Bond further noticed that “their shoes were worn out, their toes protruding from the shoes in a bleeding condition. In the same way some were compelled to stay on the way and pull sand burrs from their feet shedding many tears.” And Bond was moved by the courage of mothers traveling with infants: “Alas! it was painful and sorr[ow]ful to see the mothers carry their babes on the way giving them the bosom in languid and tired steps with sorrowful hearts.”
The chief reason Bond’s manuscript was expurgated in the 1945 edition was that, unlike Levi Savage, Bond—in retrospect, at least—was ready to condemn the handcart scheme itself. As he awkwardly expressed his censure many years later, “Whatever was on the agents minds were in regards the council to the saints to cause the trials and sufferings and heart burnings of an innocent and God fearing saints following should have been more careful in giving them advice as those anxieties with self confidence has rendered untold hardships, broken hearts and so many deaths of loved ones.”
The constant hunger felt by the Martin Saints was comparable to that among the Willie party. As John Jaques remembered in 1878, “You feel as if you could almost eat a rusty nail or gnaw a file.” Vignettes evocative of that hunger range from the poignant to the terrible. Peter McBride, only six years old during the journey, recalled that a passing party of Gentiles stopped to talk to his family. “They gave my baby sister some cookies. She carried them in her little pocket, and I was always with her and would tease for a bite. She would give me a taste once in a while, and it was so good. No cake I ever tasted since was ever so good.”
Josephine Hartley remembered a small but significant deed on Edward Martin’s part: “The captain was very kind to mother and gave her some of the flour sacks to scrape off with a knife for what little flour was left along with the lint. With this, she was able to make cakes and mush to help sustain life.”
The most harrowing testimony to hunger among the Martin Company comes from Sarah Crossley. Twelve years old at the time, she watched as her nineteen-year-old brother steadily weakened and succumbed to the cold.
His suffering was over one morning as we found him frozen in his bed. We were so numbed with our suffering and the sight of death that I think we were almost glad he had gone. We felt that he had gone only a little ahead of us, that we would soon be with him. I did pray though that the commissioner of provisions would not know of it until I had received Joseph’s portion of flour. I cannot tell you the pang that smote my heart as he counted out the spoons full and when he came to Joseph’s he said, “Oh Joseph died last night didn’t he”? I had lost my brother’s portion and it hurt me worse than it did to first look upon his still white face.
Historians and even anthropologists have noted the fact that in all the handcart parties, more men than women died. A chief reason for this is that, on the whole, the men performed the most grueling labors on the trek. One of the most taxing came each night, when guards kept watch over the camp—vigilant not only against Indians (whose attacks never materialized), but against wolves. Several Saints recorded the toll of guard duty: “The hardship on the men having to stand guard six hours every other night was beyond human endurance.”
Fifteen-year-old Albert Jones later recalled how one of the strongest men in the party was reduced to a walking cripple:
A Brother Blair, one of the Royal Life Guards Blue of her majesty, the British queen, was with us, whose grand physique and gigantic frame was the admiration of us boys of the London branch, whenever he attended meeting in his regimentals. With the lack of proper nourishment, he dwindled down to a wreck, both mind and body; his wife, to keep him from giving up, willow in hand, drove him about camp to fetch wood or water, as she required it for camp use.
Margaret Clegg remembered the comparable collapse of her father, who
took sick and he had to ride in one of the wagons, that had provisions. One day he felt a little better and thought that he would try and walk, but he could not keep up as he had rheumatism so bad he could not walk, and he took hold of the rod at the end gate of the wagon to help him along and when the teamster saw him, he slashed his long whip around and struck father on the legs and he fell to the ground. He could not get up again.
According to Margaret, her father was thus abandoned by the company, but, following the wagon tracks, he “crawled on his knees all the way to their camp. He was so badly frozen when he got there, they did all they could for him.”
If his own testimony is to be believed, Aaron Giles, the solitary lad from Poland, was indeed abandoned by the company. In a letter to Brigham Young that he wrote just two months later, Giles recounted that, while the company was still about a hundred miles short of Fort Laramie,
I was so sick that I was oblidged to lay down for I could not walk no farther and thay would not let me ride in the Waggon so I was oblidged to stop so I was so sick that I fell asleep by the Road side. they travelled on and left me. and when I awake I found that I was alone, so I tried to get up and try to overtake them, but I could not move so I sat up to think what I should do, out in the open plain. no house no where to go to, and among woolves and among the Indians to be killed—some time in the afternoon I got very thirsty so I tried to go towards the Platte River which was about 1 Mile from the road an in about an hour I got there. when I got there I drank as much as I wanted and I went to walk to go farther, but I could not, so I sat down to think what I should do. so while I was thinking I fell asleep, and before I slept long I heard some trampling of horses so I awake. and saw a man on horse back and he was a Waggon Master of a Compeny of soldiers going to Laramie with the pay Master—and he asked me how I came there I told him I was left behind by the mormons and I was sick and could not go no farther; so he put me on his horse and had me up to the waggons and put me in one of the waggons.
