Other Saints confirmed that fourteen members of the Martin Company died during that single, terrible night.
At this point, the company ground to a halt. For days, they did not stir out of their wretched camp beneath the Red Buttes, a small outcropping of ruddy sandstone that loomed to the south. Effectively snowbound, the Martin Saints were too cold and hungry and worn out to travel onward. All they could do was hope for a spell of Indian summer to thaw the landscape and give them the motivation to strike the trail once more—or hope beyond hope that someone was coming from the west to rescue them.
But in the next week, no rescuers appeared, and the weather did not relent. As John Jaques pithily put it twenty-two years later, “Winter came on all at once.”
MOST OF THE volunteers who joined the rescue mission out of Salt Lake City were young men serving in local Mormon militias: each town had such a corps of standing troops. Others, however, were ordinary citizens. Large though the force eventually became that set out eastward along the Mormon Trail to render aid to the handcart emigrants, the mission remains poorly documented in terms of primary sources. For the most part, the rescuers must have felt too pressed by the urgency of the moment to keep diaries.
Two of the men who would emerge as heroes of the rescue, however, later left colorful memoirs of that campaign. A comparison of the two reveals the very different ways in which rescuers were recruited. Ephraim Hanks was a footloose frontiersman who had sometimes served as a Mormon scout. In early October 1856, he was at Utah Lake, thirty miles south of Salt Lake, fulfilling a commercial fishing contract for the city’s markets. According to his retrospective account, he had heard rumors about the handcarters on the plains, which troubled his sleep. One night, as he tossed and turned in his bed, he heard a disembodied voice call out his name three times. The third time, he answered, “Yes, yes. Is there something I can do for you?”
The voice intoned, “That handcart company is in trouble. Will you help them out?”
Hanks leapt from his bed. At dawn, as he entered Salt Lake City, he was intercepted by a messenger from Brigham Young requesting the very service he had divined in his dream. Shortly thereafter, the Prophet blessed Hanks by laying hands on his head, then sent him on his way.
The process by which Daniel W. Jones signed on was somewhat less inspired. A veteran mountain man and Indian fighter who had converted to the LDS church, Jones came to Salt Lake in early October to attend the General Conference. There, he heard Young announce the emergency and call for volunteers. Jones, however, did not immediately raise his hand. In his own telling, as he drifted out of the conference, “Brother Wells spoke to me saying: ‘You are a good hand for the trip; get ready.’ Soon after Bishop Hunter said the same thing to me. Also Brother Grant met me and said: ‘I want you on this trip.’ I began to think it time to decide, so I answered, ‘all right.’”
The first team to move out of Salt Lake City on October 7, under the command of George Grant, was composed of twenty-seven men and sixteen wagons. Among the six returning missionaries who were willing, after their high-speed journey to Zion, to turn around at once and head back into an early winter, Grant and William Kimball may have been motivated by something like guilt for their blithe assertions as they had passed the handcart pioneers on the plains that the latter would have no trouble completing their journey.
Yet those six missionaries also included Chauncey Webb, the master handcart craftsman. After joining the Martin Company, with whom he traveled from Iowa City to Florence, where he had been the sole voice pleading against continuing the journey, Webb had jumped into Franklin Richards’s light-wagon caravan to complete the passage. It is curious, and perhaps telling, that Richards himself declined to set out back along the trail, for he more than any other church official had been responsible for urging both the Willie and Martin Saints to push on from Florence.
Even in Salt Lake City, Richards consistently underestimated the seriousness of the crisis. After uttering his soon-to-be infamous phrase in the bowery predicting that the handcart pioneers would suffer nothing worse than “cold fingers and toes,” Richards advised Grant that his advance team of rescuers ought to run into the Willie Company somewhere near the Green River crossing, well to the southwest of South Pass.
Traveling fast, Grant’s entourage reached Fort Bridger (two days’ travel west of the Green River) on October 12. There they heard no news of the handcart companies, not even a rumor. Even more ominously, that same day the rescue party crossed paths with Abraham Smoot’s freight train of wagons. Worn out themselves, Smoot’s team had no news of either the Willie or the Martin Companies.
