Devil's Gate

by David Roberts

  With the plan announced to the Saints in Utah, to the Saints in the Eastern states (via a bulletin published in the New York–based The Mormon on December 1, 1855), and to the British Saints in the Millennial Star, the great “experiment” (as it was alternatively called, even by Young) was launched. The Prophet put Franklin Richards in charge of organizing the emigration from Liverpool. Apostle John Taylor, the president of the Eastern Mission, based in New York City, was to be in charge of receiving the European Saints upon their arrival in the New World and sending them on their way to Iowa. Taylor, who had been severely wounded in the Carthage jail when the mob had burst in and killed Joseph and Hyrum Smith in 1844, took his duties seriously. At once he dispatched Elders William H. Kimball (Heber Kimball’s son) and George D. Grant to Iowa City to superintend the building of the first hundred handcarts, then Elder Daniel Spencer, a missionary just returned from England, to take charge of the whole Iowa operation.

  In the spring of 1856, however, at the very launching of the great handcart experiment, things started to go seriously wrong.

  MORE MYTHOLOGIZING: according to a persistent legend, Edmund Ellsworth, who was finishing his two-year mission in England in 1855, had a dream in which he was called to lead a handcart party to Utah—this, before Young had announced his plan. Ellsworth’s prescient vision would serve for the Saints to buttress the idea that the scheme was indeed of divine origin.

  In this case, the source of the myth was Ellsworth himself, who spoke to a huge gathering in Salt Lake City only two days after his company arrived there. With Young in the audience, he quoted the Prophet’s advice in the dream of more than a year before: “He further said, ‘The powers of the wicked would be exerted against me, and the force of the elements would be combined to overthrow me, as was the case with the companies which first left Nauvoo’; and asked, ‘Can you be faithful before God, and lead your brethren home to Zion by means of hand-carts?’”

  Most of the British Saints in the Ellsworth and McArthur Companies sailed to America aboard the Enoch Train, arriving in Boston on April 30, 1856. By steamer they reached New York the following day, and the day after that set off by train for Iowa City, where they alighted, ready to begin their handcart trek, on May 12.

  Except that there were no handcarts waiting for them—despite the efforts of Apostle John Taylor and other Mormon officials to contract for the building by local carpenters of that initial fleet of one hundred carriages. No scholar has yet explained this monumental oversight. Daniel Spencer had arrived in Iowa City on April 23, almost three weeks before the Ellsworth and McArthur emigrants. That very day, he wrote cryptically in his journal, “Examined the handcarts contracted by G. D. Grant which I did not much like.” Did Spencer simply discard or refuse to pay for these inadequate vehicles?

  In any event, after the five hundred Saints in the two companies reached Iowa City, they would be forced to linger there for four weeks as they built their own handcarts. Even the more sharp-eyed diarists among these pilgrims seem to have accepted this glitch with a glum fatalism. Thus Archer Walters, a skilled carpenter who would perform much of the building of the handcarts, to his diary:

  Monday [May] 19th Went into the city of Iowa. Short of lumber…. [Tuesday] 20th Went to work to make hand carts. Was not very well. Worked 10 hours.

  The most serious consequence of the handcart shortage was that the new, hastily constructed contraptions had to be built of green, not seasoned, timber. On the trail, the wood would warp, split, and shrink, necessitating frequent stops for jury-rigged repairs.

  It is a testimony either to the converts’ loyal obedience to their leaders, or to their utter ignorance of just what kind of ordeal lay ahead of them, that in all the diaries and reminiscences from the first two handcart companies later collected in the LDS Archives, there is scarcely a word of complaint (not to mention recrimination) about the failure of the officials to have handcarts ready in Iowa City, or about the obligation for the emigrants to build the carts themselves out of unseasoned wood. At last, on June 9, Ellsworth’s party set off; McArthur’s followed two days later.

