Devil's Gate

by David Roberts

  By 1848, as a skilled seamstress, Patience had seen her salary rise to £12 a year. No photograph of Patience Loader from her English years seems to have survived, but a picture taken in Utah in 1858, when at the age of thirty-one she married her first husband, reveals a pleasant, almost pixieish face, with a prim mouth but gaily curling hair.

  The Loaders were staunch Anglicans. James and his wife, Amy, were so devout that as a child Patience found the churchgoing onerous: “Sometimes I use to get quite tiard and as I grew older I use to think it was alittle to much to have to go to church and Sunday school all day on Sundays when some of My companions could go and take a nice walk with there friends.” In London, Patience had the misfortune to serve three years as a servant for an elderly “Maden Lady” and her equally superannuated housekeeper, who were fervent devotees of a splinter church calling itself the Independents.

  Between the two the Lady and her housekeeper I heard nothing but religion talked over and ever talking to get Me to join there church which in time I done. I must say More to pleas them than Myself for I realy fealt religion a burthen…. Thay allmost thought it a sin to laugh and thay considered it awfull to think of going to a theater.

  From the employ of this odd couple, Patience passed, around 1848, into the service of the Maden Lady’s sister, one Mrs. Henderson, and her husband. The Hendersons, who had served for years as missionaries in Russia, were also fiercely devout, imposing on their hired help as many as three church meetings each Sunday, Bible classes at home on Monday evenings, and prayer meetings on Thursday evenings. Mr. Henderson, a tutor at some sort of school or college, was often heard to swear that “he could not die happey if he did not visit Jerusalem.”

  For Patience, then, at age twenty-three, religion was apparently at best a pro forma exercise, at worst a tiresome obligation. One day in 1851, however, Mrs. Henderson, returning from a church meeting, took her servant aside. She “called me into her room and said do you know anything about the Mormons I answered no. Well she sais I have heard that your father and Mother have joined them and she said she was sorrey for them I told her I did not think it was so.”

  A measure of the integrity of “Reccolections” as a memoir is that Patience resists any temptation to gild this stunning revelation with complacent hindsight. Instead, she captures the full shock—indeed, the indignation—of that moment in Mrs. Henderson’s room.

  I wrote home to enquire of father and Mother and I found it was true that thay had been baptised and said thay was Latterday Saints Of course I did not know what it ment I wrote back and told them that thay must think themselves better than anyone else to be so conceited as to call themselves saints and I did not feel verey good over it either and I ask Mother if she thought that to be baptised by a Man was going to wash her sins away and told her I did not believe any such Nonsence as that and said I believed there was other churches just as good as theres and I said that I had found out by My Brother that there was none but poor folks that joined there church.

  Patience does not reveal by whom or precisely when her parents were converted. Despite her ignorance of the Mormon creed, however, England at the time was abuzz with gossip about the upstart American religion, in large part because LDS missionaries had been so wildly successful at winning recruits among the poor of Great Britain.

  Accepting what she could not change, Patience took a job as a dressmaker in Ramsgate, a seacoast resort town in Kent, not far north of Dover. More than a year passed before she paid her next visit to Aston Rowant. By that time, several of her sisters had also converted to Mormonism. Patience arrived at the gardener’s cottage to find two Mormon missionaries from Utah, a Mr. Archer and a Mr. Dalling, visiting her father. They “came to My fathers house to preach,” she recorded; but “I did not pay any great attention to their preaching.”

  The missionaries evidently saw a soul ripe for the plucking, for they went out of their way to invite Patience on walks in the garden and cooked her (and her family) a dinner of “roast Mutten and nice fresh vegetables.” Mr. Archer was accompanied by wife and children; Mr. Dalling was alone. As the week wore on, Patience remembered,

  I had quite a pleasant visit with Mrs Archer…but not so pleasant with Mr Dalling for he set about to try to convert me to the Mormon faith of course this was his Mission he was sent out to do. but he was to tiresome he done Nothing but preach to me all the time and at that time I did Not want to be troubled so much about religion. and Mrs Archer seeing I did not like it came to my rescue. and she said to Mr Dalling I think you had better stop your preaching to Miss Loader she don’t like so much of it You are enough to tire her out.

