Devil's Gate

by David Roberts

  In Florence, the last bastion of Mormon settlement before Salt Lake, the Ellsworth Company laid over for nine days, as the Saints tried to fix their dilapidated carts. While in Florence, John Oakley engaged in an impromptu debate with several “apostates” and “half Mormons” who, appalled by the hardship of handcart travel, tried to “entice whom they could to stop in their glorious place showing especial regard for the sisters—one said to me God never required such hard things as drawing a hand cart.” Oakley had a ready rejoinder: “I told him he had not read his Book right He required (what he the apostate would call hard) his Only Begotten to do a harder thing than draw a hand cart.”

  In Florence, the McArthur party tarried even longer than Ellsworth’s—sixteen full days—as they repaired carts and nursed their bodies back to health. Once again, the company’s leader gallantly acceded to Ellsworth’s insistence on going first on the trail. When McArthur’s party headed west on July 24, the Scots were a full week behind their English rivals.

  Unlikely though it may seem, no author would publish a history of the handcart emigration before LeRoy and Ann Hafen’s 1960 volume, Handcarts to Zion. The Hafens (brother and sister) performed a valuable service in gathering together original documents, although since 1960 many more primary sources have come to light. Their narrative, however, is cursory at best, and the whole book is vitiated by the Hafens’ partisan point of view: they consistently minimize the horrors of the emigration, while striving to see it as a heroic rather than a tragic saga. (As a Swiss girl of six, the Hafens’ mother had come to Zion in the last of all the handcart companies, in 1860.)

  Sadly, we can be sure that nothing like a comprehensive history of the strangest “experiment” in all the annals of westward migration will ever be written. Too many details and episodes have fallen for good between the cracks. Yet in gathering together every scrap of firsthand testimony researchers can find, and in making those documents available to the general public (as they were not, for instance, in the 1960s, when Wallace Stegner wrote his mildly skeptical The Gathering of Zion), the LDS Archives in Salt Lake City have performed a noble service in the name of disinterested scholarship.

  Thanks to those archives, and to the sharp eyes of weary pilgrims, poignant aspects of the handcart ordeal can be rescued from oblivion. In the McArthur Company, for instance, only a single diarist—Thordur Didriksson, from Iceland—bothered to record an aspect of the daily regimen that must have been heart-wrenching for every Saint in the party:

  There were 30 children in the company and early every morning they were sent on ahead of the grownups all in one bunch. Some of them had very little clothing but they all wore hats. They were driven along with willows and had to keep walking as long as they could. No use to cry or complain. But along during the day when it was hot they were allowed to rest and were given food. They were often 2 or 3 miles ahead of us. It was hard for parents to see their little 5 and 6 year olds driven along like sheep.

  Similarly, in Florence the Ellsworth Company took on some thirty new recruits. They are glancingly referred to as “Italian Saints,” but the names of the few that have been preserved look French (e.g., an emigrant recorded as “Peter Stalle,” whose real name was something like Jean-Pierre Staley). How the “Italians” got to Florence is lost to history: most likely they had come up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers by steamboat. Their addition to the party is not even mentioned in the official Ellsworth Company journal, nor are their names on the partial roster in that journal.

  The cold-eyed John Oakley, however, recorded on July 17, “Some 30 Italians were added to our Com. 14 cows added to our fit out also 9 beef cattle & team.” Then, on August 17:

  One Bro. Rosing an Italien much reduced for want of his accustomed beverage (Brandy) was left behind the teams having taken a different road I went back having taken the horse out of the team to do so intending to put him on the horse but found him to feeble after a thougher trial so I came to the waggons (1 mi.) took one the mule teams & came to get him had to lift him in he died an hour after I lifted him in the waggon.

