Devil's Gate

by David Roberts

  On August 11, the Willie party finally reached Florence. By that date, a general apprehension had seized the company as to whether it was too late in the year to try to push on across the plains and over the Continental Divide to Salt Lake City. If the snows of winter came early, the company might find itself stranded somewhere in the mountains of Wyoming.

  In the end, about a hundred of the Saints dropped out in Florence, electing to stay there for the winter, or even to settle there more permanently. About these backouts, Millen Atwood later sneered, “Those who were good for nothing left us at Florence.”

  The apprehension lingered. On August 13, a conference of the fewer than four hundred Saints still in the company was assembled. During that meeting, the most prescient counsel offered by any Saint in any of the handcart parties was put forth, only to be ignored. As a result, the single most tragic decision in the whole 1856 handcart campaign set in motion the catastrophe that would ensue.

  Many years later, the granddaughter of one of the Willie party Saints insisted that “almost the entire company felt they should winter [in Florence] and start early in the spring,” but this is probably hindsight passed down as memory. At the August 13 meeting, one by one the company leaders rose to speak. Captain Willie himself and his lieutenant, Millen Atwood, argued forcefully in favor of continuing the journey. So did two high church officials who happened to be present, George Grant and William Kimball. Grant and Kimball would soon join Franklin Richards and other returning missionaries in their high-speed, light-carriage dash to Utah.

  Among the Saints remaining in the Willie Company, however, only four had ever been to Salt Lake. Three of them were Willie, Atwood, and William Woodward, the company clerk and official journal-keeper. The fourth was Levi Savage.

  Born in Ohio, Savage was thirty-six years old that summer. Ten years earlier, like Edward Bunker, he had served in the Mormon Battalion that had traveled all the way to California in General Kearny’s army. From California he had made his way east to Salt Lake the following year. There he had married and sired a young son, but only eleven months after the birth, his wife had died. Less than a year thereafter, in 1852, Young called Savage to go on a mission—not to Great Britain, but to far-off Siam (as Thailand was then called). Without questioning the Prophet, Savage set off for the Far East, leaving his sister to take care of a son still not two years old.

  Bureaucratic snafus kept the missionary from even getting to Siam. Instead he ended up serving a frustrating two years in Burma, where he never learned the language and made virtually no converts. As a weary Levi Savage returned to the United States in early 1856, he wanted only to get back to Salt Lake City and his son and sister. It was his bad luck to arrive in Iowa City just four days before the Willie party set out. Valuing Savage’s vast experience, Willie conscripted him to be sub-captain of the second hundred. Savage accepted the onerous post without demurral.

  Now, however, at the August 13 meeting, Savage arose and spoke. With tears streaming down his face, he pleaded against continuing the journey—the sole voice among the leaders to argue for wintering over in Florence. In his own journal, Savage recorded this courageous deed:

  Brother Willey Exorted the Saints to go forward regardless of Suffering even to death; after he had Spoken, he gave me the oppertunity of Speaking. I said to him, that if I Spoke, I must Speak my minde, let it cut where it would. He Said Sertainly do so. I then related to the Saints, the hard Ships that we Should have to endure. I Said that we were liable to have to wade in Snow up to our knees, and Should at night rap ourselvs in a thin blanket. and lye on the frozen ground without abed; that was not like having a wagon, that we could go into, and rap ourselves in as much as we liked and ly down. No Said I.—we are with out waggons, destitute of clothing, and could not cary it if we had it. We must go as we are &c. The hand cart Sistem. I do not condemn. I think it preferble. to unbroke oxen, and unexprianced teamsters. The lateness of the Season was my only objection, of leaving this point for the mountains at this time. I Spoke warmly upon the Subject, but Spoke truth, and the people, judging from appearance and after expressions, felt the force of it.

  For his pains, Savage was instantly rebuked by the other company leaders and church officials. Captain Willie was particularly scathing. As one emigrant later recalled, “At the conclusion of his discourse, James G. Willie denounced him as a recreant to the cause of truth and a disturber of the peace of the brethren and an opposer of those who were placed over him and called upon him to repent.”