  At this rebuff, Mr. Dalling shifted gears. “From this he did not talk so much of religion to me but commenced upon the subject of marriage. and let me know that he was without a wife in the world and that he would like to get accompanion before he returned to Utah.” Patience declined the proposal.

  Yet something “took” during this extended visit home. Whether it was Mr. Dalling’s badgering or, more likely, the serene example of her parents and sisters, by the time she returned to a new job—this time in a posh London hotel—Patience, too, had become a Latter-day Saint. Perhaps at first hers was a conversion of complaisance, to please her family, as she had agreed to embrace the Independent church to ingratiate herself with her former employer. But probably not—for in her memoir Patience now insists that God’s “watchfull care was over Me and he knew what was best for me and opened my eyes.” This may well be the voice of retrospect speaking from sometime after 1887; but for the rest of her life, until her death in Utah in 1922 at the age of ninety-four, Patience would remain a steadfast Mormon.

  Two days before she went off to the London hotel, she was baptized into the church. The chronology of the memoir is hazy here, but it seems that the conversion occurred sometime during 1853. More than two years would pass before the Loaders set sail for America. Meanwhile, in London, Patience kept her new faith a secret, for good reason.

  At some point, a new housekeeper, who proved to be a thoroughgoing busybody, came to work at the hotel. Every Sunday, Patience would slip out to attend an LDS meeting. One Monday, as she started work, Patience bid a cheery good morning to the housekeeper.

  She did not care to speak after a time she sais I hear you are a Mormon I answered Yes well She Sais we don’t want no Mormons in this house and said I would have to leave I said I could do that I can get a nother place She said she did not think I could if she told people I was a Mormon…. She said She had heard that the Mormons was abad Set of folks.

  The housekeeper’s fear was that Patience might try to proselytize among her fellow maids at the hotel. Indeed, she had been doing just that, covertly inviting them to attend her LDS meeting and giving them “tracks” that laid out the principles of the church. She had already succeeded in winning over two of the maids to the Mormon faith.

  Defiant to the end, Patience accepted her firing by the busybody housekeeper. As she walked down the long hall of the hotel for the last time, some of the manservants “sneared at me and said good bye old gal are you going to see old Joe Smith I said good bye don’t you know Joseph Smith was killed by wicked men.” (The founder in 1830 and first Prophet of the Mormon church, Joseph Smith, had been murdered by a mob in Illinois in 1844.)

  Patience was even castigated by her own sister Eliza, who was staying with her during a visit to the hotel. Two years younger, Eliza had held out against the family drift toward the LDS church: she would never become a Mormon, and would spend all her life in England. Now Eliza “fealt as bitter towards me about My religion as the housekeeper did she would scarcely speak to Me and never came to bid me good bye.”

  Patience promptly found another job with a kindly old military veteran who, according to her, had “fought in the Battle of Watersoo.” Her duties were to care for the ex-officer’s invalid wife.

  Meanwhile, Patience’s parents were also bearing the brunt of the widespread English prejudice against
the Mormons. At some point, Sir Henry John Lambert, the baronet whom James Loader had faithfully served as gardener for more than two decades, discovered their new religion. He gave them an ultimatum—to abjure their faith within a year or be evicted. The family refused to renounce the church.

  It was not the prospect of losing his job, however, that set James Loader’s eyes on the New World. Within a year after founding his church, Joseph Smith had proclaimed the solemn duty of every Saint to “gather to Zion.” At the time, the Prophet had fixed Missouri as the land in which the elect must assemble. He had determined, in fact, that Jackson County, on the western edge of that state, was the original site of the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve had been placed on Earth by God not in the Holy Land of the Near East, but in the middle of North America.