  It would remain for a single informant—a descendant of Jean-Pierre Staley named Margaret Barker, who was interviewed many decades later—to flesh out the picture of this shadowy cadre of “Italian” Saints:

  The Mr. Ellsworth who had charge of the company, for some reason, badly mistreated the French saints, even depriving them of food. It is claimed, by the children of Pierre (Peter) Stalle that he died of starvation. It is claimed that Mr. Ellsworth sold part of the food that should have gone to the saints. When Pierre Stalle was dying, his wife climbed to the wagon to have a few last words with her husband. Ellsworth came with a rope and cruelly whipped her until she was forced to get down. This was verified by the French families who came. “The captain was a very mean man. At one time a man died and they whipped and kicked him and threw him under the tent. His wife took his shoes to wear and some lady called her a dirty Italian.”

  In this reminiscence, Margaret Barker was no doubt calling upon tales handed down by family and friends among the French contingent, and so her own testimony about Ellsworth’s brutal treatment of these foreigners may itself be unreliable. Yet even the loyal sub-captain John Oakley corroborates such a portrayal of Ellsworth, as in his September 12 diary entry: “I whiped a man for stubbornly refusing to walk this according to my presidents orders.”

  As July waned, both companies trudged on, following the Platte River, the Ellsworth party staying a few days ahead of McArthur’s. The good trail the Saints had followed across Iowa gave out, as the emigrants battled with the notorious sand hills of Nebraska. In the worst of the going, the handcarts sank up to the wheel hubs in sand. The toil was terrible, as Twiss Bermingham’s diary entry for August 3 makes clear:

  We started at 5 o’clock without any breakfast, and had to pull the carts through 6 miles of heavy sand. Some places the wheels were up to the boxes, and I was so weak from thirst and hunger and being exhausted with the pain of the boils that I was obliged to lie down several times, and many others had to do the same. Some fell down.—I was obliged to take the children and put them on the handcart and urge them along the road in order to make them keep up.

  On July 26, Henry Walker—a fifty-eight-year-old English laborer in the Ellsworth Company—was struck and killed by lightning. Wrote Archer Walters, “I put the body, with the help of others, on the hand cart and pulled him to camp and buried him without coffin for there was no boards to be had.” Walker left his wife and children to push on toward Zion without him. Three other emigrants were injured by the lightning bolt, including a boy who was badly burned, but they survived and were able to continue.

  On August 16, the McArthur party suffered what Twiss Bermingham called “the most severe day’s journey we have had since we started”—twenty miles of arduous pulling across sand hills interspersed with frequent fords of streams tributary to the Platte. On that same day, a double calamity turned into what many of the Saints regarded as a double miracle.

  First, an elderly Scotswoman named Mary Bathgate was bitten by a rattlesnake. “Before half an hour,” Bermingham averred, “her leg had swelled to four times its thickness.” In his account of the journey written a few months after arriving in Salt Lake, Daniel McArthur detailed the emergency treatment of the victim:

  Sister Bathgate sent a little girl back to me as quickly as possible to have me and Brothers Leonard and Crandall come with all haste, and bring the oil with us, for she was bitten badly. As soon as we heard the news, we left all things, and, with the oil, we went post haste. When we got to her she was quite sick, but said that there was power in the Priesthood, and she knew it. So we took a pocket knife and cut the wound larger, squeezed out all the bad blood we could, and there was considerable, for she had forethought enough to tie her garter around her leg above the wound to stop the circulation of the blood. We then took and anointed her leg and head, and laid our hands on her in the name of Jesus and felt to rebuke the infl
uence of the poison, and she felt full of faith.

  We then told her that she must get into the wagon, so she called witnesses to prove that she did not get into the wagon until she was compelled to by the cursed snake. We started on and traveled about two miles, when we stopped to take some refreshments. Sister Bathgate continued to be quite sick, but was full of faith.

  Another member of the party, one Mary B. Crandal, wrote a beguiling portrait of the Scotswoman in a memoir published almost forty years after the trek. “We all called her Mother Bathgate, for she must have been upwards of sixty,” Crandal wrote. “She told me she had been in the coal-pits for forty years. She would travel on ahead and swing her cane and shout, ‘Hurree for the handkerts.’” After she reached Salt Lake City, Mary Bathgate lived on for many years. “She was a natural poet,” Crandal recalled. “She composed some verses on her miraculous healing from the bite of the snake. I promised to write them for her but never did so. She could not write herself. How many things we neglect that we wish in after years we had not!”