  Savage himself recorded the captain’s rebuke thus: “Elder Willey then…Said that the God that he Served was a God that was able to save to the utmost. that was the God that He Served; and he wanted no Jobes co[m]forters with him.” Stung, Savage offered to give up his sub-captainship, but Willie did not accept the resignation.

  Heaping further scorn on Savage’s misgivings, church official William Kimball now promised the Saints that he would “stuff into his mouth all the snow they would ever get to see on their journey to the valleys!”

  In his journal, Savage did not bother to record the further heroism of his acquiescence. It would be left to John Chislett to capture it. Accepting defeat, Savage addressed the meeting:

  “Brethren and sisters, what I have said I know to be true; but, seeing you are to go forward, I will go with you, will help you all I can, will work with you, will rest with you, will suffer with you, and, if necessary, I will die with you. May God in his mercy bless and preserve us. Amen.”

  The Willie Company lingered three more days in Florence, as the Saints made desperately needed repairs to their handcarts. The recurrent problem was that sand caught between the axles and hubs ground the wood away. Again and again the weakened axles broke at the shoulder.

  On August 16, the company started west out of Florence, pulling and pushing their dilapidated carts toward the very fate that Levi Savage had foreseen.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TROUBLES ON THE PLATTE

  On July 9, 1856, as the Willie Company Saints lingered in Iowa City waiting for their handcarts to be built, William Woodward recorded an alarming development in the official journal: “A company of Saints arrived that came in the Horizon from Liverpool numbering some 800 souls came up this evening in the midst of a terrible storm, and we as well as the other Companies accommodated them the best in our power.”

  The sudden advent of the additional throng of Saints who had come across the Atlantic on the Horizon would now tax to the utmost the talents and energy of Chauncey Webb and his carpenter assistants. Yet more unseasoned wood had to be found and crafted to make carriages for what would become the fifth, last, and largest of the 1856 handcart companies.

  The Horizon had departed from Liverpool on May 25, three weeks after the Willie Company’s Thornton. With 856 Saints on board, the Horizon sailed to Boston, rather than New York. Some two hundred emigrants stayed on in Boston or other cities along the route, as the Saints rode by train through Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, Rock Island, and at last to Iowa City.

  Eventually a company of about 650 emigrants would shove off from Iowa City on July 25, ten days after the Willie Company’s departure. Thanks to straying cattle, they covered only seven miles during their first seven days. Most of the Saints in this party had come across the Atlantic on the Horizon, but their numbers were swelled by other emigrants such as Patience Loader and her family, who had reached the Eastern Seaboard earlier and now belatedly joined the last handcart party on the plains.

  At first that company was split into two contingents, but it ultimately coalesced as one, under the charge of thirty-seven-year-old Edward Martin. Of all five leaders of the handcart parties, he had the longest tenure in the church and the greatest experience as a traveler. Born in Preston, a factory town in Lancashire, one of the English counties in which the Mormon missionaries had their greatest rates of recruitment, Martin was in the first wave of British converts, joining the church in 1837 at the age of eighteen. With a new
bride, the former Alice Clayton, he traveled to Nauvoo in 1841 and came to know Joseph Smith well.

  After the Prophet’s martyrdom, the Martins, with their two surviving children (the firstborn had died in 1845), joined the exodus to Winter Quarters led by Young in 1846. There their younger child died. Only six days later, Martin was conscripted to serve in the Mormon Battalion, leaving his grieving wife behind, who was already pregnant with the couple’s fourth child. He served faithfully in General Kearny’s Army of the West, even though it meant an absence from Alice of eighteen months. During that time, she gave birth to a son who lived only five months.

  In 1848, Edward, Alice, and their sole surviving child set out for Utah by covered wagon. As if the couple had not already been afflicted by enough tragedy, a fifth child was born en route in Wyoming, only to die within two weeks of the family’s arrival in Salt Lake City. Another daughter, born in Salt Lake, died after a single year.

