Long before the tide of Oregon emigration in the 1840s, boosters of westward expansion had made a vogue of minimizing the difficulties of the trail. In 1813 the Missouri Gazette, published in St. Louis, announced that there was “no obstruction in the whole route that any person would dare to call a mountain.” A Missouri senator in 1838 boasted of Oregon’s “tropical” climate and claimed that the Rockies could be crossed even by “delicate females.” The first Anglo women to cross South Pass, a pair of missionaries’ wives, did so in 1836.
And indeed the pioneer party under Brigham Young proceeded westward with relative ease. The few encounters with Indians were peaceful. There were so many bison to shoot that Young eventually had to scold his followers for wasting so much meat, as they left carcasses to rot on the plains.
As mythologized by the Mormons, the pioneer hegira seems to take place in isolation, as if those 148 pilgrims were pushing along the Platte and Sweetwater like explorers penetrating an undiscovered country. In fact, that spring and summer there were no fewer than five thousand emigrants walking and riding westward toward their own promised lands. The trail was so crowded that on April 25, the Mormon company decided to cross the Platte and continue on its north bank, rather than follow the established and well-trodden route of the Gentiles on the south side of the river. That separation, so characteristic of the Saints, would persist through the following years, so that along the Platte the Mormon Trail came to be distinguished from the Oregon Trail proper.
Unlike the Donner Party, whose story will always remain fuzzy, thanks to a paucity of primary sources, the Mormon pioneer trek is well documented in some twenty-seven trail diaries kept by various members of the party. The best of them is William Clayton’s voluminous journal, full of homely but welcome detail. A random sample, from April 21:
One of the Indians presented several certificates from persons who had previously travelled through their village, all certifying that the Grand Chief of the Pawnees was friendly disposed, and they had made him presents of a little powder, lead, salt &c. Heber gave them a little tobacco & a little salt & President Young gave to the chief, some powder, lead, salt and a number of the brethren gave a little flour each. The old chief however did not seem to think the presents sufficient, and said he did not like us to go west through their cou[n]try, he was afraid we should kill their Buffalo and drive them off. Brother Shumway told him we did not like Buffalo.
It comes as no surprise that this obsessive recorder would set himself the task of measuring the distances the party traveled to the nearest foot. On May 8, Clayton gauged the circumference of one of Heber Kimball’s wagon wheels, finding it to be precisely fourteen feet eight inches. A calculation revealed that exactly 360 revolutions of the wheel covered a mile of ground. So Clayton tied a red rag to one of the spokes, then counted every single revolution all day long. After a few days, the labor started to drive him crazy. With the help of a handy collaborator, he concocted an interlocking pair of wooden cogs attached to the wheel that did the counting just as efficiently as the red rag (a replica of this “roadometer” is on display in the Museum of Church History in Salt Lake City).
The upshot of this mania for measuring distances was not only that Clayton could sum up the party’s journey as exactly 1,031 miles long, but that he could rush into print in 1848 a slender book called The Latter-day Saints’ Emigrants’ Guide, a volume that every subsequent party of Mormon pioneers heading to Zion found invaluable. The entries are as quaint and useful as Clayton’s diary. Tables taxonomize every conceivable landmark:
Sandy Bluffs, west foot.
Two hundred yard further, is a creek five feet wide.
The cavalcade on the Mormon Trail amounted to far more than men accompanied by three women and two children. The pilgrims traveled in seventy-two wagons pulled by sixty-six oxen and fifty-two mules, or rode on ninety-three horses, driving along nineteen cows, seventeen dogs, and some chickens. The three women, as Stegner notes, “might as well have been invisible,” for they are mentioned only three or four times in all the journals. Of the whole menagerie, he adds, “It sounds like a dog’s dream, that trip; but the journals don’t mention the dogs much either.”
To bring order to what might have been a ragtag parade, Young imposed a military discipline. The whole party was aroused at 5:00 A.M. by the peal of a bugle. The team started moving at seven after each wagon team had cooked a dinner to be consumed at noon. The wagons were parked at night in a precise configuration with the front wheel of one interlocked with the back wheel of another. Prayers were offered to God every evening at 8:30, and by nine everyone had to be in bed with the fires extinguished. Rules included a prohibition against wandering more than twenty rods (110 yards) from camp.
Even so, the men and boys seemed to be having too good a time on the trip. Buffalo-hunting had become an addiction, as well as cards and checkers in camp. On May 29, Young blew his stack. He assembled the whole expedition and harangued them about the “low, mean, dirty, trifling, covetous, wicked spirit dwelling in our bosoms.” More than one diarist recorded Young’s diatribe:
When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I hear is some of the brethren jawing each other and quarreling because a horse has got loose in the night. I have let the brethren dance and fiddle and act the nigger night after night to see what they will do…. Well, they will play cards, they will play checkers, they will play dominoes, and if they had the privilege and were where they could get whiskey, they would be drunk half their time.