In the end, Giles left the Martin Company and stayed on with the soldiers at Fort Laramie. Yet despite the harsh treatment by his fellow Saints, Giles apparently did not apostatize, for his letter closes with a wish to come on to Salt Lake with a wagon company at some future date.
The Martin Company, as noted, reduced its daily rations even before reaching Fort Laramie. Samuel Openshaw’s diary places the first reduction, from a pound of flour per adult per day to twelve ounces, as early as October 3, though it may have been later. According to John Jaques, before October 19, “The pound of flour fell to three fourths of a pound, then to half a pound, and subsequently yet lower.”
Elizabeth Sermon would later claim, “The food rations were reduced to ¼ lb. per adult and 2 oz. for the children—per day. Starvation to us but not so to the Captains. By our going around camp at night where cooking pots of some of the Captains could be seen, they looked pretty full and smelled quite savory. In fact, the Captains fed well while we drank ours in porridge for I could not make bread with the small allowance of flour.” No other diary or reminiscence, however, corroborates this aspersion.
On October 8, the Martin Company reached Fort Laramie. Like the Willie Company before them, the Martin Saints found none of Franklin Richards’s promised resupply provisions waiting for them. The company spent two days at the fort, trying to trade valuables for food. As Josiah Rogerson remembered,
During the afternoon, while resting here, numbers, if not all that had any money left, went to the fort and purchased from the sutler there, some tea, coffee, sugar, Babbitt’s saleratus and soda, black and cayenne pepper, crackers, bacon, etc., of which our supply that we had brought from Florence, Neb., had been getting short for the past week or two. Hints were made to us while here as to the early fall of snow, which we might look for in the next 120 to 150 miles.
Although Fort Laramie was a nonmilitary trading post, that autumn there were quite a few soldiers billeted there. Their presence is explained by John Bond: “Here the government stationed the troops to guard the overland road to California and the northwest territory.” Presumably, the need to guard the trail arose from rumors of hostile Indian tribes in the area.
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bsp; Added Bond, “Here rest two days to wash the clothing, shoe the animals and make other repairs and receive council to go to the westward.” At the fort, several backouts elected to leave the company and winter over with the traders and soldiers, many of whom encouraged the Saints to do so. Though only fifteen at the time, Josiah Rogerson vividly remembered the appeal of that proposition half a century later: “The comfortable adobe quarters, and the snug and warm log rooms were quite tempting for a winter’s rest, with plenty to eat.”
But the vast majority of the company chose to push onward on October 10. For the first time, the Saints saw real mountains looming ahead. “Laramie’s Peak, in the distance,” noted John Jaques, “gave the first adequate idea of the Rocky Mountains—grand, gloomy and mysterious.” John Bond took in the same view with a sense of foreboding: “The wind is blowing hard and the snow is seen on the Larimie Peak in the distance which gave every indication that a snow storm was near at hand.” At the moment, Laramie Peak rose almost fifty miles away to the west, but at 10,240 feet, it towered a full vertical mile above the banks of the Platte. Bond further observed, “The wolves are following the trains making their monotonous howlings in all directions a hideous sound to the ears.”
It was during these days that the daily rations were successively reduced. On October 17, the company reached Deer Creek. This was the site where the McArthur Company had rendezvoused with the flour-laden resupply wagons, which had covered no fewer than 410 miles from Salt Lake. Here, five weeks later, Captain Martin and his co-leaders made a momentous decision.
Even with reduced rations, Martin deemed that the handcarts were moving too slowly. The solution was a radical one. As John Jaques remembered twenty-two years later, “Owing to the growing weakness of emigrants and teams, the baggage, including bedding and cooking utensils, was reduced to ten pounds per head, children under 8 years five pounds. Good blankets and other bedding and clothing were burned, as they could not be carried further, though needed more than ever, for there was yet 400 miles of winter to go through.”
Half a century later, Josiah Rogerson could still see the casting off of baggage as a reasonable stratagem: “The wisdom of this timely counsel was soon afterward realized. When many of the canvas bags were opened it was readily seen that the heads of many families were hauling and pulling luggage in the shape of books, trinkets and half worn-out clothing that could be dispensed with beneficially.”
Yet others were appalled. In his journal, William Binder wrote, “This action of the Elders in charge seemed to us a terrible hardship, as we were only very scantily provided with clothes and bedding, and to stand by and see our bits of clothing and bedding burned on the spot caused anything but a good feeling to exist in our hearts towards our leaders.”
The obvious question presents itself: why burn the baggage, rather than cache it, in case the Martin Saints changed their minds, perhaps in a return to Fort Laramie, so that as the season grew colder, they might retrieve the precious clothes and bedding? The reminiscence of one Saint seems to give the answer. “A council was called,” wrote John Watkins, “at which they all decided, under the circumstances, to lighten the loads to a few pounds each, which was w[e]ighed out to them with a pair of scales, leaving out quilts and blankets, overcoats, cooking utensils and everything that could be dispensed with which were put in a heap and set fire to for fear some one would be tempted to pick out something that they needed so badly.” On a much smaller scale, then, Captain Martin’s order to burn the discarded baggage was like Cortés’s burning his ships on the Mexican coast in 1519, so that his conquistadors could not succumb to the temptation to return to Cuba.
