In March 1849, Brigham Young and his co-leaders declared the establishment of the State of Deseret (which Joseph Smith claimed meant “honey bee” and is pronounced DEZ-er-ette), with a “free and independent government.” The grandiosity of Mormon ambitions spoke in the very size of the domain the Saints claimed for Deseret—a region a thousand miles long from north to south (from the Wind River Range in Wyoming to the Gila River in Arizona) and eight hundred miles from east to west (from central Colorado to the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada of California). Deseret was twice as big as Texas.
In an uneasy 1850 compromise, the U.S. Congress whittled Deseret down to an official Utah Territory—still colossal, at 220,000 square miles two and a half times as large as the state of Utah today. The compromise appointed Brigham Young to a four-year term as the territory’s first governor.
The dream of Mormon autonomy, however, would be dashed not by Congress so much as by a completely unforeseeable event—the California gold rush. For the hordes of fortune-seekers who streamed west in 1849, the most logical route to the gold fields was the Mormon Trail through Salt Lake City. Young tried at first to divert this throng of roughnecks toward an alternative route that passed through Fort Hall, the Hudson’s Bay Company outpost in what is today Idaho. But it soon became clear that there were huge economic benefits to be gained from trade with miners who, desperate to get to California, found Salt Lake to be the only viable resupply point on the long and arduous trail. Charging these “golden pilgrims” what they regarded as exorbitant rates for flour and other basic foodstuffs, Utah settlers and merchants grew prosperous. In 1849 alone, more than ten thousand gold-seekers passed through Zion.
The official U.S. census for 1850 recorded the non-Indian population of the Utah Territory as 11,380. Only about half the inhabitants were living in Salt Lake City itself, for almost from the start Young had ordered the Saints to build new towns elsewhere in the territory. Within ten years of the pioneer party’s alighting in the Great Basin in 1847, there were no fewer than ninety-six Mormon villages and settlements, stretching from Fort Bridger in Wyoming to San Bernardino in California, inland from Los Angeles.
Ultimately, Young would never be content simply to establish an independent city-state in the wilderness. From 1830 on, with Joseph Smith’s founding of the religion after he had “translated” the Book of Mormon from the golden plates, the goal of the Saints was to convert the whole world. Young sincerely believed in such a destiny. In a typical 1855 pronouncement, he proclaimed, “We will roll on the Kingdom of our God, gather out the seed of Abraham, build the cities and temples of Zion, and establish the Kingdom of God to bear rule over all the earth.”
As the gold-miners flooded through Salt Lake City in 1849, and paused there for as little as a day or as long as several weeks to recuperate, curiosity about the odd Mormon sect bred familiarity, and familiarity often gave birth to contempt and alarm. Accounts of life and manners in Salt Lake City began to appear in Eastern newspapers. The government surveyor and explorer Captain John W. Gunnison spent the winter of 1849–50 in Salt Lake City. Fascinated by the religion and the society it had spawned, Gunnison published in 1852 the first book-length account of the colony written by a Gentile outsider, The Mormons, or, Latter-day Saints, in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. A remarkably balanced account, the book credits the Mormons with having established a “peaceful, industrious, and harmonious community.” At the same time, Gunnison unambiguously testified to the practice of polygamy among the Saints, still officially denied by the church: “That many have a large number of wives in Deserét, is perfectly manifest to any one residing long among them.”
In 1853, as he surveyed for a possible railroad route, Gunnison’s party was ambushed in a desolate region of western Utah, near the present-day hamlet of Hinckley. The captain and seven of his men were killed, their bodies mutilated. The so-called Gunnison Massacre was almost certainly perpetrated by a band of Pahvant Utes, in retaliation for the murder of members of their own tribe by a California-bound emigrant train unrelated to Gunnison. Yet because of the revelations in Gunnison’s book, and because the idea of a railroad running through Utah was anathema to Young (since it would jeopardize Zion’s isolation from the rest of the United States), it was suspected at the time—and is still argued today—that the killings were either carried out by Mormons or by Indians acting under secret Mormon orders. Those dark suspicions were given further credence in 1855 when, after a trial conducted by Gentiles but convened in Utah found three Pahvants guilty of manslaughter, they were sentenced to three years in prison and promptly allowed to escape.