  The apocalypse, or the second coming of Christ, was imminent, though Smith declined to specify a date. At the time of the apocalypse, only those gathered to Zion would be spared. All the rest of the world was Babylon, and on that ultimate day, in Smith’s words, “tribulation and desolation [would] fall upon the wicked” who dwelled there.

  By 1855, Zion had been relocated to Salt Lake City, or, more generally, the State of Deseret, in what the U.S. government called Utah Territory. The Millennial Star, the Mormon newspaper established by Brigham Young and his colleagues in 1840, published in Liverpool and read by every British Saint who could read English (the Welsh had their own language, and many of the converts were illiterate), was full of constant exhortations to gather to Zion. As early as 1848, in the pages of the Star, the faithful had absorbed Young’s injunction, “To the Saints of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and adjacent islands and countries, we say, emigrate as speedily as possible…. Come immediately and prepare to go West.” And in September 1855, even as the Loaders prepared for their journey, they no doubt heeded the words of Franklin D. Richards, president of the European Mission: “Every impulse of the heart of the Saint, every hope of the future, says, ‘Gather up to the land of America.’”

  For most of the British Saints, the only obstacle to emigration was financial. The converts were expected to pay their own way to Zion, and for many of the working-class poor, the cost of passage amounted to a staggering sum. More than one family scrimped and saved for years to afford the long journey to Utah.

  By December 9, 1855, James and Amy Loader, their daughters Patience, Maria, Jane, and Sarah, and their son Robert, had arrived at the harbor in Liverpool, ready to board the John J. Boyd, a sailing vessel bound for New York. Also booking passage were Patience’s thirty-four-year-old brother, John, his wife, Harriet, and their two small children. None of those pilgrims would ever see England again.

  PATIENCE ALMOST MISSED the trip. Having carried their baggage on board, the Loaders learned that the Boyd would not sail until the next day. Patience decided to use the free time to visit her twenty-four-year-old sister, Zilpah, the wife of John Jaques, who worked in the offices of the Millennial Star. Zilpah and John were planning to wait till the following June or July to sail to America, along with their twenty-two-year-old sister, Tamar.

  There must have been some confusion, for when Patience returned to the harbor the next day, the ship was minutes from pulling out of the dock. Her family was screaming at the crew “to the top of there voice for the Lord sake bring My girl on the ship and dont leave her behind,” but with hundreds of passengers on board, the Boyd was not about to delay its departure for a single tardy emigrant. A bare wooden plank was all that connected ship to shore: now, with a pair of sailors each holding one of her hands, one man walking ahead, one behind, Patience negotiated the gauntlet. Once on board,

  My dear good father sais God bless you My dear girl we was all afraid you would be left behind we watched for your coming so anxiously. and when the men began to take away the planks Your Mother began to frett and said oh what will we do Patience has not come and the vesel is ready to start out to sea and we will have to leave her behind…. There was great rejoicing when I was safe on the vesel with them all.

  The journey from Liverpool to New York would take sixty-six days, unconscionably long even for a sailing ship in an age when steamships were already routinely making the passage in two weeks. But like nearly all the European Saints bound for Zion, the Loaders could afford only steerage on a sailing vessel.

  A semiofficial report of the John J. Boyd’s passage that winter, written by one of the emigration officers on board, was published in The Mormon on March 1, 1856. That newspaper, launched only the previous year, New York’s answer to Liverpool’s Millennial Star, was edited by John Taylor, one of the Twelve Apostles, who were subordinate in rank in the church only to Brigham Young himself. As president of the New York Mission, receiving the Saints who came from abroad and sending them on to Iowa City, Taylor would play a crucial role in the handcart campaign.

