by H. W. Brands
The most important distinction of the Mormon migration was its religious motive. Except for a few missionaries, Oregon was settled by people looking for land, health and other earthly goals. California’s lure was its gold. The Mormons went west seeking eternal salvation. Their zeal for Zion gave them energy to accomplish great feats of endurance on the trail. But it occasionally led to disaster and tragedy.
By the 1850s the Oregon Trail—now the Oregon and California Trail—was a well-trod route, with trading posts at convenient intervals and guides conversant with the best practices for cross-continent travel. Yet Brigham Young thought he could improve on the standard model. Theology and politics prompted his desire to innovate. For Young and other Mormons, the physical gathering of Zion was a crucial part of their belief system; all Mormons should come to Utah as soon as possible. Politically, filling Utah with Mormons would serve the purpose of securing the new Zion against gentiles who might want to settle there. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 enshrined the principle of popular sovereignty—that the settlers in a territory had the right to determine their own government—Young sought to ensure that when the residents of Utah drafted a state constitution, Mormons controlled the process.
But getting to Utah cost money, especially for those European converts who had to sail the Atlantic first. Many of the Europeans were poor. No small part of the appeal of Mormonism was its promise, by something called the Perpetual Emigrating Fund, of financial assistance to immigrants who chose to make a new life in America. Yet the Mormon church wasn’t wealthy. Simply building Salt Lake City, and dealing with the problems that beset the Mormon farmers—including drought and plagues of grasshoppers—stretched the church’s finances. Brigham Young was eager to discover any device or method that trimmed the travel cost to Utah.
The biggest single outlay for most overland emigrants was a covered wagon and its team. If emigrants could do without wagons, they could travel at much less expense. One of the early Mormon trains had overtaken a thrifty Scotsman who carried his goods in a wheelbarrow. Questioned about this novelty, the fellow praised his choice of transport. He didn’t have to worry about feeding and tending horses, he said, or about Indians stealing them.
When Brigham Young heard the story, he was fascinated. He concluded that substituting wheelbarrows—or handcarts—for covered wagons could cut the cost of emigration dramatically. As a young man he had worked as a carpenter, and he now devised specifications for the ideal vehicle. “Take good hickory for the axle trees,” he wrote to one of his subordinates, “and make them, say, two inches in diameter at the shoulder and 1¼ at the point, say four and a half feet from point to point; make the hubs out of hardhack or iron wood, or if they cannot be had, get young hickory, small and tough and turn them out about six inches long and five or six inches in the diameter.” The wheels should be four-and-a-half or five feet in diameter. “The axle should be up high enough for a man to draw on the level. The rims should be split out of hickory like the rim to a spinning wheel, only thicker, fastened and lined with green hides when they can be obtained.” Forgoing iron rims, by itself, would reduce the cost dramatically. Young recognized that a handcart could not carry all the provisions a family would need, but the Mormons in Utah would take care of that. “If it is once known that such a company is on the plains, there will be no difficulty in having the brethren from this place meeting them with provisions nearly if not quite half way.”
Not all the Mormons thought the handcart scheme wise. It was difficult enough simply to walk across the plains and the Rockies. To have to push loaded carts would tax the strength of even healthy young men, let alone the women who might be called into service. Moreover, wheels rimmed with iron sometimes failed on the trail; wholly wooden wheels would fare much worse.
Yet Young’s word was law among the Saints. The church leadership endorsed the project. The challenges it entailed should be considered a test of faith, they declared. “Families might start from Missouri river, with cows, hand-carts, wheel-barrows, with little flour, and no unnecessaries, and come to this place quicker, and with less fatigue than by following the heavy trains with their cumbrous herds, which they are obliged to drive miles to feed,” an epistle from the leadership declared. “Do you not like this method of travelling? Do you think salvation costs too much? If so, it is not worth having.”
The rank and file responded. “The Lord has promised, through His servant Brigham, that the hand-cart companies shall be blessed with health and strength, and be met part way with teams and provisions from the Valley,” declared Jean Jaques, a British convert. “And I am not afraid to prophesy that those who go by hand-carts, and continue faithful and obedient, will be blessed more than they ever dreamed.”
Five companies set out in the summer of 1856. The first three left Iowa City, in eastern Iowa, in June. They comprised nearly eight hundred emigrants, mostly from England, Wales and Scandinavia, with some Italians thrown in. Problems arose at once. The design and construction of the carts fell short of what the journey required. “We had them to eternally patch—mornings, noons and nights,” one of the trekkers recalled. The wheels and axles lacked sufficient grease, making them harder to push than necessary. And the racket they created took a toll on the travelers’ nerves. “They mowed and growled, screeched and squealed, so that a person could hear them for miles.”
The biggest problem was hunger. Even with provisions presumably awaiting them at the halfway mark, the handcarts couldn’t carry enough to keep the trekkers decently fed. “There was very little food to cook, and we were too tired to cook it,” one of the migrants remembered. Another said, “I never was so hungry in my life.” A woman who had been twelve years old on the journey remarked, “At night we often went to bed without supper.” She had been enchanted, amid her hunger and weariness, by a streamside spot. She turned to her father and said, “Let’s build a little log house and stay in this place always.” He looked at her and asked what they would do about food. She replied, “Do as we’re doing now—go without.”