Testimonies such as Gunnison’s about life in Utah, and particularly about polygamy, forced Young’s hand. In 1852, after twenty-one years of strenuous official denials, the President finally acknowledged publicly that “plural marriage” was sanctioned by Mormon doctrine. Meanwhile, from 1849 through 1856, with a certain naïveté, Young continued to lobby the U.S. government for the admission of Deseret to the union. Polygamy was too much, however, for the average American to swallow. It will be recalled that John C. Frémont, running for president as the first Republican candidate in 1856—the same Frémont who had surveyed the route the Mormons followed to the Great Basin, and whose report Young carried with him on the pioneer trek—campaigned on the pledge to abolish “those twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy and Slavery.”
As part of his statehood effort, Young conducted his own census of Deseret in 1856 and came up with a population of some 77,000. This number was wildly inflated: four years later, the U.S. census would count the true population of the Utah Territory at 40,273.
By 1855, a number of federal officials assigned to the territory had fled, their reasons ranging from sheer frustration to fear of being assassinated by Young’s shadowy “avenging angels,” the Danites. Tensions in the breakaway theocracy were stretched tighter than at any time since the pioneers had first arrived in the Great Basin. It was widely rumored that the U.S. government, instead of admitting Deseret to the union, would invade Utah with troops. This was no mere paranoid fantasy on the part of the Saints, for in 1857 just such an invasion would be launched by President James Buchanan.
In Young’s mind, the best deterrent against such a conquest was sheer numbers. In Great Britain, and increasingly in Scandinavia (particularly Denmark), thousands of converts longed to gather to Zion. Only their own poverty stood in the way.
It was in this fraught climate of fear and defiance that Brigham Young came up with the “divine” handcart scheme.
BETWEEN THE PIONEER trek of 1847 and the last wagon train in 1855, no fewer than 150 separate companies of Mormon emigrants made the long voyage across the plains to Salt Lake City. Some of these parties carried mainly freight, but the majority of them brought the tens of thousands of faithful Saints to the only place on earth where they would be safe from the iniquities of Babylon. Every such journey was perilous, and it was the rare exception for a party to come through without suffering several or more deaths. Disease far outweighed accidents as a cause of mortality. John Unruh, whose The Plains Across (1979) is the seminal study of overland migration to the West between 1840 and 1860, concludes that in 1850 and again in 1852, more than two thousand emigrants (both Gentile and Mormon) died of cholera on the Oregon and California Trails, most of them before they reached Fort Laramie.
The dead were usually hastily buried by the wayside. One 1852 emigrant bound for Oregon recorded in her diary the location of 401 fresh graves along the trail, estimating that she had discovered only about one-fifth of these dolorous sites. Taking the twenty-year period from 1840 to 1860 as a whole, Unruh calculates that the average mortality rate for an emigrant party was about 4 percent.
For the ever pragmatic Young, however, the critical flaw in the mechanism of gathering to Zion was not the mortality rate, but an economic one. Saints arriving in the Midwest from the Eastern states or from Europe faced the necessity of buying wagons and oxen to continue their journe
ys beyond the reach of Mississippi and Missouri River steamboats or of the railroad to Iowa City. By the mid-1850s, a wagon typically cost $90, a yoke of oxen $70. Since it took three yokes to pull a fully loaded wagon, the cost of outfitting a family for the trail easily reached $300. This sum was beyond the means of most Saints, especially the working-class converts in Britain and Scandinavia, who had to pay for their journeys from Liverpool to New York or Boston and their transportation to Iowa or Missouri before even contemplating the purchase of a wagon train.
