Devil's Gate

by David Roberts

  The conclusion is inescapable: nearly two months before the arrival of the long-awaited Ellsworth and McArthur Companies, Heber Kimball and Brigham Young were fully aware that more than seven hundred more handcart Saints were preparing their journeys westward, dangerously late in the season. What those two men, as well as the rest of the Mormon authorities in charge of the emigration, did—or more precisely, did not do—in the face of this alarming development remains all but inexplicable today.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SAVAGE ADVICE

  Among the five Mormon handcart expeditions of 1856, by far the least well known and most poorly documented is the third, the Bunker Company. There is a logical reason for this: the vast majority of the 290-odd emigrants in that party (a larger number than traveled in either the Ellsworth or McArthur Companies) were from Wales. As they started out from Iowa City, almost none of them spoke English. Nor in later years did more than a handful of them choose to reflect in writing upon their experience crossing the plains.

  The chaos in communication caused by that language barrier is hard to imagine, but it must have added a severe stress to the inevitable hardships of the trail. One member of the party, twenty-one-year-old Priscilla Evans, made the trek with her thirty-seven-year-old husband, Thomas. Though both Evanses were Welsh, only Thomas spoke the language. Almost sixty years after the marathon journey, Priscilla kept a fresh (and still indignant) recollection of that linguistic tribulation. “Dont you think I had a pleasant journey,” she wrote in an autobiographical sketch penned around 1914, “traveling for months with about 300, people, of whose language I could not understand a word. My husband could speak Welch, so he could join in their festivities when he felt like it.”

  Edward Bunker, thirty-four years old that summer, was an American just returning from almost four years of missionary service in Great Britain. He had first emigrated to Zion by wagon train from Winter Quarters (Florence) in 1850, although in 1846, he had been a member of the staunch Mormon Battalion that had marched with General Stephen Watts Kearny’s Army of the West to California. In mid-June of 1856, a church official helping oversee the launching of the handcart trains at Iowa City wrote to President John Taylor in New York, “Edward Bunker superintends the making of ox-yokes, ox-bows and the hauling of timber.”

  Bunker himself wrote almost nothing about the Welsh company’s journey. His 1894 manuscript autobiography devotes a mere three short paragraphs to the trek. From that account, only two details of interest emerge. Very soon after the company left Iowa City, a torrential rainstorm leveled its camp. Thanks to the storm, writes Bunker, “I got a heavy drenching, which brought on a spell of rheumatism that confined me to my bed a portion of the Journey.”

  Bunker found the language barrier between himself and most of the Welsh Saints a trial: “The Welsh had no experience at all and very few of them could speak English. This made the burden upon me very heavy.”

  From the first-person accounts of pilgrims on the Bunker Company’s trek, only the haziest portrait of its leader emerges. He seems to have been a stern disciplinarian along the lines of Edmund Ellsworth, without perhaps the latter’s fanatical bent. Priscilla Evans claimed many years later that Bunker would allow none of the sick or lame to ride in the three wagons that accompanied the train; instead, they had to be carried on handcarts. Yet David Grant, a sub-captain whose fawning loyalty to his leader may render his testimony unreliable, wrote in a letter to England from mid-trek, “There are in the company those still more advanced in years, who ride in the wagons.”

  In the same letter, Grant also insisted, “This is so healthy a country, that our appetites are very good.” And, “I am happy to say that we have been united in all things since we left Iowa City, and am glad in having such a man to lead us as our Captain.”

  Like the two parties before them, the Bunker Company arrived in Iowa City to find no handcarts ready for them. A delay of three weeks ensued while the carriages were once again slapped together out of unseasoned wood. At last the third company started rolling westward on June 23, two weeks after the Ellsworth procession had departed. In the end, it would take the Bunker Company 104 days to reach Salt Lake City; it thus completed the passage about a week faster than the Ellsworth and McArthur parties, but still far more slowly than the sixty to seventy days predicted by Brigham Young.

