At her lowest ebb, however, Patience (who up to this point in her memoir has showed no instinct for the metaphysical) was visited with what she took to be a divine vision. During a night so stormy that “we had to hold on to the berth to keep from beign thrown out,” as her mother voiced fears that “we would all be lost and drounded in the sea,” Patience lay sleepless behind curtains her father had hung for privacy around her bed.
Just when the ship was tosing and rolling the worst I opened my eyes we was all in darkness: but in amoment the curtens opened and abeautifull lovely figure stood there oh such alovely countenance I had never seen before in all my life and the light was So bright around him that I could See the calour of his eyes and heir he had brown eyes and lovely brown heir and he spake the words to me as I looked at him he sais fear not You shall be taken there all safe then he left and the curtens was again closed…. I believe I had seen the savior.
On February 15, 1856, the John J. Boyd at last lay at anchor in New York harbor. The correspondent for The Mormon acknowledged that the ship had only one day’s drinking water left among its provisions.
AS HAD BECOME routine, all the Saints who arrived in New York were transplanted at once to Castle Garden, a gigantic refurbished opera house that served as a temporary dormitory and processing center for the emigrants. It was at this point that a colossal misunderstanding began to inflict its insidious harm upon the Loaders—a misunderstanding that would have profound consequences for the tight-knit family from Aston Rowant.
In her memoir, Patience recalls that President John Taylor visited Castle Garden the morning after the arrival of the John J. Boyd, “to make enquirey to findout who had Money and who had not those that was able to go out and rent rooms for themselves had to do so.”
The Loaders still had money. At once the family rented rooms in Williamsburg, a section of Brooklyn just across the East River from Manhattan. Within a short time (Patience simply says “soon”), the various Loaders had found paying jobs. James’s expertise as a gardener won him employment planting flower beds at “good wages.” John got work as a shoemaker. Patience and her sister Maria were hired by a clothing store to make mantillas—long silk or lace scarves that hung down over the shoulders. Jane and Sarah became baby-sitters. Nine-year-old Robert started attending school in Williamsburg.
The fact is that the Loaders had no intention of setting out at once for Iowa City and thence to Zion. Instead, in Patience’s testimony, “We was all working and expected to stay here until the next year then we thought we would make enough Money to buy an outfit to go to Utah.” That outfit would be a wagon and a team of oxen.
Such a plan was far from unusual among the European Saints arriving in the New World. Many would set down roots in New York (or Boston or Philadelphia) that proved so tenacious they would never finish their pilgrimages to Salt Lake City. Others grew disillusioned with the Mormon faith and eventually (in the opprobrious formula of the church) “apostatized.” And many worked for a year or longer, until they could indeed afford an outfit, then made their way to Zion in covered wagons, just as Brigham Young’s pioneer party had done in 1847.
Not only had the Loaders no intention of gathering to Zion by hand-cart: it seems, astonishingly, that they had never heard of the handcart plan. The grand scheme had been announced in a long article in the Millennial Star, but that manifesto had not been published until December 22, 1855—ten days after the Boyd had left Liverpool. It had likewise been published in The Mormon on December 1, 1855, two and a half months before the Loaders arrived in New York. Yet surely the Saints on board the ship had gossiped and speculated about the prospect of their novel “experiment” in crossing the plains. Even more surely, Patience’s brother-in-law, John Jaques, as the associate of European Mission president Franklin D. Richards, must have been intensely caught up in the details of the handcart plan. How could he not have explained it to Patience, on the very eve of her departure from England, when she spent the night visiting Jaques and his wife, her sister Zilpah?
It is possible that Patience’s memoir is disingenuous at this point—or that the hindsight of three decades in Utah before she began to write had retouched her memory. But “Reccolections of past days” is so artless a narrative that deliberate falsehood seems unlikely. Perhaps after all the truth is that the Loaders had somehow remained ignorant of the handcart scheme.
