaborated in this I-told-you-so vein by spinning out an odd homily:
My reasoning has been like this: Take small children, those that are over five years of age, and if their steps were counted and measured, those that they take in the course of one day, you would find that they had taken enough to have traveled from 12 to 20 miles.
Count the steps that a woman takes when she is doing her work, let them be measured, and it will be found that in many instances she had taken steps enough to have traveled from 15 to 20 miles a day; I will warrant this to be the case. The steps of women who spin would, in all probability, make from 20 to 30 miles a day.
So with men, they do not consider the steps they make when they are at their labor; they are all the time walking. Even our masons upon the walls are all the time stepping; they take a step almost at every breath.
“I am not a good walker,” the Prophet asserted, “though I have walked a great deal in the course of my life.” He went on to recount the longest pedestrian journey of his life, an 1834 missionary tour, during which he claimed to have walked two thousand miles, averaging forty miles a day for weeks on end with little trouble. Young did acknowledge that “the hand-carts look rather broken up, but if they had been made of good seasoned timber, they would have come in as nice as when they started with them.” And, “True, the brethren and sisters that came in with hand-carts have eaten up their provisions, and some have hired their clothing brought, and they had but little on their carts when they came in.”
Yet the moral was plain. In the euphoria of the moment, Young was happy to voice it:
As for health, it is far healthier to walk than to ride, and better every way for the people….
To have to walk a thousand miles?—Those who get into the Celestial Kingdom will count this a very light task in the end, and if they have to walk thousands of miles they will feel themselves happy for the privilege, that they may know how to enjoy celestial glory.
If anything, at that bowery meeting Young was upstaged by Edmund Ellsworth, who delivered a truly fanatical analysis of his company’s success. Ellsworth sincerely believed that the devil was in his party’s midst, causing all the troubles the pioneers faced, “using his influence and doing his best, with sickness, weakness, and fatigue, breaking down the carts, etc., to discourage the faithful and sink their spirits.”
Given his druthers, Ellsworth would have accomplished the journey in even purer style. He told the bowery congregation:
I regret that there was a wagon in our company, for I realized that wagons had a tendency to destroy the faith of our brethren and sisters; for if they were sick a little they felt that they could get into the wagons.
I am persuaded that if there had been no wagons for such people, there would have been none sick, or weak, but that their faith would have been strong in the name of the Lord.
A few deaths happened in our company, but this was doubtless due mainly to the fact…that it was in a great degree composed of infirm people, and many of them had been accustomed to different kinds of labor to what they have experienced this year.
Some had been raised at work under ground all their lives, and been subject only to that kind of exercise, and through this they had accumulated diseases and their lungs had been affected; and some were nearly dead when they left the old country.
In a speech given two weeks after the monumental bowery meeting, Young boasted that “Br. Ellsworth performed the journey in 63 days and br. McArthur in 61½.” This is so far from the truth that it can only be characterized as a deliberate lie. In reality, the Ellsworth Company, leaving Iowa City on June 9 and arriving in Salt Lake City on September 26, had been 110 days on the trail. The McArthur Company was a mere two days faster. But the average Saint in Salt Lake had little idea when the handcarts had departed from Iowa, and the congregation dearly wanted to hear what their leader was telling them.
Evidently, Young also wanted to pretend that his prediction of a sixty-odd-day passage by handcart had come to pass. In truth, the Ellsworth and McArthur Companies had averaged a little less than twelve miles a day—quite a creditable pace, but far short of the fifteen to twenty to thirty the Prophet had envisioned.
Among the new arrivals in Zion that September, there were some curious and poignant sequelae. Mary McCleve, a sixteen-year-old Irish girl who lost her father, John, only two days before reaching Salt Lake City, was married only six weeks after the end of her journey to a sixty-one-year-old man. “It was love at first sight,” she would report seventy-six years later, “even though he had three grown girls older than myself…. Ten children blessed our union.”
But William Butler, who had staggered through Echo Canyon in the dark, resigned himself to death, and had to turn over his stock to his wife, Emma, suffered a diametrically opposite denouement. As the couple neared Salt Lake, Butler later ruefully disclosed, “We were meet on our way going into the city by a woman wife of John Pannel Wright. from south willow creek.—she used her influence to induce my wife to leave me and go home with her. her Man was three days waiting in the City to take my wife home with him.”
Twiss Bermingham, the scrupulous diarist in the McArthur Company, saw his faith quickly dissolve in Salt Lake City. The following year, he apostatized and returned to Florence, where he became a schoolteacher. A version of his diary that was not published until 1937, in the American Legion Magazine, reveals that the church was not above expurgating original documents as they were transcribed into the official LDS Archives. In Bermingham’s last diary entry, on September 21, the sentence “Conduct of the men from the Valley who came to meet us was disgraceful” was struck from every version except the one finally published by the non-Mormon American Legion Magazine.
William Aitken, that much angrier apostate, rode out of Salt Lake City with three hundred other apostates in April 1857, well armed and apparently in fear of ambush on the trail. The men, women, and children were “all determined to get off or die,” Aitken later wrote. After a hard journey through heavy snows, the apostates reached the safety of the States. “Thousands in Utah would be glad to be with us, though in the same condition,” Aitken averred.
As for Archer Walters, the loyal carpenter and burier of the dead—he succumbed to dysentery only two weeks after reaching Zion. His death, according to contemporary experts, was “caused by eating corn-meal and molasses, and aggravated by his weakened condition and lowered resistance resulting from exposure, under-nourishment, and physical exhaustion during the thirteen hundred mile journey.” Walters’s five children remained loyal to the church, and by 1937 he had five hundred descendants in Utah.
Meanwhile, even as the Saints in Zion rejoiced in the arrival of the first two handcart companies, the portent that would ultimately develop into catastrophe was already coalescing hundreds of miles to the east. In New York City, President John Taylor had received more than 1,600 Saints who had sailed from Liverpool in May: 764 aboard the Thornton, 856 aboard the Horizon. He had sent them on to Iowa, not without worrying about the lateness of the season. The Thornton emigrants reached Iowa City on June 26, the Horizon Saints not until July 8. These pioneers would make up the fourth and fifth handcart companies of 1856.
Brigham Young would later claim to know nothing about these late-arriving pilgrims, not even of their existence, but this, too, is a demonstrable falsehood. On June 11, from Iowa City, William Woodward, one of the officials in charge of the eastern end of the handcart migration, wrote to Heber Kimball in Salt Lake City. His newsy epistle contained this pregnant paragraph:
We have heard that another ship load of emigrants have arrived at New York by the ship “Thornton” numbering when they left Liverpool 764 souls. James G. Willie, Millen Atwood, & Moses Clough preside over the Thornton’s company. We expect them at this point by the 16th or 17th of June.
When did this letter reach Salt Lake? Normally the arrival dates of such documents are by now impossible to determine, but in this case, a clerk in Young’s office marked a filing notation on the back of the original letter: “Recd July 30/56, Eastern Mail.”
The conclusion is inescapable: nearly two months before the arrival of the long-awaited Ellsworth and McArthur Companies, Heber Kimball and Brigham Young were fully aware that more than seven hundred more handcart Saints were preparing their journeys westward, dangerously late in the season. What those two men, as well as the rest of the Mormon authorities in charge of the emigration, did—or more precisely, did not do—in the face of this alarming development remains all but inexplicable today.