  From details in the scanty record of the pioneers’ own writings, one divines that the Bunker party suffered much the same privations and ordeals as did the two companies that preceded them. Among the few vivid vignettes of daily life within the entourage are those concerning a single handcart, the one pushed and pulled by the Evans couple and by Elizabeth Lane, a woman traveling alone who was assigned to the Evanses’ cart. We know almost nothing about Lane—neither her age nor her place of origin, even though she wrote a memoir of the trek in 1896. It contains this cryptic avowal: “I had always been isolated from the Church, so that I had not one particular friend; I seemed to travel all alone.”

  Priscilla Evans paints a woeful picture of the motley crew of twenty-odd comrades with whom she shared a tent each night: “There were in our tent a man with one leg (my husband) Two blind Thomas Giles being one of them, one man with one arm, and a widow with five children. The widow and her children and myself, were the only ones who could not speak the Welch language.” Thomas Evans had lost his leg in an accident at the age of nine. Hobbling along on his wooden leg, he somehow covered the 1,300 miles from Iowa City to Salt Lake. His wife hints at the torment he underwent: “While walking 20 to 25 miles per day where the knee rested on the pad it would gather and break and was most painful, but he had to endure it or remain behind.” Elizabeth Lane elaborates: “He soon gave out in the deep sands of Nebraska, and his wife and myself took the cart all the way to Laramie.”

  A slightly different version of Priscilla Evans’s memoir adds the significant admission that she was at least five months pregnant toward the end of the journey. And this version makes it clear just how desperate Thomas’s plight was:

  When his knee, which rested on a pad, became very sore, my husband was not able to walk any farther and I could not pull him in the little cart, being so sick myself, so one late afternoon he felt he could not go on so he stopped to rest beside some tall sagebrush. I pleaded with him to try to walk farther, that if he stayed there he would die, and I could not go on without him. The company did not miss us until they rested for the night and when the names were checked we were not among the company and a rider on a horse came back looking for us. When they saw the pitiful condition of my husband’s knee he was assigned to the commissary wagon.

  If “assigned to” means “allowed to ride in,” this version of Evans’s memoir contradicts her other one. But if Bunker ever relented and let invalids mount the wagons, he apparently did so only rarely and grudgingly, for Elizabeth Lane wrote that after rheumatism in her ankles rendered her almost too lame to walk, a kindly fellow pilgrim named John Cousins “carried me on his back through many rivers, and when Captain Bunker put me out of the wagon at Laramie River, he picked me up and carried me through the water.”

  Several sources report that from the very start at Iowa City, the Bunker Company emigrants were issued only half a pound of flour per person per day “and a little Tea and shugar.” This was only half the ration allotted to the Ellsworth and McArthur Companies on leaving Iowa City, a ration that those earlier emigrants themselves found pitifully inadequate. The rationale for this extreme economy of food is nowhere to be found in the record. Only after Florence was the daily issue raised to a pound of flour per man or woman per day. Even this, reported John Parry, was “not near enough,” as he remembered an ordeal during which “little Children 6 years of age did use to walk 26 miles p[er] day.”

  The Bunker Company would most likely have faced mass starvation had another timely resupply wagon train out of Salt Lake City not intercepted its path. Only Parry’s account even mentions this heaven-sent intervention, as he places it at �
��the uper crossing of the Platt River,” possibly at or near present-day Casper, Wyoming.

  The record of the Bunker Company offers posterity only a glimpse here and there of its three-month odyssey. A few moments verge on the comical. “Indians met us some times,” John Parry noted, “and helped us to pull our Carts, which was a great fun for them.” Despite his ceaseless suffering, Thomas Evans was not above a practical joke. Priscilla relates how it backfired:

  Some Indians came to our camp, and my husband in a joking way told an Indian, who admired me, that he would trade me for a Pony. He thot no more about it. But the next day, here came the Indian with the Pony, and it was no Joke with him. I never was so frightened in all my life. There was no place to hide, and we did not know what to do. The Captain was called, and they had some dificulty in settling with the Indian with out trouble.