There is no getting around the family’s shock and surprise at what transpired in the spring of 1856. On March 29, John Jaques wrote James Loader a letter, which he received on April 18. In no uncertain terms, the epistle ordered the Loaders to leave New York at once and go by train to Iowa, then by handcart to Zion. The orders, according to Patience, were straight from President Richards.
Patience went to President John Taylor’s office in New York to plead her case. “He knew that My father had only we fourgirls to help him as Mother was avery delicate Woman unable to take a journey by handcart across the plains.” Taylor seemed sympathetic. “I ask Br Taylor if he would like to have his girls pull ahand cart across the plains he Said no.”
Quite apart from the physical ordeal the emigration promised for her frail parents, Patience was disturbed by the indignity of such a means of travel. “I could not see it right at all,” she wrote later, “to want us to do such a humeliating thing to be I said harnest up like cattle and pull a handcart loded up with our beding cooking utencels…and have to go through different towns to be looked at and Made fun of.”
So deep was the family’s alarm at this turn of events that Patience wrote her brother-in-law a letter of protest. Not only did John Jaques answer it in paragraphs that thundered with anger and contempt—he published the exchange in the Millennial Star, disguising Patience’s identity only with the signature “P______.”
In English regularized with respect to spelling and punctuation, Patience appeared in the Star insisting that the family had been “somewhat surprised to find that we have to go by the hand-carts.”
Father and mother think this cannot be done, and I am sure I think the same, for mother cannot walk day after day…. If we girls were strong boys then I think it might be done, but father is the only man in our family…. Mother, I am sure, can never go that way. She says herself that she cannot do it…. Mother says that she must have a revelation before she can see this right. Why, we shall have to sell nearly all our clothes! And what shall we do for things to wear when we get to the Valley? Seventeen pounds weight each is very little.
(The last line reveals that the seventeen-pound personal baggage limit was announced in advance to the Loaders—as it would not be to many of the handcart Saints.)
John Jaques’s rejoinder, addressed not to Patience but to her father, is a fanatical tirade. He insists he has read the letter from “P______” half a dozen times, barely managing to suppress his incredulity.
There is not one atom of the spirit of Zion in it, but the very spirit of apostacy. I felt to exclaim in my heart, “Who has bewitched you…that you should so soon forget the goodness of the Lord in delivering you from this part of Babylon, and opening up your way to Zion?”…
Joseph Smith prophesied that those who would not gather to Zion when their way was open, should be afflicted by the devil….
It astonishes me that you wish to stay in New York. After you have left one part of Babylon, I wonder how you can think of sitting down in another, when you have the privilege of bidding it farewell altogether…. I have heard you talk of saving all your family, and I know you desire to do so, but is this the way to do it? No, it is not, but is the way to make shipwreck of your own salvation, and your children’s too.
(And so on, to the length of some 2,500 very public words.) Jaques softened the blow of his withering diatribe only by promising to emigrate with Zilpah and set out by handcarts with the Loader family in the summer of 1856.
The impact on James Loader of his son-in-law’s savage dressing-down would have been devastating enough had it remained private. But
one day in April or May a high official in the New York Mission office came to the Loaders’ lodgings in Williamsburg. “He said did you know that your name is in the Mellinal star Br Loader,” Patience later wrote. “You are thought to be apostizing from the Church & it sais father Loader has brought his family out of one part of Bablon and Now he wants to settle down in another part of Bablon.”
The shaming was too much for James Loader. In Patience’s words,
This hurt My poor dear fathers feelings very Much he said to Mother I cannot stand that to be accused of apostacy I will show them better; Mother I am going to Utah I will pull the hand cart if I die on the road…. So when father gave the word we all agreed to go with him and we commenced to make ready for the Journey.
It was a decision that would seal James Loader’s fate, and change the lives of his family members forever.
THE LOADERS LEFT New York on July 3, 1856. They took a train across New York state to the town of Dunkirk, on the shores of Lake Erie, then a boat westward across that body of water to Cleveland. From Cleveland, they traveled once more by railroad, with stops in Chicago and Rock Island, before arriving in Iowa City.
