AT FORT LARAMIE in the beginning of October, the Willie Company saw the last of its backouts leave the party, as several women chose to remain at the fort, and at least two men returned to it after proceeding only a few days farther west. These “deserters” simply vanish from the historical record. It is evident that some of the women were wooed by denizens of the fort in search of potential brides.
On October 4, the day the rations were reduced to twelve ounces of flour per adult, with the party camped thirty-one miles west of the fort, Levi Savage wrote in his journal, “Some Stealing is practiced by Some, consequently we put all the provisions into three wagons, and placed a gard over them.” The calculus of starvation is as simple as it is cruel. Even with their full ration of a pound of flour per day, plus a little bacon, sugar, and tea, the handcart Saints were ingesting no more than 1,500 calories per day. The exertions of even a moderate day on the trail caused each adult emigrant to burn a minimum of four thousand calories. By October 4, the Willie Saints were fifty days out of Florence, eighty-two out of Iowa City.
During the numerous expeditions undertaken by covered wagon between 1847 and 1856, the Saints from Brigham Young down to the poorest emigrant learned from their own experiences on the trail just how much food it took to gather to Zion in good health. Although the concept of the calorie would not be defined until 1880, the Saints in Zion knew well the size and weight of the provisions needed to keep hunger at bay along the trail.
Once more, an obvious question has a tangled answer. Why did the church authorities, from the very start of the handcart “experiment,” limit the daily ration to no more than a pound of flour per man and woman per day, plus a measly supply of other foodstuffs? There are several possible contributory factors. In estimating the rate of passage from Iowa City to Salt Lake by handcart at sixty days, Young radically underestimated the actual time those journeys would require. It was widely hoped that the companies could supplement their flour rations with game killed along the trail—particularly buffalo. But besides being for the most part inept hunters, the European-born Saints could ill afford to halt along the trail for whole days while their sharpshooters went off in pursuit of wild game. The odd berry patch or wild onion field raided along the way made only the paltriest boost to the pioneers’ nutrition.
A more cynical calculation no doubt entered into the deliberate underfeeding of the emigrants. Young had concocted the handcart plan mainly to save money. The less spent on food, the cheaper the “experiment.”
The overriding factor, however, was in all likelihood built in to the handcart expeditions by the very nature of the carriages the Saints pulled and pushed. Like the seventeen-pound baggage allowance, a one-pound flour ration stretched the carrying capacity of each company to the limit. One could counter by arguing that adding ten or twelve more wagons to each company would have allowed for the transport of far more food, but once again, economy dictated otherwise.
The very nature of zealous faith played its part, too, in the shortfall. Young, the Apostles, and the company leaders believed that hardship was a noble test. If an emigrant truly put his trust in God, hunger would be only a necessary privation, not a cause of death. A faithful Saint might arrive in Zion a bit leaner than when he left Iowa, but the trial would provide its own lasting spiritual reward.
Yet in sending out the massive resupply wagons that intersected with the Ellsworth, McArthur, and Bunker Companies, Young seemed to recognize that the handcart Saints were under-provisioned. All the more inexplicable, then, the tiny size and faint resolve of the three resupply missions Richards’s party encountered between Independence Rock and the Big Sandy crossing.
Both the diaries kept during the journey by the Willie Saints and their reminiscences dictated as long as decades later abound in poignant tableaux of the ravages of hunger within the company after October 4. Many of them come from the voices of Saints who were only children at the time. John Oborn, then twelve, spoke for all of them when he later recalled, “Our scant rations had reached the point where the amount ordinarly consumed for one meal now had to suffice a full day. From here on it is beyond my power of description to write. God only can understand and realize the torture and privation, exposure and starvation that we went through.”
Michael Jensen, an eleven-year-old Dane in the party, recollected eating roots, the bark from trees, and cactus. “Prickly pears were gathered, the stickers burned off in the fire, and then they were prepared, by being cut into pieces then boiled, then eaten. Sometimes they were baked, then eaten.”
The livestock themselves were giving out, along with the emigrants. On several occasions, Captain Willie had a cow slaughtered for food, but to divide one scrawny animal’s meat among more than 350 Saints made almost no dent in their hunger. On October 12, Levi Savage recorded the gruesomely comic demise of one heifer: “One of the cows, that was over run with work tho drove less could not be got within a mile of Camp. By Bro Willies order, Several of the Brothren went back to kill her, for the peop[le] to eat, (if they wanted it) They Struck her twice in the head, with an ax. She got up & run into camp, where She was Shot, dressed, and ishued out; The people have Sharp apatites.” Five days later, a calf gave out, but was devoured by wolves before the Saints could claim it for food.
Fifteen-year-old George Cunningham remembered twenty years afterward how every scrap of a slain cow was rendered edible:
We used to boil the bones and drink the soup and eat what little meat there was. We greedily devoured the hides also. I myself have took a piece of hide when I could get it, scorched off the hair on the fire, roasted it a little on the coals, cut it in little pieces so that I could swallow it and bolted it down my throat for supper and thought it was most delicious.