  The Bunker Company was fortunate not to encounter freezing weather before completing its trek, though one diary mentions a six-inch snowfall thirty miles west of Fort Laramie. Despite the resupply at the Platte crossing, the company ran short on food long before reaching Salt Lake City. One emigrant, Samuel Orton, later claimed that while the party was still two or three hundred miles east of Salt Lake, the daily flour ration was cut to a quarter-pound per adult. Hunger once again reduced the emigrants to desperate straits. Twenty-three-year-old Eleanor Roberts had married a fellow emigrant while the company waited in Iowa City for the hand-carts to be built. According to a secondhand source, somewhere along the trail (perhaps at Fort Bridger) she traded her wedding ring for flour.

  Eleanor also purportedly lost her shoes en route, when she took them off to cross the Missouri River but forgot and left them on the near bank. “She walked the rest of the journey bare-footed,” claims the source. By his own account, Robert Roberts’s boots gave out somewhere near Independence Rock in central Wyoming and he had to walk the last eight hundred miles barefoot. (The actual distance from Independence Rock to Salt Lake City is only 332 miles.)

  As late as August 30, the loyal sub-captain David Grant could blandly write, “We travel together in peace and harmony…. Elder Bunker has proved himself a father to his people, and I know that the Holy Spirit has been with him and aided him in leading them all the time.”

  But other pilgrims in the Bunker Company were beginning to give out, and more than one prepared for death. The loner Elizabeth Lane later recalled,

  We finally came to Green River, and I was behind the camp; there was no one in sight and it was near sundown. I sat down and thought this is the last. After a while I began to ask myself what brought you here? I called myself a coward. So I got up and asked the Lord to help me, and prepared to wade the river; and the Lord did help me, and I got safe to the camp just as they were preparing to come after me. But the next morning I could not stand; I had been chilled through.

  Others also attributed their survival in extremis to divine intervention. Thomas Giles, one of the blind men in the party, was traveling with his wife, two young sons, and a baby girl. The infant died early on during the trek and was buried beside the trail. Near Fort Bridger, only 113 miles short of Salt Lake, Giles collapsed with illness. Bunker delayed the company for two days, hoping the blind man would recover, but when he did not, the captain ordered the party to continue. He allegedly left two men behind to bury Giles after he died.

  During this wait, leading Apostle Parley Pratt passed by on an eastward journey to the States. Pratt had known Giles in Wales. According to a secondhand account, Pratt administered a blessing to the blind man, making the following promises: “that he should instantly be healed and made well, that he should rejoin his company and arrive safely in the Salt Lake Valley; that he should there rear a family; and that because of his faithfulness he would be permitted to live as long as he wanted.”

  All the promises came true. Giles recovered, caught up with the company, and made it to Salt Lake City. He would live another forty years, gaining a genial reputation as the Blind Harpist for his talents as an itinerant musician.

  After the daily ration had been reduced to a quarter-pound of flour, Samuel Orton also lingered on the edge of death, only to undergo an even more mystical salvation than Giles’s. In his own words:

  I soon became very weak and sick so that I had to leave my hand-cart and travel behind the company. I was so sick I thought I should die, and I asked the Lord that I might die. All at once a voice spoke to me as plain as I ever heard a voice in my life and said, “Sam are you here?[”] I turned around and answered “yes” but could see no one. which surprised me very much. I went on and caught up with the company took hold of my handcart and my sickness left me.

  That voice out of nowhere plunged Orton into a deep meditation: “I made up my mind if the Father and the Son did appear to the Prophet Joseph Smith and reveal the gospel unto him, and that Brigham Young was his Lawful successor I wanted to see the Halo of light around his head like there was around the head of the Saviour on nearly all of the pictures we see.”

  A few days after Orton reached Salt Lake, he attended a meeting in the bowery. Sure enough,

  Looking toward the stand there I saw President Young with the rays of light around his head as I had asked for on the plaines, and the same voice as spoke to me on the plaines said, “Now Sam if ever you apostatize here is your condemnation.” I looked around me to see if the people heard it, but, I thought they did not.

  So fragmentary is the record of the Bunker Company’s journey that no accurate death toll has ever been compiled. Without citing their sources, Hafen and Hafen reckon a total mortality of “less than 7.”