To solve this problem, in 1849 Young and his fellow leaders invented the Perpetual Emigration Fund. In effect, the PEF lent the necessary money for the journey to Zion as an advance to the indigent emigrant, who once in Salt Lake City would pay off his debt through labor. Church officials characterized the PEF as an altruistic outpouring of funds to enable emigration. Its backers promised the recipients, “This will make the honest in heart rejoice, for they love to labor.”
What those backers failed to mention (and what PEF apologists today still minimize) were two mitigating circumstances. The first was that while church coffers supplied much of the money, a substantial part of it was raised by dunning all the less-than-impoverished Saints—especially in Britain and Scandinavia—to donate every shilling or krone they could spare to the PEF. Even more onerous was the fine-print stipulation that the loan would accrue an interest rate of 10 percent in Utah. Many a Saint would spend the rest of his life in the territory unable to pay back his PEF loan.
In sheer practical terms, the PEF worked: by the end of 1855, it had assisted 3,411 emigrants to get to Utah. But in that year Young reckoned the PEF debt as $100,000, owed to the church by 862 Saints who had not yet been able to pay back their advances. To the Prophet, this was an untenable situation.
As the Forty-niners had streamed through Salt Lake City on their way to the goldfields, the Saints had been astonished to see the odd but undeniably doughty fortune-seeker heading westward with nothing more than a shapeless pack on his back, or, even more bizarrely, pushing a wheelbarrow laden with his belongings. These tough eccentrics planted the germ of an idea. As early as 1852, Young had toyed with the handcart scheme, but it was not until 1855 that he announced it to his flock. As Apostle Franklin D. Richards, president of the European Mission, would rationalize the wheelbarrow-handcart comparison, “Many men have traveled the long and weary journey of 2000 miles from the Missouri river to California on foot, and destitute, in order to obtain a little of the shining dust—to worship at the shrine of Mammon. Who that appreciates the blessings of the Gospel would not be willing to endure as much and more, if necessary, in order to dwell with the righteous and reap the riches of eternal life?”
Adding urgency to Zion’s looming economic crisis was a disastrous crop failure in 1855. Not only drought but a plague of “Mormon crickets” (wingless grasshoppers) ravaged the corn and wheat fields, reducing the harvest to as little as a third of the normal yield. By winter, many residents were near starvation, digging up thistle roots and pigweed to fill their bellies. In 1848, a similar infestation of grasshoppers had threatened to wipe out the crops, but as if out of nowhere, hordes of seagulls had descended upon the fields and gorged themselves on the noxious insects, saving the fledgling colony. The advent of the seagulls, considered a divine miracle at the time, did not recur in 1855. (The state bird of Utah today is the California gull, Larus californicus.)
On October 29, 1855, in the Thirteenth General Epistle (a kind of Mormon state-of-the-union address issued once a year), Young and his two chief counselors announced the handcart plan. A month before that, the Prophet had written Franklin D. Richards in Liverpool a letter outlining the scheme in detail. In the December 22 issue of the Millennial Star, Richards published the letter along with his own extended editorial on the matter. His audience—the British Saints who would make up the vast majority of the handcart companies—would be far more directly affected by the consequences of the plan than the Saints who had already made it to Utah. (It was that issue of the Star that Patience Loader’s family had failed to read, as they sailed toward New York aboard the John J. Boyd in December.)
Whatever his faults, Brigham Young is widely credited with being a practical genius. Yet in retrospect, his September 30 letter to Richards reads as a triumph of starry-eyed wishful thinking over common sense. Retrospect may be an unfair lens through which to scrutinize what we now know as a catastrophe; but there is a strong and persistent belief in Mormon circles today that there was nothing intrinsically unsound about the handcart plan—that only the domino effect of a series of unlucky and unlikely events produced the disaster.
“I have been thinking how we should operate another year,” Young mused in his letter to Richards.
We cannot afford to purchase wagons and teams as in times past, I am consequently thrown back upon my old plan—to make hand-carts, and let the emigration foot it, and draw upon them the necessary supplies, having a cow or two for every ten. They can come just as quick, if not quicker, and much cheaper—can start earlier and escape the prevailing sickness which annually lays so many of our brethren in the dust.