In their race against time—that is, against the dwindling of their rations—the leaders of the handcart companies resorted to separating the children from the adults and compelling them to make a head start on the day. “There were 30 children in the company and early every morning they were sent on ahead of the grownups all in one bunch,” recounted one of the travelers, an immigrant from Iceland. “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.” The practice wrung the hearts of the parents of the children. “It was hard for parents to see their little 5 and 6 year olds driven along like sheep.” But the leaders of the train had decreed it, and so it was done.
For all their suffering, the three trains made it to Utah, with total casualties not much worse than wagon trains typically suffered. They were greeted at Salt Lake City by a brass band and by Brigham Young himself. “And thus has been successfully accomplished a plan devised by the wisdom and forethought of our President”—Young—“for gathering the poor,” proclaimed the Deseret News, the paper of the church.
THERE WAS ANOTHER CHAPTER TO THE HANDCART STORY that year. Two other trains were slow hitting the trail. One set out in mid-August, the other in early September. Everyone who knew about the challenges of the plains and mountains realized that starting so late in the season was risky, yet the emigrants put their faith in God. “They expect to get cold fingers and toes,” wrote one of the Mormon officials directing the emigration. “But they have this faith and confidence towards God that he will over-rule the storms that may come in the season thereof and turn them away, that their path may be free from suffering more than they can bear.”
The handcart companies went ahead, and the suffering started soon enough. September snows are not unusual on the high plains; October snows are normal. The handcart emigrants were unprepared for serious cold; constrained by what the carts could ca
rry, they lacked anything like winter gear. Making matters worse was the fact that handcarts, unlike covered wagons, offered no shelter from storms. In rain, sleet and snow, the emigrants overnighted in the open or in tents chosen for lightness rather than warmth. Their bodies shivered, desperately burning calories to fend off hypothermia; the shivering aggravated the shortness of their rations.
Long before they reached South Pass, the emigrants battled deep snow. “A severe day,” wrote Levi Savage, a captain of a group of a hundred handcarts, on October 23. “The wind blew awful cold and hard.” The trail climbed Rocky Ridge, the sharpest pitch of the route, and the snows kept the emigrants struggling until long after dark. The night camp afforded little respite. “Few tents were pitched,” Savage said, “and men, women and children sit shivering with cold around their small fires.” The last stragglers arrived just before dawn, in one of the few wagons that accompanied the handcart train. “Some badly frozen, some dying, some dead. It was certainly heartrending to hear children crying for mothers, and mothers crying for children.”
Hope appeared at Devil’s Gate, where the Sweetwater River cuts a gash in a line of granite. Six wagons sent to provision the handcart trains met the emigrants there. But the food and clothing they brought fell far below the need.
The suffering worsened. Part of one train took refuge from the freezing wind in a ravine just off the trail. The weather pinned them down. “We stayed in the ravine five or six days on reduced rations,” a member of the group recalled. “One night a windstorm blew down almost every tent. Many perished of cold and hunger at this place.” A member of the rescue party wrote Brigham Young from Devil’s Gate, characterizing the emigrants as he found them: “between five and six hundred men, women and children, worn down by drawing hand carts through snow and mud; fainting by the way side; falling, chilled by the cold; children crying; their limbs stiffened by cold; their feet bleeding and some of them bare to snow and frost.”
The rescue parties saved the two trains from utter annihilation. Eventually enough wagons came to feed the surviving emigrants and carry them to Salt Lake City. Brigham Young’s loyalists lauded the rescue effort, which would be etched in Mormon history as an example of how the Saints looked out for one another, and God looked out for them all. “Notwithstanding some deaths and the suffering and frost bite since leaving the North Fork of the Platte River, we can plainly recognize the kind hand of an overruling Providence in opening a way of escape for so many, in dictating wise and timely counsels to the living Oracles,” the Deseret News asserted.
The deaths, in fact, ran into the hundreds—perhaps the highest toll suffered by any body of emigrants in the history of the West. A survivor remembered the journey as “one long funeral march.” Jean Jaques, the British Mormon, was not usually a critic of Brigham Young, but he thought the handcart debacle a needless tragedy. “It was cruel to a degree far beyond the power of language to express,” Jaques said, “and the more so for the reason that the worst parts of the experience were entirely unnecessary, because avoidable by timely measures and more sagacious management.”
THE QUESTIONING OF YOUNG’S LEADERSHIP MIGHT HAVE BEEN more intense had Mormons not felt the need, at just this moment, to band together against the outside world. At one time or other, in every federal territory—which was to say, in every part of the West except Texas and California, which became states without having been federal territories—friction developed between federally appointed officials and the locals. The latter typically looked on the former the way American colonists had looked on British officials just before the Revolutionary War: as outsiders who had legal authority but no moral right to tell them how to behave. The locals knew that, under the Constitution, they one day would inherit political power. They chafed at restrictions in the meantime.