By June 12, the trekkers had reached what would come to be known as the Last Crossing, near where the Sweetwater entered the North Platte. Later in the season, the Platte would be low and braided enough to ford, but now, swollen with spring snowmelt from its headwaters in the Medicine Bow Mountains, it was running a hundred feet wide and fifteen feet deep. It was here—ironically, in the center of today’s Casper, Wyoming—where the Martin handcart company would start to come to grief nine years later.
In 1847, it took the pioneer party six days of perilous ferrying to get across the Platte. The Saints had had the foresight to carry with them a leather boat that they called the “Revenue Cutter,” which could carry as much as 1,800 pounds. The “Cutter” was up to the job of getting all the baggage across the river, but the wagons themselves presented a major problem. The men experimented with log rafts lashed together out of native timbers, with rope systems to swing the wagons from shore to shore, and with attaching outrigger poles to the wagons in an attempt to float them across. Finally, their best-built raft proved barely adequate to carry a single wagon at a time; each ferry left the men holding their breath as they anticipated a capsize.
As he would throughout his tenure as Prophet, Young now turned adversity into a business opportunity. He ordered several of the men to stay behind at the Last Crossing, where they would charge $1.50 per wagon to ferry the scores of Gentile trains bound for Oregon across the flooding river.
Ascending the Sweetwater, which meandered in endless loops through a valley flanked on either side by granite outcrops and wooded hills, the Saints were forced to share the single trail with Gentile companies. The procession sometimes took on the character of a traffic jam, as parties often raced each other to snag the best campsites. Some of the trains were peopled with emigrants from Missouri. The Saints had fresh and bitter memories of being driven out of that state in 1838–39, so relations between them and these homesteaders now grew tense. The Mormon diarists reflect the contempt for the Missourians: in one train, the “men, women and children were all cursing, swearing, quarreling, scolding, and finding fault with each other and other companies.”
The Mormon caravan trundled without serious incident up the Sweetwater valley. On June 27 the wagons crested South Pass, the 7,500-foot divide that is so gently inclined the men amused themselves by trying to determine the precise place where the Atlantic watershed gave way to the Pacific. The date was not lost on the Saints—it was the third anniversary of Smith’s mu
rder in Carthage.
A few miles beyond South Pass, the Oregon Trail parted from the far less traveled route that the Saints must follow to the Great Basin. Grateful to take their leave of the noisome Gentiles, the Saints nonetheless began to worry about getting lost. Fortunately, the very next day they encountered three strangers near the Little Sandy River. One of them was the most famous of all mountain men, Jim Bridger, nicknamed “Old Gabe.” No one knew the country to which the Saints were headed better than he. Two decades before, leading a party of trappers, he had made what was probably the Anglo discovery of Great Salt Lake (which he mistook, because of its saline composition, for a bay of the Pacific Ocean). In 1841, as the beaver trade collapsed, he had built Fort Bridger, the only outpost of civilization in the huge wilderness that stretched away on all sides.
During subsequent years, relations between Old Gabe and the Mormons would so deteriorate that the mountain man would have to flee for his life from Saints (Danites among them) who took over the fort by force. But now, at first meeting, Bridger was happy to camp with Young’s party and tell them all he knew about the Great Basin.
Another Mormon legend hovers about this important meeting. According to this tradition, Bridger was so pessimistic about the prospect of settling near the Great Salt Lake that he promised to give Young a thousand dollars for the first ear of corn he might raise there.
The diaries kept on the trail reveal a more nuanced appraisal on Old Gabe’s part. According to Wilford Woodruff, Bridger said of the Great Salt Lake Basin that “there was but one thing that Could operate against it becoming A great grain country & that wold be frost. He did not know but the frost would effect the corn.”
Before parting, Bridger gave the Saints detailed directions as to how to penetrate the canyons guarding the Great Salt Lake on the northeast. He averred that “he was Ashamed of the Maps of Freemont for He knew nothing about the Country.” Old Gabe’s directions, however, proved so confusing that the Mormons would give up trying to follow them.
On June 30, as the Saints lingered on the east bank of the Green River to build more rafts for their last major stream crossing, they had an equally momentous rendezvous with three other men riding in from the west. One of them was a fellow Saint, Sam Brannan. This extraordinary traveler had sailed from New York in 1846 all the way around Cape Horn to California, where he arrived in time to greet the American squatters who had perpetrated the semi-comic Bear Flag Revolt, the first step in the seizure of California from its Mexican government. Having learned of the pioneer party’s departure from Winter Quarters in April 1847, Brannan had come all the way east to the Green River to intercept Young’s Saints and talk them into settling in golden California.