  The résumé of the journey that appeared in The Mormon insisted that “Notwithstanding that our company consisted of Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, Icelanders, Italians, English, Irish, and Scotch, the rules adopted proved efficacious in maintaining a strict entente cordial[e] among us all.” While acknowledging a fair amount of hardship and an unspecified number of deaths (particularly among the Danes, due to an outbreak of measles) during the journey, the correspondent struck a jaunty tone. In a season plagued by storms that wrecked other ships on the Atlantic, he bragged, “We had made the passage without the loss of a single spar. Truly we can say that we have been blest, and that our long voyage has been an advantage to us in many ways.”

  In her memoir, Patience left an account of the voyage on the John J. Boyd that paints a far more ominous and vivid picture of the trip. “Never will forget the first night on the ship,” she vows.

  Not much sleep for any one that first night and we was orderd to go below we could not get a berth the first night So we had to lie down on the floor as best we could: I began to think we would smother to death before Morning for there was not abreath of air I made my bed on a large box I had abig loaf of bread in asack this I used for my pillow to make sure of having bread for breakfast this was not avery nice thing to do to sleep on my bread.

  Such belowdecks chaos and squalor were far from uncommon on the emigrant ships of the day. After the first night, a guard promised better accommodations for the Loaders, and indeed, they were soon moved to a higher deck with berths “just beneath the skylights and that was opened to give fresh air.”

  Patience claims that each emigrant was allotted only one pint of drinking water per day (which of course would have been inadequate for health in even the most sedentary passenger); “we had to wash in Salt water and cook our potatoes in salt water I said well one good thing we will not have to use any salt to our potatoes.”

  On board the ship, pitching with the waves through one storm after another, Patience, her mother, and all her siblings were seasick for six weeks running. The captain, whom Patience sized up as “avery rough cross man” and a drunken tyrant, was driven to distraction by his cargo of Saints.

  At one time the captain Said if we did not stop our d—preachen and praying we would never land in New York I told the Mate that was the only thing that Saved his vesell for he [i.e., the captain] was such awicked drinking Man and neglected his duty it was awounder that he was sufferd to live.

  According to Patience, one night the captain, in a drunken stupor, knocked over the lantern in his cabin, which caught fire. The conflagration might well have set the whole ship ablaze had the crew not rushed to extinguish it.

  Halfway through the passage, the John J. Boyd came in sight of a dismasted clipper ship bound from Baltimore to Liverpool that was on the verge of sinking: several crew members had already been washed away. The captain lowered lifeboats and rescued the survivors. This “one kind act he did,” in Patience’s phrase, had an ulterior motive:

  The Mate fetched in his boat the first time four poor Sick Men poor things thay looked so poor and waurn out two Men had two ribs broaken…. The other two
poor Men Said to the captain sir we feel to thank you God bless you for coming to help us. the brute of a captain sais to them god d—you go to work that is all I want of You get up that riging I don’t want to here no more of your talk.

  (Even the correspondent to The Mormon admitted that the rescue was providential for the Boyd, whose crew was shorthanded from overwork.)

  The captain of the clipper ship, his jaw broken, was beside himself with grief, for his sixteen-year-old son had been lost at sea on his first ocean voyage. The man had opposed his son’s participation, but, in Patience’s direct quote, the boy “beged So hard of his Mother to let him come with me and now this has happened. I have lost my boy my only child how can I go home to my wife without our boy.”

  According to Patience, there were five hundred Danish Saints among the company. As she reports,

  Good and kind was the dainesh brothers and sisters and we enjoid ourselvs together allthough we could not talk there langwage Neither could thay talk the English langwage but we could make each other understand thay would make up a dance as Many of the danish breathren had instruments with them and could play Many good dance tunes and the Young Men would come and envite us English sisters to there dance.

  Yet there was no ignoring the tragedy that stalked the company on board the Boyd. Patience is the only witness who recorded the toll: “We had aterrable severe voiage Much sickness and Many deaths Numbering Sixty two in all.” Among the victims was her own niece, Zilpah, the ten-month-old daughter of John Loader and his wife, Harriet King: “It did indeed seem verey hard to role her in ablanket and lay her in the big waves and see the little dear go floting away out of sight.”