  Ellsworth would prove himself something of a tyrant on the trail, as well as a fanatic proponent of handcart travel once he reached Salt Lake City. McArthur seemed, in contrast, to lead by charismatic example. His team earned the nickname of the “Crack Company,” in homage to its members’ pluck, fitness, and high spirits. Ellsworth had demanded that his company be allowed to move out first, a preemption that McArthur bore with good grace. Even on the trail, Ellsworth had to be at the head of the caravan. On July 1, Archer Walters, the English craftsman whose diary rarely has a harsh word for anyone, complained about “Bro. Ellsworth always going first which causes many of the brothers to have hard feeling.”

  The Crack Company soon caught up with Ellsworth’s slightly balkier entourage, and the two parties traveled together across Iowa. A friendly but heated rivalry between the two teams developed early on, accentuated by the makeup of their personnel—Ellsworth’s mostly English Saints, McArthur’s nearly all Scots. Indeed, the first and second companies would play a grueling game of tag and catch-up all the way to Salt Lake City.

  The 270-mile passage across Iowa, known by now to be by far the easiest segment of the long trail, nonetheless unfolded in a grim procession, as with alarming regularity pilgrims (mostly children) died by the wayside. Archer Walters, whose duty it was to craft coffins for the victims, recorded their deaths (which began even before the party left Iowa City) in laconic diary entries:

  Friday [June] 6th Made another child’s coffin….

  Sunday 15th Got up about 4 o’clock to make a coffin for my brother, John Lee’s son name William Lee, aged 12 years. Meetings as usual, and at the same time had to make another coffin for Sister Prator’s child…. Went and buried them by moonlight at Bear Creek….

  Tuesday 17th Traveled about 17 miles; pitched tent. Made a little coffin for Bro. Job Welling’s son and mended a hand cart wheel….

  Saturday 21st…Bro. (Jas.) Bower died about 6 o’clock; from Birmingham Conference. Went to buy the wood to make the coffin but the kind farmer gave me the wood and nails….

  Wednesday [July] 2nd Rose about 5 o’clock after sleeping in wet clothes, and made a coffin for Bro. Card…for his daughter named ______ Card, aged ______….

  Thursday 3rd Ever to be remembered. Bro Card gave me ½ dollar for making his daughter’s coffin.

  With regularity, Walters records the nearly daily stops to repair broken handcarts. Ever the realist, McArthur was well aware of the inadequacy of his flimsy carriages. In a memoir written just a few months after he arrived in Salt Lake, the leader of the Crack Company vividly evoked this ordeal by repair:

  Our carts, when we started, were in an awful fix. They mowed [moaned] and growled, screeched and squealed, so that a person could hear them for miles. You may think this is stretching things a little too much, but it is a fact, and we had them to eternally patch, mornings, noons and nights.

  Edmund Ellsworth, in contrast, was hard put to admit that anything was amiss. “June 9th 1856. At 5 P.M. the carts were in Motion proceeding zion wards,” he crowed in the official journal, kept by scribe Andrew Galloway. “The Saints were in excellent spirits bound zion wards. the camp travelled about 4 Miles and pitched their tents. all well.”

  And when the Saints were not in excellent spirits, Ellsworth responded with a tongue-lashing. As John Oakley, a sub-captain of the company and Ellsworth’s unwavering yes-man, recorded on June 11:

  Prest E spoke said he did not want to hear any more grumbling from this time on that the Em[igratio]n had cost more than expected consequently Prest Spencer was short of means so that we could not expect Sugar & Meat &c plentifully. said much depended on the success of this Co. if we failed it would throw a damper in the gathering of Israel we are responsible for it will be our own faults if we fail for the Prophet Brigham has Said it can be done. said he would rather the people of this camp would cut open his heart
& drink his hearts blood than to hear any more grumbling for the judgements of the almighty would be upon us.

  According to Oakley, who no doubt mirrored Ellsworth’s views on the matter, when the handcarts broke down, it was due not to faulty design but to carelessness on the part of their handlers.