  Compounding the near-tragedy was the reckless act of Bathgate’s best friend. In McArthur’s telling,

  As the word was given for the teams to start, old Sister Isabella Park ran in before the wagon to see how her companion was. The driver, not seeing her, hallooed at his team and they being quick to mind, Sister Park could not get out of the way, and the fore wheel struck her and threw her down and passed over both her hips. Brother Leonard grabbed hold of her to pull her out of the way, before the hind wheel could catch her. He only got her out part way and the hind wheels passed over her ankles. We all thought that she would be all mashed to pieces, but to the joy of us all, there was not a bone broken, although the wagon had something like two tons burden on it, a load for 4 yoke of oxen. We went right to work and applied the same medicine to her that we did to the sister who was bitten by the rattlesnake, and although quite sore for a few days, Sister Park got better, so that she was on the tramp before we got into this Valley, and Sister Bathgate was right by her side, to cheer her up.

  Among the emigrants in both the Ellsworth and McArthur Companies, there were quite a few such spunky, cheerful, and doggedly determined souls. Many of them were women. Twenty-one-year-old Mary B. Crandal (Mary Brannagan at the time), from Ireland, was one. Retrospect may have added a rosy glow, but in 1895 Crandal would look back on the trek and vow, “We all felt well and I enjoyed myself as well as I ever did in my life, only sometimes I would have liked something more to eat.”

  DESPITE THE JAUNTY memoirs of such pioneers as Crandal, it is clear that somewhere near the boundary between today’s states of Nebraska and Wyoming, toward the end of August, both the Ellsworth and McArthur Companies were in serious trouble. What saved the parties was the single most vital (and most foresighted) component of the divine handcart plan.

  In Salt Lake City, Brigham Young and his chief counselors had anticipated that the rations issued to the first two handcart companies would be inadequate to sustain them on the 1,300-mile journey to Zion. To relieve the shortage, the authorities had sent out wagon teams laden with supplies (mostly flour), traveling east along the Mormon Trail in expectation of intercepting the handcart companies.

  On August 31, near Deer Creek, a small southern tributary of the North Platte, the resupply train met the Ellsworth party. The surviving diaries of the handcart pioneers are surprisingly matter-of-fact about this potentially life-saving rendezvous. Perhaps the morale of the company was so low at that point that not even the gift of a thousand pounds of flour could stir the emigrants to exultation. Deaths, in fact, had begun to seem almost routine occurrences. One poor Englishman, fifty-one-year-old Robert Stoddart, had the bad luck to die only an hour before the Ellsworth Company met the resupply train. He was buried at Deer Creek, leaving his wife, his fourteen-year-old son, and his ten-and six-year-old daughters to travel on to Zion without him. Two days later another Englishman, sixty-five-year-old Walter Sanders, died and was promptly buried beside the trail.

  Today, on the site of the Deer Creek resupply, stands the sleepy town of Glenrock, Wyoming. Sylvan the place remains, a woody hollow of an oasis in the bleak prairie stretching north and south of the meandering Platte. The only historical monument in Glenrock, however, says nothing about the handcart companies, choosing instead to celebrate the trading post–cum–saloon of former mountain man Joseph Bissonette (built in 1857) and a short-lived Pony Express station from 1860 to 1861.

  The resupply expedition was so well organized that another thousand pounds of flour was waiting for the McArthur Company when it reached Deer Creek on September 2. A few months later, McArthur would remember how this sudden (and apparently unexpected) boon had “caused the hearts of the saints to be cheered up greatly.” Not content with a single mission of mercy, the authorities in Salt Lake had sent out a second wagon train a couple of weeks after the first. Thus, farther west along the trail, the Ellsworth and the McArthur Companies each received another thousand pounds of precious flour, the latter only twelve days after their first resupply, as they camped on Pacific Creek, now a mere 228 miles short of Salt Lake City.