Just as in England, in the United States Mormon converts were regarded as a curiosity, and sometimes taunted about their pilgrimage to Zion. In Davenport, Iowa, Patience reported, “agreat croud—gatherd around us casting slurs at us and asking father if he was going to take his fine girls to Utah and give them to Brigham Young for wives.” The jeerers urged James Loader to stay in Davenport, “for girls was scarce in that neighbourhood and there was lots of Men that wanted wives.”
Later, on the train between Davenport and Iowa City, “two big Men” forced their way into a car that the family had been told was reserved for them. (They may have been hobos, or simply local ruffians looking for amusement.) The men’s intrusion was threatening enough that James Loader and his son John ordered them to leave, but only when John, “beign astaut Young Man, pushed them boath out of the car and closed the doors” was the family liberated from the menace.
Besides the stress of the journey itself, there was another reason it was wrenching for Patience to leave New York. In her brief résumé of the trip to Iowa City, she momentarily lifts the veil over her private life. In Williamsburg, she had been courted by a man named Alexander Ott. Thirty-three years old that July, Ott had first come to Utah by wagon in 1854; now he was serving as a missionary proselytizing in the East. Patience was now twenty-eight years old, but Ott is the first suitor mentioned in her memoir. She was in fact engaged to be married to the missionary. In Dunkirk, Patience took the time to write her beau a love letter.
Yet the romance came to a sour ending. In one brisk run-on sentence, Patience sketches its denouement: “I promised to become his wife when he came home [to Utah] that I would wait for him to return home as soon as he was releaced from his Mission but he prooved falce to me and Married a widow woman.”
The Loaders arrived in Iowa City in mid-July. Here, along with all the other members of their handcart company, they camped on the ground under a big canvas tent. “The weather was dreadfully hott No shade whatever,” Patience complains, “here we staid for three weeks before the company was ready to start.”
In that laconic sentence, Patience records a delay that would prove to be the fatal flaw in the 1856 emigration. At the Iowa City camp, there were not nearly enough handcarts available to supply the hundreds of Saints bound for Zion. On the spot, using green wood culled from nearby forests, the best carpenters among the company had to build makeshift handcarts that would break down with infernal regularity on the trail.
During that extended wait, Patience’s brother John and his wife, Harriet, decided not to continue to Utah. Having lost their infant daughter on the voyage of the John J. Boyd, the couple was expecting yet another newborn. As Harriet was “nearing her confindment,” she and her husband deemed the handcart journey too arduous. John soon found a job in Iowa City. The couple and their children would gather to Zion only a decade later, after he had served as a volunteer in the Civil War and been seriously wounded in the Battle of Cedar Creek in Virginia.
To make up for that loss, the Loaders were reunited in Iowa City with John Jaques and his wife, Zilpah, Patience’s twenty-five-year-old sister, as well as sister Tamar, two and a half years younger. Jaques had made good on his promise to emigrate to Salt Lake City with the Loaders by hand-cart. Zilpah herself was eight months pregnant, but, unlike her sister-in-law, was prepared to face the rigors of the trail in that condition. If at this reunion there was any lingering bad blood between Jaques and his father-in-law, on account of the humiliating broadside published in the Millennial Star, Patience does not record it. Instead, she remarks simply, “this was ahappy Meeting.”
The handcart train of which the Loaders were members is known today as the Martin Company, after the man in charge of it, Edward Martin. Thirty-seven years old, born in Lancashire, he had emigrated to the United States in the 1840s and served in the so-called Mormon Battalion in the Mexican War. Having traveled with those troops to California and back, Martin was one of the most experienced voyagers among all the 1,800-plus handcart pioneers of 1856.
On July 25, the Martin Company at last moved out of its Iowa City camp. Decades later, Patience would look back on that departure as a grievous mistake: “At that time we did not know what hardships we would have to pass through before we came to the end of our Journey if we had known we may have backed out and Staid in Iowa which I think would have been better for us and would have been the means of Saving my dear fathers life.”