  Along with deaths by the wayside, both parties suffered losses in the form of what Mormon leaders called “dropouts” or “backouts”—men, women, and children who, finding the toil unsupportable or their faith weakening, chose to return to Iowa City (or later, to stay in Florence) rather than complete the trek. That pressure from peers and leaders not to abandon the pilgrimage was intense emerges in the poignant early entries of one of the McArthur Company’s most faithful diarists, Twiss Bermingham, an Irish Saint about twenty-six years old who was accompanied by his wife and three children aged eight and younger. On June 12, only the second day of his party’s journey,

  We traveled 12 miles, starting at 9:30 o’clock and camped at 1 o’clock. The day was very hot and windy. The dust flew so thick that we could not see each other 1 yard distant…. This day was so very severe that Brother Larens and myself with our families thought we could not go on with safety to ourselves and families and drag hand carts with about 250 lbs. of luggage on them, and so determined to return to Iowa City to try and procure a [wagon] team to go through with.

  Bermingham paid a teamster $5 to carry his family back to Iowa City. There, on the following day, a fellow Saint exhorted the man to get back on the trail. Without further comment in his diary, the Irishman harnessed his family back to their handcart. On June 14, the Berminghams caught up with the McArthur train, thirty-six miles out of Iowa City.

  Since no comprehensive rosters of any of the handcart companies were ever compiled, it is very hard to calculate the number of dropouts. Combing genealogical records, historians LeRoy and Ann Hafen assert that the Ellsworth Company had thirty-three dropouts among its 280 emigrants. In a letter to the New York newspaper The Mormon, one J. H. Latey, a loyal Saint resident in Florence, estimated that the average back-out toll was “from five to fifty in a company of 300.” Latey was disgusted by these defections, editorializing,

  Those weak in the faith soon find those who will make them weaker; those who have backed out before them come up with their long faces, smooth words, and melancholy tone, prating away their words of comfort (?), and if they will only go away with them there is no end of the money and comfort they are going to have, and a team, ONLY NEXT SPRING, to ride in and go to the Valley.

  Since observers such as Latey and the Hafens were at pains to minimize dropping out, the actual number of backouts was probably higher than their estimates.

  Among the leaders of the handcart companies, there was a prevalent conviction that the process of dropping out was the Lord’s way of separating the chaff from the wheat. John Oakley, Ellsworth’s sub-captain, captures this sanctimonious leitmotif as he records the sermons in which emigration officials harangued his company on June 6, three days before its departure from Iowa City:

  Eld: Spencer Tyler & Furgesen spoke of the high anticipation thought & solicitude for the hand cart co. & how thankfull those ought to be who were about to start out. Prest S said how softly we all ought to walk before the Lord & before angles who are watching us with most anxious solicitude especially for this company. Bro. Fergusen said shame on him or her who would propecy that the H Cart Co. would not go through when Bro. Brigham had said they shall—said it seem it may be now as it has been the Lord has killed off one half of the people to scare the other half to do right.

  This vein of righteousness, which Brigham Young himself was wont to employ in his speeches in Salt Lake City, readily produced a kind of circular argument: whoever dropped out or even showed faintness of heart was judged to have been morally deficient from the start. Thus on June 20, in Oakley’s diary, “One Bro Loyd and family (Welsh) Complained that the Hand Cart pulling was too hard & stoped after pulling to the top of a hill Bro. L likes a full belly & plenty of Whiskey.” Five days later, Oakley joined another sub-captain and Ellsworth to deliver a homily on “lousiness” to that evening’s camp meeting: “Cautioned against to freequent talking. & the purpose of the Lord in having us travel in this way it was not that He had not sufficient Cattle &c but He wished to decipline & prove us.”

  Heartless though it seems, Oakley’s scorn for dropouts extended with a kind of Orwellian logic to those who were so faithless as to collapse and die along the trail. Thus:

  Sun. [September] 7th…A Bro. Geo. Liddiard was taken verry ill & remained back some 5 mi. I took the horse & went after him found him dying. I hasted back to camp it was then dark—& came back in com. with Bro. Ira Hinkley & Thos Fowler with a waggon & fetched the body he died an hour after we put him in the waggon…. According to Bro. Liddiard’s own testimony he has been a soldier in the British Army & lived a verry life of debauchery My opinion is that the remains of venereal disease & want of his accustomed stimulous drinks was the cause of his stopping here.

  Sat. [September] 13th…A sis Mary Mayo died of disentery She had little faith & had grumbled much (age 65).