Brannan would grow indignant when Young ignored his propaganda in favor of the land of milk and honey. Yet as he had crossed the Sierra Nevada that spring, he had been one of the first travelers to come upon the wreckage and carnage of the Donner Party. Now he was the bearer of the shocking tidings of the disaster that had engulfed that emigrant train in the snows of the winter of 1846–47.
Another Mormon legend has it that the Donner Party was made up of the very men who had persecuted the Saints in Missouri and Illinois. Their terrible end was God’s punishment for their sins. In reality, although the Donner Party had started west from Springfield, Illinois, its members had had nothing to do with the conflicts around Nauvoo that had led to Smith’s martyrdom in Carthage.
It is beguiling to learn that this righteous Mormon myth had its origins not in a retrospective distorting of history, but on the very day Brannan met up with the Saints. One of the pioneers, Norton Jacob, so mangled what Brannan reported (unless Brannan himself mangled the truth) that that evening he wrote in his diary:
Br Brannan fell in with a company of Emigrants who by quarreling & fighting among themselves, delayed time until they got caught in the Snows on the Mountains last fall & could not entrical themselves…. Their sufferings were incredible manny of them perished with cold & hunger, all their cattle died & they compeled to eat the flesh of those that died among them!…These are the men that have Mobed & killed the Saints!
Once across the Green River, the Saints had only 169 more trail miles to reach the site of their new Zion. Five-sixths of their long journey was over. But in that home stretch, they would encounter the hardest traveling of all—none of it more arduous than the last thirty-six miles as, finding faint traces of the Donner Party’s passage the year before, they literally built a road down what would come to be called Emigration Canyon.
And now the pioneers’ progress was slowed to a crawl by an outbreak of what the Saints called “mountain fever.” It was characterized by intense headache, severe pain in the joints, and fevers approaching the delirious. The Saints themselves blamed it on sudden alternations of heat and cold, or on alkali in their cooking water. Historians have puzzled as to the true nature of mountain fever. The best guess is that it was Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which is caused by ticks. According to Rock Springs, Wyoming, Bureau of Land Management archaeologist Terry Del Bene, “The sagebrush through which the pioneers moved in western Wyoming is a huge tick farm. The ticks have thermal sensors—they’ll migrate straight toward you.”
No one was stricken more seriously than Young himself. By July 19 he could no longer walk. Uncertain whether to halt the migration until its leader recovered, the Saints ultimately sent ahead an advance party of twenty-two wagons under Orson Pratt, while Young was carried slowly along on the bed of a wagon among the main party.
On July 21, Pratt’s team broke through a last canyon barrier and suddenly gained its first view of the Great Salt Lake basin spreading below. “We could not refrain from a shout of joy,” Pratt wrote.
It is often overlooked or forgotten that in choosing to settle near the Great Salt Lake, the Saints were invading and occupying a foreign country. In July 1847, virtually all of the Great Basin was still Mexican soil, even while the United States’ war against its southern neighbor waxed furious. It would not be until the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848, that all of what are today Utah, Nevada, and California, as well as most of Arizona and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming, would be formally ceded to the United States.
This singular moment in LDS history furnishes the pedestal for the most potent and beloved of all the Mormon myths. According to that legend, on July 24, 1847, Brigham Young beheld the Great Salt Lake valley and at once announced, “This is the place.” Today, July 24, known as Pioneer Day, is the occasion for gala celebrations not only in Salt Lake City, but in every Mormon community. It is the most important Mormon holiday, even more significant than Christmas.
On the outskirts of Salt Lake City today stands This Is the Place Heritage Park, a spacious memorial ground that includes an authentic full-size replica village of the new Zion as it looked during its earliest years. The park is dominated by a sixty-foot-tall pylon with statues of Heber Kimball, Wilford Woodruff, and Brigham Young on top, gazing out over the city below from the spot where the Prophet made his pronouncement.
Alas, Young never uttered his most famous utterance. Historian Dale Morgan, combing the records of the pioneer days, found that the “This is the place” formula does not crop up before 1880—thirty-three years after the pioneer party reached its Zion, and three years after Young’s death.
The truth, always more mundane than the myth, is that when a prostrate Brigham Young was wheeled into sight of the promised land on July 24, the advance party had already plowed three acres of ground and planted the first seedlings, built a dam on what would be named City Creek, and diverted water to the fields by means of irrigation ditches. Wilford Woodruff’s journal for that day notes only that the Prophet “expressed his full satisfaction in the appearance of the valley as a resting-place for the Saints, and was amply repaid for his journey.”
CHAPTER THREE
THE DIVINE HANDCART PLAN
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.
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