  None of this shook Martin’s faith. In a letter to a friend in England, he vowed, “Our God is a merciful God, and he will hear the cries of his children.”

  In 1852, Martin was called by Brigham Young to return to his native Britain to serve as a missionary. During his absence, Alice’s seventh child, a son, also died after only a year on earth. Of the couple’s seven children, only one survived infancy.

  Martin spent almost four years in his missionary service, mostly in Scotland. A poignant letter from his eleven-year-old daughter, written in 1855, after her father had been gone for three years, laments, “It would be pleasing to me to see you once more, but as the time has not come I must be contented. It seems as if I never had a father.”

  Recruited by President Franklin D. Richards in Liverpool to help oversee the massive emigration of 1855, Martin was finally allowed to come home, as he sailed with his fellow Saints aboard the Horizon, then made his way to Iowa City. In a photograph preserved in the LDS Archives, Martin gazes down at the camera with a look that could be taken for disdain, or, alternatively, for the weariness of a man who has endured untold hardships. His chin is supported by a starched, upturned collar. A receding hairline is counterbalanced by almost dandyish curls bedecking both temples. His cheeks and chin are badly scarred, perhaps by smallpox or acne.

  Among the five leaders of the 1856 handcart parties, Martin was, with Daniel McArthur, arguably the most skilled and the most humane. He certainly had the hardest job of all, for the Martin Company not only contained an unwieldy multitude of emigrants, pushing the most dilapidated handcarts, but fully three-quarters of their number were women, children, and old people. President Richards, who would see them off from Florence, admitted that “They have a great proportion of crippled and old gray-headed men.”

  It is a testament both to Martin’s leadership and to the pluck and will of the average Saint in the party that despite these circumstances, the fifth company covered the 270 miles between Iowa City and Florence in about four weeks, just as fast as the four healthier companies that preceded it. It will be recalled that in her “Reccolections of past days,” Patience Loader devoted only a few lines to the Iowa passage, those dealing chiefly with her alarm as her father’s legs started to give out with the company almost in sight of Florence.

  A few of the Martin Company Saints could even gaze back, from the vantage point of decades of retrospect, and remember the party in Iowa as “as happy a lot of people as ever crossed the plains.” The words are those of Margaret Clegg, sixteen at the time, writing in 1906, a full half-century after the ordeal. “It never occurred to my young mind,” Clegg would add, “that we should experience ought but joy and happiness on our long pilgrimage to that promised land.”

  Yet the diary of Jesse Haven, second-in-command, who led an advance guard across Iowa a few days ahead of the main company under Edward Martin, is a litany of aggravations:

  July 27th Sunday. Saints in rather bad perdicament being without tents all their things got wet…. The Saints last night and this morning found much fault grumble much about me blamed me becaused the tents were left behind In the evening had a meeting…. I told them if they did not scese their groumbling that sickness would get into their midst and they would die off like rotten sheep. but if they would be humble and keep united the blessings of the Lord should attend them….

  Aug. 2nd…Saints much fatiged—Some got into camp late. Some did not come in at all….

  Aug 9th…Saints traveled badly to-day—much scatered, after we got into camp—11 left us.

  As the last entry so laconically records, there were many backouts along the Iowa trail. Other Saints were disfellowshiped for one offense or another and banished from the company.

  The Iowa traverse was a gauntlet of searing heat punctuated by violent thunderstorms. On July 22, Jesse Haven’s thermometer recorded 108 degrees in the shade. More than half a century later, John Southwell vividly recalled an August downpour:

  On the following day, when half mile from camp, one of the most horrible electric storms I ever saw fell upon us accompanied with hail and rain. It proved a perfect deluge. In this flat clay soil in the space of ten minutes the roads became almost impassable and oh what a scene to behold. Four hundred men, women and children struggling to keep their feet. Here was no sign of a shelter. Our tents were rolled up in the wagons. After everyone was drenched and many were unable to move out of their tracks the captain gave orders to pitch camp and set up the tents the best they could in the mud and quick as possible this was done. It proved a temporary shelter for the old people and children. They were protected from the rain but they were still ankle keep [deep] in the mud.