  One of the emigrants, Robert Roberts, flatly contradicts this sanguine conclusion. “This hand cart journey,” he later wrote, “was a very severe and trying experience in which many lost their lives.” All the way to Salt Lake, the nineteen-year-old Welshman had guided his nearly blind uncle, who in exchange had paid his nephew’s passage across the Atlantic and to Iowa City. But only a few days after reaching Salt Lake, the uncle died “on account of the hardships of the hand cart journey.”

  On October 2, the Bunker Company staggered into Salt Lake City, to a celebration only slightly less frenzied than the one the first two hand-cart companies had touched off a week earlier. The jubilation ringing throughout Zion, however, would come to an abrupt end two days later.

  NOT ONLY THE genesis of the handcart plan in Young’s imagination, but the very spirit in which it was carried out, has everything to do with what was going on in the Utah Territory at the time.

  By early 1856, the Mormon authorities knew that Deseret’s hopes of winning statehood were doomed on the floor of an unsympathetic Congress. Polygamy, out in the open since 1852, was simply too repulsive a practice for mainstream America to countenance. Meanwhile, the apprehension that federal troops might invade the territory and wrest control from Young and his lieutenants was growing weekly. The need to bring thousands of converted Saints quickly and cheaply across the Atlantic from Europe and Great Britain had everything to do with the dream of building up a Zion that could repel such an invasion.

  Out of this climate of fear and righteous indignation was born what remains by all odds the strangest cultural convulsion in LDS history. The Mormons themselves called it the Reformation. Its author was Young’s Second Counselor, a forty-year-old man named Jedediah Grant. He was known to the faithful as “the sledgehammer of Brigham,” while he liked to style himself “Mormon Thunder.” More familiarly, the Saints called him “Jeddy.”

  Historian David L. Bigler describes Grant’s appearance as “not unlike a young Abraham Lincoln.”

  He stood over six feet tall, his build was lanky, his eyes deep-set, complexion swarthy, jaw square, and face long. Perhaps to a combative nature may be attributed his crooked nose which bent somewhat to his left from an old break near the bridge. But his smile was natural and his face not at all unpleasant. Behind the smile was an enigmatic figure, one untroubled by doubt, driven to enforce righteousness.
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  A New York Times reporter visiting the territory painted a less flattering portrait of Grant, as “a tall, thin, repulsive-looking man, of acute, vigorous intellect, a thorough-paced scoundrel, and the most essential blackguard in the pulpit.”

  According to several sources—Saints who later turned apostates, but whose testimony on this matter seems reliable—the Reformation germinated out of a trivial event. Grant was attending a church meeting in Kaysville, a small town about twenty-five miles north of Salt Lake City. Having invited several elders to come to the meeting, he had lent one of them a mule. That man (his name has not come down to us) prided himself on his riding skills, so he set out for Kaysville at a full gallop, compelling his colleagues to follow at an equally frantic pace.

  By the time the horses and mules arrived in Kaysville, they were “heated and tired.” Grant opened the meeting “pleasantly enough,” as the various elders took turns offering testimonies of their faith. But when the “sledgehammer” rose to speak, he allegedly “became quite excited and then proceeded to accuse every one present of all sorts of wrong-doing…. He denounced them for their inconsistency and hypocrisy, and bitterly upbraided them for running his own mule and their own beasts in such a manner.”

  Such a tantrum ought to have spent itself in a few minutes at the Kaysville meeting. But Grant went on in his vituperative vein, “call[ing] upon everybody to repent, and ‘do their first works over again,’ or the judgment of God would speedily overtake them.”

  The zeitgeist of Zion was primed for this outburst. Grant’s “spirit of fiery denunciation” sparked the wildfire that would quickly sweep across Deseret. Meetings followed weekly, during which “the mutual accusations of those who were present became, if possible, more bitter than before; the ‘Saints’ were denounced as the vilest of sinners and they were all commanded to be re-baptized.” (Rebaptism, in Mormon doctrine, accomplished “remission for one’s sins.”) According to Fanny Stenhouse, the first baptisms occurred on a cold night, during which Jeddy not only immersed others with vigorous enthusiasm, but “remained in the water so long that he got a thorough chill and contracted the disease of which he died.” Indeed, Grant would suddenly die on December 1, 1856, of typhoid and pneumonia, the latter in all probability brought on by the nocturnal baptisms.