In her memoir, Patience devotes only a few lines to the 270-mile month-long trek from Iowa City to Florence. In retrospect, no doubt the routine ordeals of that first leg of the journey paled in comparison with the horrors to come. It is only as the Martin Company neared Florence, and her father’s legs swelled so much he had trouble walking, that her prose begins to prickle with alarm.
In a reminiscence published in the Salt Lake Daily Herald more than two decades later, with his former fanaticism mellowed out of him, John Jaques vividly conjured up the chaos of the Iowa City camp and the tortures of the first weeks on the handcart trail. That most of the pioneers had been told nothing about the seventeen-pound personal baggage limit is abundantly clear in the camp scene Jaques evokes:
As only a very limited amount of baggage could be taken with the handcarts, during the stay in the Iowa camping grounds there was a general lightening of such things as could best be done without. Many things were sold cheaply to the residents of that vicinity, and many more things were left on the camping ground for anybody to take or leave at pleasure. It was grievous to see the heaps of books and other articles thus left in the sun and rain and dust, representing a respectable amount of money spent therefore in England, but thenceforth a waste and a dead loss to the owners.
As for the party’s makeshift handcarts:
Some of the axles broke in a few days, and mechanics were busy in camp at nights repairing the accidents of the day….
Many were prostrated in the Iowa camp because unclimated and unaccustomed to the great heat. In starting from Iowa with the handcarts and dragging them over the sandy roads, it seemed like pulling the very pluck out of one, the pluck physical and corporeal. The pluck mental remained with the company much the same to the last. The carts were poor ones, with wooden axles, leather boxes, and light iron tires, and the squeaking of the wheels through lack of sufficient grease could often be “heard a mile.”
John Jaques also kept a diary of the trek. Its entries are telegraphic, factual, and determinedly upbeat: “Good camping place, good feed, water a half mile off at a spring”; “wood, water and feed excellent.” Yet here and there tribulation breaks through: “Two wagon loads of rough men came to our camp from Marengo with the intention of creating a disturbance, but they were unable to and went away in a short time shouting and yelling”; “The axle of two carts brokle down. Temporary axles were lashed on”
; “Saw a wolf at the carcus of a calf, close to the road. I arrived after dark. Lame with fester.”
Contemplating the character of the hundreds of handcart emigrants, one cannot help but be impressed by how tough these men, women, and children were. To be sure, lives of hard manual labor back in Britain or Scandinavia had inured many of them to weakness or fatigue. And their Mormon faith gave them a strength that cannot be measured in ergs.
But for the kind of effort an overland migration would require, these converts were woefully inexperienced. As Wallace Stegner writes in his pithy history The Gathering of Zion, “Most of them…had never pitched a tent, slept on the ground, cooked outdoors, built a campfire. They had not even the rudimentary skills that make frontiersmen. But as it turned out, they had some of the stuff that makes heroes.”
By August 22, the last of the handcart emigrants had straggled into Florence, just across the Missouri River on the west. Built in 1846 as Winter Quarters by Brigham’s pioneer party, the place had been abandoned in 1848. Then in 1854, when the former Omaha Indian territory was opened for settlement by U.S. citizens, Mormon entrepreneurs reestablished the outpost as Florence. By 1856, it was a thriving little tent city, with stores, warehouses, corrals, and a bowery or town hall for meetings, all laid out in the orderly rectangular grid that would characterize all Mormon settlements, including Salt Like City.
Here in Florence lay another opportunity to terminate the trek, winter over, and head on for Zion the next spring. A general discussion among the Martin Company emigrants was held on just this theme. But a combination of fatalism and the by now ingrained exhortations of the church officials turned nearly all the pioneers back to the trail stretching westward, where it plunged into real wilderness, traversed by at least half a dozen different Indian tribes, none of which could be counted on to be friendly.
Devil's Gate Page 3