by Tim Slessor
On a more individual family level, there were decisions to be made about the wagon and the oxen or mules to pull it. With very few exceptions, the wagons chosen were the standard four-wheeled farm wagons of the time. These were not the great swaying “prairie schooners” imagined by many artists who never went beyond the Mississippi. The “schooners” were the famous Conestogas which, pulled by a team of eight or more oxen and carrying three or four tons of trade goods, traveled the easier and more level “road” south-west to and from Santa Fe. The farm wagons setting out for California and Oregon were much smaller; they might be strengthened with heavier axles or new wheels, and they would certainly be equipped with a canvas cover stretched over arching hoops. They could carry a load of more than half a ton, but the wise family did not push the load to the limit.
The main starting points were all on the Missouri river: Independence, St. Joseph, Belleview (just south of today’s Omaha) and Council Bluffs. Here the travelers could find stores stocked with most of the things they might need. There were guidebooks too; they recommended what food supplies should be taken, what spare parts to carry for the wagons, which were the safe short-cuts.
Mules or oxen? The former were faster, but cost about $70 each; oxen were less than half that price, and they could pull heavier loads. Also, even if they were slower, they were said to be less trouble than mules. There were advocates both ways, but the balance was for oxen. Ideally, a wagon was drawn by a span of four animals. Additionally, there were usually a few saddle horses; they would be useful for scouting ahead of the wagon train and herding any cattle they had, or for riding out to find game for the pot.
Except where dictated by the terrain, it was unusual for the wagons to follow each other too closely in single file; the dust raised by the wagons in front was too uncomfortable for those behind. But any area of difficult badlands, or a particularly easy ford, might push the wagons together to follow directly behind each other. There are still today places like Deep Rut Hill near Guernsey in Wyoming where one can stand shoulder-deep in the “lane” cut in the bedrock by the succession of thousands of wagons that passed exactly that way. One imagines there must have been some frustrating traffic jams. And judging by the sketches that appear in some of the diaries, many landmarks are unchanged: Court House Rock, Chimney Rock and Scotts Bluff (all in western Nebraska) are three of the more obvious. Most famous of all is Wyoming’s Independence Rock, so called because, if all were going well, many of the wagons would arrive there on or about 4 July. Some of the migrants climbed to the rounded top and scratched their names on the bare rock. Today, as one reads those names still clearly visible, and leans into the same western wind, one would have to be mentally numb not to be moved.
On the trail, the day began before dawn. While the women dealt with domestic chores and prepared breakfast, the men would pack up camp and help each other with getting the oxen or mules yoked and harnessed. Once under way, the men walked beside their oxen or mules; sometimes the women would walk with them; the younger children rode in the wagons. If the “going” was good, they reckoned to cover 12-15 miles by the evening, with a 2 or 3 hour break during the heat of the day. Across the almost treeless prairie, the travelers would collect any dry buffalo dung for cooking fuel. One pioneer observed that, with so much ash and smoke coming off the burning buffalo chips, there was no need for pepper. During the afternoon, a small party would invariably ride ahead to find a good spot for the whole caravan to bed down for the night. Obviously clean water and pasture that had not been eaten out by an earlier party were priorities. Each family prepared its own supper; the bachelors would have formed their own “messes” at the start. Afterwards, someone might get out a fiddle or a flute; there would be dancing and singing. But, given the pre-dawn start, people would bed down early.
Illnesses of every kind - pneumonia, measles, typhoid, malaria, mumps and whooping cough -were always a worry, especially to young mothers. Any medicines were just palliatives, rarely cures. Dysentery carried away babies and young children. But cholera seems to have been the most feared: it could strike out of nowhere, with death coming by the next morning. The dead were hurriedly buried in a shallow grave; perhaps someone made a wooden cross on which they scrawled a name and a date, and maybe someone said a prayer. There was seldom time for much more. No one really knows how many travelers died along the way in the 20 years that the trail was the highway to the Far West; estimates reach upwards from 10,000. But again, no one really knows.
For the young it was maybe a great and carefree adventure; for the thoughtful it was a time of apprehension about what lay ahead; for the more energetic it was a protracted and tedious means to an end - the quicker they could reach their final destination the better. All the normal joys and sorrows of life traveled with them: new friendships, old enmities, laughter, tears, flirting, courtship, marriage, birth, death, good times and bad. One diarist describes an evening camp where at one end was a wedding (conducted by a missionary who happened to be along), at the other end the burial of a small boy who had been run over by a wagon, and somewhere between the two a woman giving birth. All human life...
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There was one group of would-be migrants who were thoroughly atypical in their style and in their motives: the Mormons. They were different. That was their problem. It was not just their apparent prosperity and unashamed polygamy that stoked people’s ire - or made them jealous (on both counts?). In the eyes of those who thought of themselves as good Christians, the Mormons were heretics. And compounding their heresies, they were also more industrious than their “gentile” neighbors; they banded together to work for the common good. Their enemies saw that habit not so much as mutual cooperation, more as that of a closed and secretive society practicing a form of proto-socialism. To people deeply suspicious of what they did not understand, the Mormons were not merely distrusted; they were feared. Already, in their short history, rampaging mobs had driven them out of Ohio, chased them to Missouri, and then north to Illinois. There, near a town they had built and called Nauvoo (Hebrew for paradise), the leader and founder of the sect, Joseph Smith, and his brother were lynched. Half the town was then torched. So in 1847, while thousands of gentile emigrants had already made the overland journey in the hope of finding a more prosperous life, a small advance party of Mormons set out to find something they counted as even more precious: a place where, far from possible persecution, they might have the freedom to follow their own gospel with its divergent style of Christianity.