  Twiss Bermingham, however, recorded in his diary a detail about the resupply mission that neither the authorities in Salt Lake nor the two company captains bothered to mention. Once they arrived in Zion, the Saints would be expected to pay for the flour that had kept them alive, at the rate of 18 cents per pound.

  The dates of the Deer Creek resupplies indicate that, having set out from Florence a full week after the Ellsworth Company, McArthur’s Crack Company had been steadily gaining on its rivals, until now it was only two days behind. Exhausted though the emigrants were, stopping regularly to rest and bury their dead, the race between the English and Scottish Saints was on.

  In early September, both parties at last left the North Platte to follow the Sweetwater River to its headwaters near South Pass. On September 11, having pushed hard into the night, the hares finally caught the tortoises, on Alkali Creek, about twenty miles west of today’s nearly derelict one-horse town of Jeffrey City, Wyoming. With laconic resignation, Ellsworth dictated this turn of events to his company’s official journal: “About 11 P.M. Brother McArthur’s company came up. They had traveled nearly night and day to overtake us.”

  Perhaps magnanimously, McArthur declined to mention his catch-up feat in the reminiscence he wrote a few months later. But that it was a dramatically orchestrated coup emerges in the gloating memory of it that Phyllis Hardie Ferguson, a member of the McArthur Company, reported many years later. Ferguson claimed that her party traveled thirty-two miles that day and night to overtake the Ellsworth team.

  When it became quite dark, we reached the top of a high hill, where by Captain McArthur’s instructions we left the handcarts, and quietly walked down towards the blazing camp fires. Just before we reached the Ellsworth company, we all began to shout, “Hurrah for the handcarts!”

  Captain Ellsworth, thinking it was the overland mail coach, in which was Franklin D. Richards, the returning president of the European mission, and others who were expected, hurriedly called out the band to give them glad welcome. Imagine his chagrin when he discovered that his welcome was given to the Scotch handcart company, who had overtaken him! But he was a good man, and has long years ago ended his life’s journey. Peace to his ashes! The English people, though just as good and zealous, had not the endurance that we had, and it was difficult for them to be first.

  Ferguson goes on to claim that the McArthur party now camped for two weeks at Alkali Creek, once more granting Ellsworth the priority on the trail that he so fiercely craved. This cannot be true, however: McArthur’s own report has his company reaching Pacific Creek, some forty miles west of Alkali, only three days after the surprise rendezvous.

  For all the hijinks and spirited competition this race along the trail seems to imply, and despite the invigoration provided by the blessed gift of flour, both parties trudged on as many of their members grew weaker and sicker.
Twiss Bermingham, who had so faithfully jotted his party’s doings into his diary from the Iowa City start onward, found himself unable to make a single entry between September 5 and 21, and none after the 21st. Archer Walters, the Ellsworth Company coffin-maker, recorded the Wyoming toll:

  Tuesday 2nd Platt River. Travelled 19 miles. Walter Sanderson, aged 56, died….

  Sunday 7th Travelled 26 miles. Bro. Nipras died. Left on the road….

  Sunday 14th Travelled 3 miles. Camped to mend hand carts and women to wash. Sister Mayer died.

  After that September 14 entry, Walters’s own diary breaks off, not to be resumed.

  Galvanized by the humiliation of McArthur’s catching him up, Ellsworth drove his company onward with furious resolve. On September 18, a party of missionaries from Salt Lake who were returning to England crossed paths with the Ellsworth entourage. Writing later for the Millennial Star, Thomas Bullock sketched a rousing vignette of this meeting on the trail:

  September 18th, we were very agreeably surprised by suddenly coming upon the advance train of hand-carts, composed of about 300 persons, traveling gently up the hill west of Green river, led by Elder Edmund Ellsworth. As the two companies approached each other, the camp of missionaries formed in line, and gave three loud Hosannahs, with the waving of hats, which was heartily led by Elder P. Pratt, responded to by loud greetings from the Saints of the hand-cart train, who unitedly made the hills and valleys resound with shouts of gladness; the memory of this scene will never be forgotten by any person present.