Two days later, on October 19, the bedraggled Martin Company came to its last crossing of the Platte, after which the Saints would cut the corner to the Sweetwater and try to follow it to South Pass. The timing could not have been worse, as the first snowstorm struck while the emigrants were fording the difficult river—the same snowstorm that engulfed the Willie Party between the fifth and sixth crossings of the Sweetwater, some hundred miles farther west.
A bitter irony is attached to that fording of the Platte. Five miles east of where the Saints waded into the water, a bridge built by a French voyageur spanned the river. As with all such bridges in the West, its owner charged a toll, which the Martin Saints were simply too poor to afford.
Given the conditions, the ford quickly turned desperate—as was so vividly recalled many years later by Patience Loader, in the passages from her memoir quoted at the end of Chapter One. Other Saints who made the crossing also left eloquent accounts of that misadventure. Wrote John Jaques in 1878:
The river was wide, the current strong, the water exceedingly cold and up to the wagon beds in the deepest parts, and the bed of the river was covered with cobble stones. Some of the men carried some of the women over on their backs or in their arms, but others of the women tied up their skirts and waded through, like heroines as they were, and as they had done through many other rivers and creeks. The company was barely over when snow, hail, and sleet began to fall, accompanied by a piercing north wind, and camp was made on this side of the river.
Thomas Durham wrote in his journal,
We had a very heavy hail storm that day and the river was very high and the water very cold. It was all I could do to stand it. My woman and her sister Eliza crossed it sticking hands or they could not have stood up in it at all. All the sick that could walk at all had to get out of the wagons and walk through the river, some of them falling down in the river several times, not being able to stand up in it being so weak.
In this crisis, heroes emerged. Twelve-year-old John Bond, traveling in the Hodgetts wagon company, which made the ford at the same time as the Martin handcarts, remembered their names many years later:
The captain repeated, “Have faith in God and you will not take cold,” while he sat on his mule and saw those innocent ones, who had pleaded so, fall in the river as the current was carrying the weak ones off of their feet, but with the stronger and manly aid and courage of John Laty, T.J. Franklin, John Toon, Geo. Hains, Geo. Dove Sr, and others the helpless and weakened ones were taken to the opposite bank of the river and were given all the care they could when brought from the icy cold water. Those noble heroes went backward and forward several times carrying them on their backs, the weaker ones, which is worthy of commendation for their kindheartedness and worthy to be handed down to future generations.
The snowstorm was no passing squall. With their clothes soaked and no way to get dry, with what we now call hypothermia menacing every Saint in the party, the Martin Company staggered on a single mile and camped near midnight. On October 20 it snowed continuously, as the Saints covered only five miles before camping again. By sunset, twelve inches of snow lay on the ground.
Inevitably, death now started to take a grim toll among the underfed, ill-clothed, and exhausted emigrants. Heber McBride, thirteen years old at the time, wrote more than a decade later about seeing his father die. The day after the last crossing of the Platte, “Father was very bad this morning could hardly sit up in the tent we had to travel that day through the snow I managed to get Father in to one of the wagons that morning and that was the last we ever saw of him alive.” The next day,
we went to try and find father but the wind was blowing the snow so bad that we could not see anything and the wagons had not got into camp and it was then after dark so we did not find him that night and the next morning the snow was about 18 inches deep and awful cold but while my sister was preparing our little bite of breakfast I went to look for Father and at last I found him under a wagon with snow all over him and he was stiff and dead. I felt as though my heart would burst I sat down beside him on the snow and took hold of one of his hands and cried oh Father Father.
Perhaps the most poignant, and certainly the most macabre, of the deaths that night befell thirty-one-year-old Aaron Jackson. Years later, his wife recounted Jackson’s passing in wrenching detail:
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p; My husband had for several days previous been much worse. He was still sinking, and his condition became more serious. As soon as possible, after reaching camp, I prepared a little of such scant articles of food as we then had. He tried to eat, but failed. He had not the strength to swallow. I put him to bed as quickly as I could. He seemed to rest easy and fell asleep. About 9 o’clock, I retired. Bedding had become very scarce, so I did not disrobe. I slept until, as it appeared to me, about midnight. It was extremely cold. The weather was bitter. I listened to hear if my husband breathed—he lay so still. I could not hear him. I became alarmed. I put my hand on his body, when to my horror I discovered that my worst fears were confirmed. My husband was dead. He was cold and stiff—rigid in the arms of death. It was a bitter freezing night and the elements had sealed up his mortal frame. I called for help to the other inmates of the tent. They could render me no aid; and there was no alternative but to remain alone by the side of the corpse till morning.
The night was enveloped in almost Egyptian darkness. There was nothing with which to produce a light or kindle a fire. Of course I could not sleep. I could only watch, wait and pray for the dawn. But oh, how those dreary hours drew their tedious length along. When daylight came, some of the male part of the company prepared the body for burial. And oh, such burial and funeral service. They did not remove his clothing—he had but little. They wrapped him in a blanket and placed him in a pile with thirteen others who had died, and then covered him up in the snow. The ground was frozen so hard that they could not dig a grave.
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