Under a new leader, Brigham Young, the wagons of the Mormon vanguard (143 men, 3 women and 3 children) made their way west along the north side of the Platte, at a safe distance from the enmity of other migrants whose trail lay along the south side of the river. Once across the plains, Young led his people over South Pass, then he veered south away from the main trail. His path lay down a broad valley that overlooked the Great Salt Lake. They had come 1,300 miles. Now, with a minimum of pondering - or so the legend goes - Brigham Young looked around and then, with the certainty of an Old Testament prophet, he declared, “It is enough. This is the place.” In almost the same breath, he ordered his people to start clearing the land, damming the streams, digging irrigation ditches, plowing and planting seed. A detachment was sent back into the foothills to cut logs; they needed to build cabins quickly to see them through the coming winter. Also fodder had to be gathered for the livestock they had brought with them: 66 oxen, 52 mules, 19 cows and a flock of chickens.
Brigham Young had chosen an unlikely spot. His fellow pioneers must have looked at each other and wondered. This was certainly not the verdant and clear-streamed wilderness of the migrants’ dream. It was dry, hot and stony. It would take enormous toil to convert this sun-hard aridity to any kind of life-sustaining fertility. But Young knew exactly what he was doing. He had chosen this to be “the place” because he knew it would be unattractive to other, non-Mormon migrants. He was prescient enough to kno
w that here, on the edge of the desert, he and his people would be left alone to build their New Zion. Irrigation would be the key. With relatively simple engineering (though much hard work) they could harness the springs and snow-melt from the mountains immediately behind them. Young judged they had all they needed to make this desert bloom. Anyway, they would put their trust in the Lord; no doubt, He would provide.
Now, in a wondrous act of faith, an order would go back east for the great Mormon migration to begin. Brigham Young himself would go back with the message. So, with a small escort, he made the 1,300-mile return journey, in just nine weeks.
The pioneers he had left at “the place”, digging those ditches and building those cabins, needed all the faith they could find. Through the winter they came very close to extinction. Tales are told of grubbing for roots, butchering some of the weaker oxen, boiling hides for soup and stewing grass. But at last, come the spring, the wheat and corn they had planted late the year before began to sprout. Then, a few weeks before harvest, legend says that a great swarm of grasshoppers began to strip every stalk - until flocks of gulls flew in from the Great Salt Lake to feast on the hoppers. That miracle was, and still is, seen as proof of the Lord’s endorsement of their labors: Trust in Him and He will provide.
In May 1848, from a gathering place they called Winter Quarters, close by the Missouri, the Mormons began the exodus to their Promised Land - led by their Moses. More than 2,400 of them started walking. Theirs was a colossal act of blind faith. They needed nearly 400 wagons to carry their supplies: sacks of flour, seeds, plows, saws, axes, beehives, chickens, geese, goats and doves - everything that a whole community might need for self-sufficiency. And there were 1,300 oxen, 700 cows and some bulls, 140 pigs, 70 horses and a large flock of sheep.
In mid-September, the first of those wagons rolled down from the mountains and into the rough-and-ready settlement prepared by the earlier pioneers. One day this would grow to be Salt Lake City. Before he had departed the previous year, Brigham Young had chosen the exact place for a Temple. Again, like Moses, he had tapped the ground with a cane and said, “Here will be the temple to our God.” By the time he got back nine months later, work had begun. But, within a few years, that first building was too small. So they started again, on a temple so large that it took 45 years to complete. Today, with its steeples soaring high above the traffic of Temple Square, while it is certainly not one of the most beautiful buildings in the world, it must surely be one of the most impressive in terms of the fortitude and faith of the people who built it. Alongside, and almost as striking, is the Tabernacle where, under a high and arching roof, they hold meetings and concerts. Although it was designed long before these things were properly understood, it is said by many experts to have acoustics as fine as any in the nation.
I phoned the Tabernacle press office from London. I explained that the BBC documentary we were making about the settlement of the West must obviously include a passage about the Mormons. I had in mind several sequences, but at this early stage I wanted (please) to make arrangements for two in particular. The first, with the relevant permission, would involve filming something of the famous 350-member Tabernacle Choir in rehearsal. The second sequence would be the family farewells of a dozen or so young missionaries at Salt Lake City airport. These were (and still are) the polite and neatly-suited 19-year-olds who, as “apprentice” Mormons, are expected to go forth and knock gently on the world’s doors: in Glasgow, Manchester, Toronto, Melbourne, Auckland, Oslo and beyond. Back then (maybe it is still the same today) the departures happened regularly on the second Tuesday afternoon of each month. Away from home for upwards of two years, those young men go to spread the Good Word and make converts - though, as readers will know if they have ever responded to their knocking, they are too well mannered to push their message too stridently. As for the choir, I especially wanted to film it in the Tabernacle singing the Mormons’ unofficial anthem, a marvelous hymn that ends with the confident exhortation that “All is well. All is well!” The verses were written more than 150 years ago by a young English convert, William Clayton. Some say that he had the inspiration while walking beside a wagon over the last few miles of his long journey; he had crossed the Atlantic and now he had most of a continent behind him. At long last, as he came over a brow, he could see the lights of his New Jerusalem twinkling in the valley below. For him, all was indeed well - at last.