From this guardedly optimistic prelude, Young soared into wild fancy:
If it is once tried you will find it will become the favourite method of crossing the plains; they will have nothing to do but come along, and I should not be surprised if a company of this kind should make the trip in sixty or seventy days. I do know that they can beat any ox train crossing the plains.
The Prophet seems to have forgotten that in 1847 it had taken his handpicked pioneer party, nearly all of whom were men in the prime of life, 108 days to travel from Winter Quarters to the Great Salt Lake, over a trail three hundred miles shorter than the one the handcart pioneers would be required to traverse.
Onward into delusion:
Fifteen miles a day will bring them through in 70 days, and after they get accustomed to it they will travel 20, 25, and even 30 with all ease, and no danger of giving out, but will continue to get stronger and stronger; the little ones and sick, if there are any, can be carried on the carts, but there will be none sick in a little time after they get started. There will have to be some few tents.
Young never claimed that the handcart plan was divinely inspired. Unlike Joseph Smith, who received direct revelations from God with startling frequency, Young would record only one in his lifetime—the original vision that the Saints would find their lasting Zion somewhere in the West.
Yet in the same issue of the Star, Richards leapt to the divine conclusion: “The plan is the device of inspiration,” he told the British Saints, “and the Lord will own and bless it.” Within months of its inception, the handcart scheme was widely believed by Mormons to have been passed down to Young in a revelation from God. Thus in the lyrics of a song written by Emily Hill Woodmansee (a twenty-year-old member of the fourth handcart company in 1856)—one of many songs the handcart pioneers would sing along the trail:
Oh, our faith goes with the hand-carts,
And they have our hearts’ best love;
’Tis a novel mode of traveling,
Devised by the Gods above.
Chorus:
Hurrah for the Camp of Israel!
Hurrah for the hand-cart scheme!
Hurrah! Hurrah! ’tis better far
Than the wagon and ox-team.
And Brigham’s their executive,
He told us the design;
And the Saints are proudly marching on,
Along the hand-cart line.
In his December 22 editorial in the Star, President Richards eagerly expanded upon Young’s enthusiasm for the “novel mode of traveling.” His rhetorical device was to evoke the tribulations endured by the pioneers who had employed the old method of crossing the plains:
They alone can realize what it is to get up on a sultry morning—spend an hour or two in driving up and yoking unruly cattle, and while impatiently waiting to start on the dusty, wearisome road, in orde
r to accomplish the labours of the day in due time, hear the word passed around that some brother has an ox missing, then another hour, or perhaps half a day, is wasted, and finally, when ready to start, the pleasantest time for travelling has passed, during which a company with hand-carts would have performed the greater part of an ordinary day’s journey.
With only a few animals among their numbers, the handcart companies, Richards predicted, would present far less of a temptation to Indian raiders. The emigrants ought to be able to average fifteen miles a day, and so cover the trail in seventy days. (A curious calculation, this, for seventy times fifteen equals 1,050 miles—some 250 short, as Richards well knew, of the 1,300 miles that stretched between Iowa City and Salt Lake.) Like Young, Richards predicted that the handcart Saints would grow so fit they would actually speed up as they neared their goal, topping twenty miles per day. “We believe,” the Apostle wrote, “that experience will prove sixty days to be about the medium time that it will require to cross the plains.”
Above all, Richards emphasized, it was the sacred duty of the British Saints to travel by handcart. Invoking Muslim pilgrimages to Mecca and Hindu self-sacrifices in worship of their religion’s “imaginary deity,” he preached, “Then shall not the Saints, who have the revelations of heaven—the testimony of Jesus—the preludes of eternal joys…be ready to prove by their works that their faith is worth more than the life of the body—the riches of the world—the phantoms of paganism.”
About one advantage of the handcart plan, Richards and Young were dead right: it was substantially cheaper than emigration by wagon and ox team. LDS scholar Andrew D. Olsen calculates that, compared to the $300 a family needed to spend to buy a team and wagon, a handcart for five cost only $10 to $20.
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