Eighteen-year-old Sarah James later recalled,
How good the soup tasted made from the bones of those cows although there wasn’t any fat on them. The hides we used to roast after taking all the hair off of them. I even decided to cook the tatters of my shoes and make soup of them. It brought a smile to my father’s sad face when I made the suggestion but mother was a bit impatient with me and told me that I’d have to eat the muddy things my self.
Ann Rowley was a forty-eight-year-old English widow traveling with her seven children, ages seven to nineteen, and an adult stepdaughter. She later conjured up the truly extreme measures to which hunger drove some of the children: “Rawhide strips was used to wrap the iron rims to the wheels and the wood would shrink and the rawhide would come loose. It hurt me to see my children go hungry. I watched as they cut loose rawhide from the cart wheels, roast off the hair and chew the hide.”
Sarah James’s were not the only shoes reduced to tatters. According to one emigrant, “Clothing was in rags, especially shoes. Any piece of rags, burlap or canvas was tied around the feet. All too soon this was chewed through by the tortorus terrain. It was not uncommon to take the clothing from the dead to cover the living.”
On October 15, Willie convened a council to take stock once more of the provisions. The whole company expected to be resupplied near South Pass, now less than a hundred miles away. Yet despite the Saints’ desperate hunger, the conclusion was almost foregone. In the official journal, William Woodward wrote, “It was unanimously agreed to reduce the rations of flour one fourth—the men then would get 10½ ozs. per day; women, & large children 9 ozs. per day; children 6 ozs. per day; & infants 3 ozs. per day each.” In the same entry, he noted, “Many of the company are sick & have to ride in the wagons.”
It was inevitable now that emigrants began to die. In the first week of October, six Saints perished, equaling the toll of the whole six previous weeks on the trail. Several families were hit particularly hard. Within eight days, Robert Reeder witnessed the deaths of his father and his sister. Years later, he would poignantly reconstruct those losses.
My father, David Reeder, would start out in the morning and pull his cart until he would drop on the road. He did this day after day until he did not aris
e early on 7 October 1856. He was found dead in his bed and his fellow bedmate had not heard a thing during the night. Sister Eliza wrapped a cherished sheet around him and we placed him in a shallow grave hoping the wolves would not disturb. We must go on our way in silent mourning and in a weakened condition.
Then,
My younger sister, Caroline, 17 years old, after traveling all day and seeing the camp being made for the night took off her apron to tie some sage brush in to bring into the camp. She sat down to rest, leaning on her bundle, exhausted. They found her chilled and dying and carried her to camp. She died without gaining consciousness. She, too, was placed in an unmarked grave near Three Crossings—Sweetwater. She died the evening of 15 October 1856.
Also within days, the Gadd family lost three of its members—two-and ten-year-old boys and their father. Ann Rowley, the matriarch traveling with her seven children and her grown stepdaughter, saw the latter steadily decline. “I watched with alarm, my stepdaughter Eliza, grow weaker each day,” Rowley later wrote. “She was never very strong. I had always devoted a lot of love and care to her, but she passed away one day and was buried off to the side of the trail. Her long journey was at an end, but ours had a long way yet to go.”
Many of the journals and reminiscences record the constant crying of children from hunger and cold. Some pilgrims lay down and gave up, but then found the courage to go on. Susannah Stone, twenty-five at the time, later remembered:
Only once did my courage fail. One cold dreary afternoon, my feet having been frosted, I felt I could go no further, and withdrew from the little company and sat down to wait the end, being somewhat in a stupor. After a time I was aroused by a voice, which seemed as audible as anything could be, and which spoke to my very soul of the promises and blessings I had received, and which should surely be fulfilled and that I had a mission to perform in Zion. I received strength and was filled with the spirit of the Lord and arose and traveled on with a light heart. As I reached camp I found a searching party ready to go back to find me dead or alive.
Yet the legacy of her ordeal would be that “My frosted feet gave me considerable trouble for many years.”
Sometimes only brutal treatment kept the weakest Saints from giving up. Ann Rowley witnessed an instance involving her ten-year-old son: “I watched John, so cold, drowsy and sick, want to lie down in his tracks, never to rise again. I had to stand helplessly while Captain Willie whipped him, to make him go on. Gladly would I have taken the whipping myself.”
On October 14, the Willie Company finally left the banks of the North Platte to follow its western tributary, the Sweetwater River, to its headwaters at South Pass. For a day or two, crossing a neck of land between the rivers, the party found only alkaline water to drink, which further weakened their constitutions. The Sweetwater itself was (as the name may indicate) eminently potable, but the stream meandered so broadly between low mountain ranges that the company would be forced to ford it nine times. (An old legend had it that the river was named by French voyageurs who lost a pack mule loaded with sugar crossing the river.)
In the midst of all this suffering, there were acts of uncommon heroism. Robert Reeder swore that James Hurren carried four hundred pounds of cargo on his handcart, and to aid in one ford of the Sweetwater, crossed the stream some twenty times, carrying the ill and weak on his back.