We got both sequences with maximum cooperation and minimum fuss. Months later, back in London to edit the film, we ran a sequence of families at the airport saying goodbye to their sons, followed by a long steady shot of the aircraft, with the young missionaries aboard, climbing away into the evening sky. As it banked toward the mountain, we laid the triumphant refrain, “All is well. All is well!” Obviously I am biased, but for me it was a sequence that “worked”.
Mormon missionaries have been seeking converts from the very beginning. Two of the first countries over which they cast their net were England and Wales. Indeed, three years before he led that exploratory trek, Brigham Young himself had been preaching in Lancashire. The cotton towns of that county became favorite Mormon targets. Perhaps that is where William Clayton came from.
The journeys of those converts were subsidized from the tithes that all Mormons contributed to their church’s treasury. But by the mid 1850s, so great were the numbers that the funds could not pay for all the wagons that were needed. So Young, uncompromising as always, decreed that the newcomers should “come on foot with handcarts or wheelbarrows. Let them gird up their loins and walk...” So began the handcart migrations. The Mormons kept (and still keep) meticulous records, so they know that over 3,000 converts - rather more women than men - walked all the way from the Missouri to their new home. Each two-wheel cart was loaded with 400 pounds of food and supplies; each migrant was allowed just 17 pounds of clothing and personal possessions, less for the children. They traveled in regiments of 100 carts, with five people allocated to each cart. On eventually arriving down Emigration Canyon they were met with bands, celebrations and thanksgiving prayers. They had pulled and pushed for over 1,000 miles.
Within ten years of its founding, Salt Lake City had a population of over 10,000. After San Francisco, it was the largest city in the western half of the nation. Along the base of the mountains, for more than 50 miles from north to south, stretched a broad carpet of irrigated farmland. More than 200 miles of carefully engineered canals had been dug; four or five times that mileage in farmers’ ditches carried the water out into the fields. Elsewhere there were similar, though smaller, Mormon oases. Irrigation was the key; it still is.
Brigham Young had 27 wives and 56 children. But far more significant in the Mormon story was his iron will. He was the man who had made it all happen. He was autocratic, even dictatorial, but only his enemies (and he had a few) would have accused him of being tyrannical. Perhaps he had no need to be; his reputation for astute judgment was enough to compel unquestioning obedience. Above all, he obviously possessed three of the most valuable of all qualities in a leader: a vision for the future, single-mindedness toward that end, and, most important of all, the ability to Get It Right. When in 1877 he died, 25,000 Mormons filed past his coffin. In short, without Brigham Young, who knows where the Mormons would be today? As it is, they can very reasonably claim that their people were among the first real settlers in the West.
They gave up polygamy more than a century ago. In fact, well before its abolition (the price they willingly paid to join the Union and for eventual statehood in 1896) most Mormons were already monogamous. True, even yet there is still a small rump of polygamists who, as they see it, have remained faithful to what they call the “plural marriage” doctrine of the early Church; they are members of the breakaway Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. They number a few thousand and tend to live secluded lives in the arid back-country of southern Utah, northern Arizona and north-west Texas. Mainstream
Mormons regard them as an embarrassment in which the media, out of prurience, is far too interested. If you ask about them you will be rather briskly told that they are a tedious irrelevance. Today, “normal” Mormons fly Old Glory with as much pride as anyone else. And, no doubt, they pay their state and federal taxes with as much resigned grumbling.
We’ll find for us the place which God for us prepared,
Far away in the West,
Where none shall come to hurt or make afraid;
There will the Saints be blessed.
We’ll make the air with music ring,
Shout praises to our God and King;
Above the rest, these words we’ll tell -
All is Well! All is well!
The Hostiles And The Military
The Great Father in Washington does not want his children’s land... his soldiers only come when his children make war... his children would be wise to listen to the Great Father.
Part of a speech by a Treaty Commissioner when he addressed a meeting of Sioux and Cheyenne chiefs at Fort Laramie on 14 June 1866
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Fort Laramie, though adequately garrisoned, was not stockaded; it was spread out - stables, barracks, stores, officers’ quarters - around a well-worn parade ground. In preparation for the meeting, carpenters had built a wooden stage and knocked together a spread of low benches in front of the commanding officer’s two-story house. Colonel Maynadier must have been well pleased; his messengers, sent out some weeks before, had obviously managed to persuade most of the chiefs who mattered to come in. Undoubtedly, the promise of an issue of clothing, blankets, axes, sugar and tobacco had helped - and curiosity about what the whites had in mind.