  On August 3, the Martin Company witnessed a much rarer atmospheric phenomenon than a thunderstorm, as in midday a meteor blazed through the sky. As Samuel Openshaw described it, “We beheld a ball of fire brighter than the sun before us in the air and came within about three yards of the ground and then drew out in the form of a spear and vanished out of our sight.” Some of the Saints regarded the meteor as a divine portent.

  Like all four handcart parties before them, the Martin Company emigrants were underfed. Fifteen-year-old Aaron Giles, who despite his name was a Polish Saint traveling without his family, blamed his hunger on “2 sisters Jemima Coock & Hannah Wardell [who] behaived themselves very unkind to me…. The 2 sisters never gave me victules enough. and never gave me my full Raitions of provision; so when I found out that they served me so I left them and drawed my Raitions with another man for they never gave me enough to keep my body up.”

  But even those assured of full rations found the food supply inadequate. Many Saints fell ill before reaching Florence. More than sixty years later, Langley Bailey, eighteen years old at the time, remembered that

  I was taken down with hemerage of the bowles. I was unable to walk, had to be hauled on Bro. Isaac J. Wardle and my brother’s John’s cart. After reaching Florence a Doctor was consulted said I must not go another step or I would die and be burried on the road side. A captain named Tune would not administer to me, said he did not have faith enough to rais the dead.

  The last of the Martin handcarts crossed the Missouri River and straggled into Florence on August 22. The Willie Company had departed six days earlier. Concern about the lateness of the season was widespread, but in the Martin Company there would be no Levi Savage to plead tearfully against continuing the journey that year.

  On August 24, a Sunday, a general meeting of the company was convened. One after another, the leaders rose and addressed the question of whether to go on or to winter over in Florence. Only one man counseled the latter choice: Chauncey Webb, the tireless builder of handcarts, who, after his summer’s toil turning green wood into carriages, had joined the Martin Company, bound for Zion.

  The diaries of the Martin pioneers, however, contain not even a paraphrase of Webb’s argument. If, like Savage, Webb vividly evoked the scenario of emigrants trudging knee-deep through the Wyoming snows, succumbing to cold and hunger, that speech is lost to history. Even Webb’s
daughter, Ann Eliza Young, whose 1875 memoir is one of the angriest of all Mormon apostate works, says only, “My father strongly objected to any of them starting after the last of June; but he was overruled.”

  The last person to speak at the August 24 meeting was Franklin Richards, president of the European Mission, who was about to launch out with fellow returning missionaries on his light-wagon dash to Salt Lake City. As one of the Twelve Apostles, Richards was by far the highest ranking Mormon at the meeting. One member of the assembly later recalled the man’s fervent exhortation:

  “I hear that there are saints here who fear on account of the lateness of the season and may suffer in the crossing of the Rocky Mts. in snow storms. This I will say as the saints have braved it this far and has anything come to hurt or mar the peace and safety of anyone, therefore, I prophesy in the name of ‘Isreals God’ through the storms we may come from the east, the west, the north, or the south God will keep the way open to the faithful at heart and we’ll arrive in the valleys in safety and hoped that the saints would be blessed with health & strength to pursue unto the journey’s end and there to meet with the Lords anointed and be saved with the just in the Eternal world.”

  After Richards had finished, church officials put the question to the meeting in a show of hands. A fifteen-year-old boy in the crowd, Josiah Rogerson, would recall fifty-one years later, “The vote was called, and with uncovered heads and uplifted hands to heaven and an almost unanimous vote, it was decided to go on.”

  BY THE TIME the Martin party set out from Florence on August 25, the Willie Company had reached the Loup Fork, a northern tributary of the Platte, in what is today eastern Nebraska. The fourth handcart company was thus 133 miles ahead of the fifth. So the two parties would proceed during the following two months, with the Willie Company usually a little more than a hundred miles ahead of the Martin.