There also occurred what the Saints could only regard as miracles. The pious Ann Rowley recalled one such event many years later:
Night was coming and there was no food for the evening meal. I asked God’s help as I always did. I got on my knees, remembering two hard sea biscuits that were still in my trunk. They had been left over from the sea voyage, they were not large, and were so hard, they couldn’t be broken. Surely, that was not enough to feed 8 people, but 5 loaves and 2 fishes were not enough to feed 5000 people either, but through a miracle, Jesus had done it. So, with God’s help, nothing is impossible. I found the biscuits and put them in a dutch oven and covered them with water and asked for God’s blessing, then I put the lid on the pan and set it on the coals. When I took off the lid a little later, I found the pan filled with food. I kneeled with my family and thanked God for his goodness. That night my family had sufficient food.
By contrast, William Woodward’s official journal records the deaths in deadpan notations:
Thursday [October] 9th…Samuel Gadd, from Orwell, Cambridgeshire, England died in the afternoon, aged 42 years….
Monday 13th…Paul Jacobsen, from Lolland, Denmark, aged 55 died this evening….
Wednesday 15th. Early this morning, Caroline Reeder, from Lin-stead, Suffolk, England, aged 17 years, died….
Thursday 16th…George Curtis, from Norton, Gloucestershire, England, aged 64 years died; Lars Julius Larsen, who was born July 5th, 1856 in camp at Iowa City died. John Roberts from Bristol, Somersetshire, England, aged 42 years died. The camp rolled on, roads hilly & sandy.
It would remain for John Chislett, writing years later, to summon up most eloquently the full horror of those October days in Wyoming:
We had not travelled far up the Sweetwater before the nights, which had gradually been getting colder since we left Laramie, became very severe. The mountains before us, as we approached nearer to them, revealed themselves to view mantled nearly to their base in snow, and tokens of a coming storm were discernible in the clouds which each day seemed to lower around us….
Our seventeen pounds of clothing and bedding was now altogether insufficient for our comfort. Nearly all suffered more or less at night from cold. Instead of getting up in the morning strong, refreshed, vigorous, and prepared for the hardships of another day of toil, the poor “Saints” were to be seen crawling out from their tents looking haggard, benumbed, and showing an utter lack of that vitality so necessary to our success….
Death was not long confined in its ravages to the old and infirm, but the young and naturally strong were among its victims…. Weakness and debility were accompanied by dysentery. This we could not stop or even alleviate, no proper medicines being in the camp…. Many a father pulled his cart, with his little children on it, until the day preceding his death. I have seen some pull their carts in the morning, give out during the day, and die before next morning….
Each death weakened our forces. In my hundred I could not raise enough men to pitch a tent when we encamped, and now it was that I had to exert myself to the utmost. I wonder I did not die, as many did who were stronger than I was. When we pitched our camp in the evening of each day, I had to lift the sick from the wagon and carry them to the fire, and in the morning carry them again on my back to the wagon. When any in my hundred died I had to inter them; often helping to dig the grave myself….
We travelled on in misery and sorrow day after day.
On October 19, the Willie Company set out from its camp at the fifth crossing of the Sweetwater. Only a single day’s worth of flour remained in the wagons. Suddenly, around noon, a violent snowstorm engulfed the party. The storm had come unseasonably early, but it was far from unprecedented for that part of Wyoming, as previous parties could attest.
The company could not afford to stop and pitch camp, for the next site furnishing both wood and water lay sixteen miles ahead. So the Saints trudged on into the teeth of the blizzard.
By the next morning, snow lay more than a foot deep on the ground. The October 19 storm, and the bad weather that continued thereafter, would infinitely deepen the already desperate predicament in which the Willie Company found itself.
IF ANYTHING, THE tribulations of the Martin Company in early October were even more severe than those undergone by the Willie Company. Although they had suffered no major loss of livestock, as the Willie party had in the stampede, the Martin Saints composed an even larger entourage (well more than five hundred men, women, and children), of whom an inordinate number were ill, infirm, or elderly.
On October 4, the company camped two miles west of Scottsbluff, about a hundred miles behind their bret
hren in the Willie party. One of the keenest observers of the Martin Saints was not even a member of the company. John Bond was a twelve-year-old English youth traveling in the Hodgetts wagon company with his parents and five siblings. Many years later he wrote a graphic account of his journey, titled “Handcarts West in ’56.” The narrative circulated for years in manuscript form, until it was privately published in 1945. That edition, however, was heavily expurgated. Fortunately, the original was preserved, and the full, unexpurgated text is now available in the LDS Archives.
On October 4, the Hodgetts Company, which had lagged behind since leaving Florence, caught up and camped with the Martin Company near Scottsbluff. Bond remembered his shock at seeing the “sunken eyes and emaciated forms” of the handcart Saints after their six weeks on the trail out of Florence. But he marveled at the compassion and care that dictated a practice that by this point had apparently become commonplace within the Martin Company, although few members of the party recorded it. In Bond’s words, “In an exausted condition on arriving in camp [the handcart emigrants] miss the loved ones, though fatigued themselves they return back on the plains to find them on the road powerless to go on farther, put them on their carts, pull and tug with them until they arrive in camp near midnight.”
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