  W. [September] 17th Bro Jas Birch died of disentery (age 28) burried him by the side of the road near the river on the bluff Came 11 mi. he had murmured considerable.

  Adding to the emigrants’ hardships were the chronically insufficient rations. The main daily staple for adults in the Ellsworth Company was between one-half and one pound of flour. In addition, the pilgrims were each given two ounces of rice, three ounces of sugar, and one-half pound of bacon per week. Children got even less food. Obviously, such a diet was far too little to maintain health even in sedentary humans, much less in those exerting themselves to the utmost every day.

  Archer Walters’s clipped diary entries capture the agonies of constant hunger. “Very faint for the (lack) of food,” he reports himself on June 26, only a little more than two weeks along the trail. On July 1: “My children cry with hunger and it grieves me and makes me cross.” At Fort Laramie on August 24, Walters traded a dagger he had carried all the way from England “for a piece of bacon an salt.” He also spent a dollar and a quarter to buy bacon and cornmeal, “and Henry [Walters’s sixteen-year-old son] and me began to eat it raw we was so hungry.”

  By August, hunger had driven some of the Ellsworth emigrants to stealing food from their supply wagons. When their leader discovered the thefts, he flew into a rage. John Oakley dutifully recorded Ellsworth’s tirade on August 10: “Prest E told the camp he would lead them no further unless they would do better accused them of stealing one anothers provisions hipocritically pretending sick to ride & c & c told them to put the coat on if it fitted & he knew it did some…. The Camp voted to do better.” Apparently the pilfering continued, however, for on August 24, Archer Walters quoted the company president as vowing that “those that had robbed the hand carts, or wagons, unless they repent their flesh would rot from their bones and go to Hell.”

  All five 1856 handcart companies suffered comparable shortages of food. What was the ultimate rationale for feeding the emigrants such inadequate provisions? In an iconoclastic study, historian Will Bagley declares that the bottom line was Brigham Young’s “obsessive pennypinching.” But it may be that woefully short rations were built into the divine handcart scheme, since the carriages could carry only so much baggage and the few wagons that accompanied the trains were too full of tents and other crucial gear to take on the burden of additional tons of flour and sugar and bacon and rice. Archer Walters thought (or perhaps was told) as much, for on August 11 he sighed, “Very weak myself. I expect it is the short rations: ¾ of a lb. of flour per day. It is but little but it is as much as the oxen teams that we have could draw from St. Florence.”

  Similarly, all the handcart pioneers were strictly limited to seventeen pounds of personal baggage per man or woman, and as little as ten pounds per child. This draconian regulation would contribute even more fundamentally to the catastrophe t
hat would soon unfold than would the shortage of food. One searches the voluminous documentary record of the handcart emigration in vain for a clear statement of how the seventeen-pound limit was arrived at, or who first imposed it. That it was rigorously enforced, however, emerges in many a diary entry. The punitive John Oakley, who performed some of the weighing, railed against “those whom we suspected of Keeping more than the 17 lbs & had Idols such as Boxes Books &c.”

  Nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Jones, however—one of two young Mary Anns who would marry Captain Ellsworth shortly after arriving in Salt Lake City—could see a certain humor in the Saints’ struggle with the weight limit:

  We were allowed 17 lbs. of baggage each, that meant clothes beding cooking utensils etc, When the brethern came to weigh our things some wanted to take more than alowed so put on extra clothes so that some that wore real thin soon became stout and as soon as the weighing was over put the extra clothes in the hand cart again but that did not last long for in a few days we were called upon to have all weighed again & quite a few were found with more than alowed. One old Sister carried a teapot & calendar [collander] on her apron strings all the way to Salt Lake. Another Sister carried a hat box full of things but she died on the way.

  ON JULY 8, the first two handcart companies finally reached Florence. They had been thirty (Ellsworth) and twenty-eight (McArthur) days on the trail across Iowa, averaging not the fifteen (or twenty or thirty) miles a day the Prophet had predicted, but only about nine. “On the arrival of the company in Florence,” Twiss Bermingham of the McArthur Company dryly recorded, “the emigrants were, as a rule, very tired. We found some of Bro. Ellsworth’s Company lying insensible on the road.”