Nowhere did the friction between federals and locals rise to more acrimonious levels than in Utah Territory during the 1850s. Many Mormons looked askance at secular government of any sort; the point of their fleeing to the desert Zion was to be governed by Saints, not sinners. Most of the American Mormons had memories of mistreatment at the hands of American gentiles and so were sensitive about anything that smacked of more of the same.
Federal officials, in turn, distrusted the Mormons. They knew that Brigham Young and the Mormons had intended to escape American jurisdiction by their flight west; Washington could only assume that the separatist hopes still burned in Mormon hearts. And at a time when Southerners were threatening to bolt the Union over slavery, the nation’s government was in no mood to abide Mormon challenges to federal authority.
Nor did the American public at large have any love for Mormons. Most American Christians considered Mormonism a species of heresy. The bounds of tolerance of the Protestant majority were already being tested by the Catholic immigration from Ireland. But at least the Catholics ascribed the same primacy to the Bible that the Protestants did, and they hewed to essentially the same understanding of God’s history with humans. The Mormons, with their own holy book and their own sacred history, were beyond the pale. And when, in 1852, Brigham Young made public the Mormon embrace of polygamy, the sect seemed more threatening still.
President Millard Fillmore sought to smooth things by appointing Brigham Young as Utah’s territorial governor. The appointment had the desired effect with the Mormons, but not with other federal officials in Utah. Judges and Indian agents repeatedly found themselves blocked by Young; they complained that he was determined to govern Utah with the same unchecked authority he wielded over the Latter-day Saints. Their complaints fed the anti-Mormon feeling in American politics. In 1856 the Republican party ran John Frémont for president on a platform demanding that the federal territories be rescued from “those twin relics of barbarism—polygamy and slavery.” Democrat James Buchanan, the election’s winner, decried the “despotism of Brigham Young” and vowed to bring the Mormons to heel.
Buchanan appointed a new governor and ordered a large force of U.S. army regulars to Utah. The Mormons responded with alarm, contending that Washington was declaring war on them and their religion. Brigham Young called out the Mormon militia and prepared to defend the new Zion, perhaps to the death.
AMID THE MOUNTING TENSION IN THE LATE SUMMER OF 1857, a wagon train from Arkansas, bound for California, entered southern Utah. Most non-Mormon emigrants tried to avoid the Mormons if they could. The main route to California and Oregon ran well north of the Great Salt Lake, and the California Trail crossed into Utah Territory, which then included modern Nevada, only far west of Salt Lake City. But sometimes the emigrants needed provisions or, if too late on the trail, a place to winter. In the latter case, a tense sojourn often followed. After the 1853 killing of U.S. army captain John Gunnison and eleven of his men in southern Utah by Ute Indians, rumors circulated among gentiles that Brigham Young had goaded the Indians into the slayings. Gentiles crossing Mormon lands grew even more nervous.
The 1857 Arkansas train included some Missourians as well. Mormons held much against Missouri, where their persecution in earlier days had been especially severe; this train was watched with gravest suspicion. Brigham Young had ordered the faithful to husband resources against a possible clash with the U.S. army; consequently the Arkansans and Missourians, who had expected to purchase grain and other provisions, found themselves shut out. The emigrant train included a large herd of cattle, which the Mormons judged they could use in the event of war. The cattle also tempted resident Paiute Indians, with whom the Mormons had developed good relations. In fact, so good were Mormon relations with the Indians that Brigham Young could credibly threaten to unleash the tribes against westbound emigrant trains. “If the government dare to force the issue, I shall not hold the Indians by the wrist any longer,” he told a U.S. army officer. “If the issue comes, you may tell the government to stop all emigration across the continent, for the Indians will kill all who attempt it.”
The alarm among the Mormons that they might once again have to flee a h
ome they had made, their resentment at decades of mistreatment at the hands of gentiles and the American government, their feeling of strength in their fortress community amid the mountains, a desire to signal to America at large that the Saints were not to be trifled with, the annoyance of dealing with yet another party of emigrants crossing their territory, this one with property worth stealing—all these thoughts and emotions gave rise to a murderous scheme among Mormons in southern Utah.
The decision to massacre the emigrants might have developed in stages. Mormon leaders in Cedar City signaled to the Paiutes that these emigrants were fair game for attack. When the Paiutes, accustomed to mere rustling of a few cattle from passing trains, registered reluctance at a frontal assault, Mormon militiamen promised to join them. The attack was made at a place called Mountain Meadows. Several of the emigrants were killed; the rest gathered their wagons into a defensive circle. A siege ensued.
The leaders of the Mormon plot concluded that they had got themselves in too deep to turn back. The besieged emigrants knew that white men, and not just Indians, had been involved in the murders of the deceased. Should word get out to this effect, with U.S. troops on the way, it would strengthen the case of those who wanted to crush the Mormons. The plotters decided to kill all the witnesses. They would blame the Paiutes.
They devised a new plan. One of their number would approach the emigrants and offer assistance in escaping the Paiutes. This man, John Lee, would explain that the Indians had consented to safe passage for the emigrants, under strict conditions. The emigrants must put down their arms. They must agree to leave their cattle behind. The women and children must come out first. The men could follow.