Alarmed, Grant immediately dispatched four men to speed ahead with fast horses and a single light wagon laden with a minimal cargo of flour, as a scouting party to determine the whereabouts of the missing handcart parties. Meanwhile the main caravan pushed on, averaging almost twenty miles a day. On October 15, the team reached the Green River. Still no sign or news of the Willie Company. Wrote Daniel Jones later:
We began to feel great anxiety about the emigrants as the weather was now cold and stormy, and we, strong men with good outfits, found the nights severe. What must be the condition of those we were to meet? Many old men and women, little children, mothers with nursing babes, crossing the plains pulling hand-carts. Our hearts began to ache when we reached Green river and yet no word of them.
Although there was no way to know it, as the express team of four—Joseph Young (the Prophet’s oldest son), Cyrus Wheelock, Stephen Taylor, and Abel Garr—moved out ahead of Grant’s rescue team, the Willie Company was a full 160 miles to the east, struggling up the Sweetwater River in the vicinity of Independence Rock. Grant’s team pushed on through intermittently stormy weather, reaching South Pass on October 17. Daniel Jones later remembered that a severe snowstorm hit the party head-on on the pass. But Robert Burton, one of the few men in Grant’s party to keep a diary, noted:
Friday, Oct. 17. Started late; camped on Little Sandy. Feed scarce; looked like a storm.
Saturday, Oct. 18. Clear and fair, storm passed to the right and left us. Camped tonight on the head of Sweet Water. Good feed and wood. Looked like a storm.
Burton’s is almost surely the more accurate record, indicating that Grant’s team passed over South Pass without being struck by a storm. But in any event, by the 18th, Grant had adopted a curious strategy, which was to drop off splinter groups from his rescue team to set up stations along the trail and wait for the handcart emigrants to come to them. Subsequent wagon teams in the wake of Grant’s advance guard were likewise counseled to stop and set up stationary resupply depots.
With all the advantages of hindsight, historians Rebecca Bartholomew and Leonard Arrington second-guess Grant’s decision: “Had anyone in the relief party foreseen the condition of either of the handcart companies, they would have gathered all the stores and teams at Fort Bridger, Green River, and South Pass and traveled day and night until their animals broke. It was just as well they did not know, for the relief effort would already require more strength and supplies than they carried.”
Yet how could they not know? Already, on finding no sign of the handcart parties at Green River, the rescuers’ “hearts began to ache” as they contemplated the emigrants’ plight. Was the dropping off of sub-parties to set up stationary depots a kind of laziness on the rescuers’ part? Even worse, did it represent a certain failure of commitment, akin to that of the earlier resupply teams Franklin Richards’s party had met along the trail? Grant’s team crossed paths with these fainthearted returnees on October 13 as they headed back to Salt Lake because, in Robert Burton’s dry diary entry, they “got tired of waiting.”
Meanwhile, the condition of the Willie Company had begun to slide from the merely desperate to the almost hopeless. Deaths occurred daily. The details of many of them have escaped the historical record, but here and there, a vignette of piercing sorrow emerges, as in the recollection of Sarah James, eighteen at the time. On the m
orning of October 18, as the company broke camp, Sarah noted, “As usual there were dead to be buried before we could go on.” Her father and her fourteen-year-old brother, Reuben, lingered to help with the interment detail.
After a short services we with light cart went ahead to catch the rest of the company and mother and Rueben started to follow. Father collapsed and fell in the snow. He tried two or three times to get up with mother’s help then finaly he asked her to go on and when he felt rested he would come on with Ruben. Mother knew in her heart that he had given out but perhaps she said in a few minutes with some rest he could come on she took the cart and hurried to follow us.
But by that evening, there was no sign of Sarah’s father or brother.
When we stopped for the night we made inquiries about our people but nothing had been heard of them. Since there were some who had been a few hours behind us we felt that they would come with the next group. All night we waited for word. Toward morning some of the captains who had gone out to gather up the stragglers came into camp bearing the dead body of my father and the badly frozen body of my brother Rueben. His injuries were so bad that he would suffer from them for the rest of his life. When morning came Father’s body along with others who had died during the night were buried in a deep hole. Brush was thrown in and then dirt. A fire was built over the grave to kill the scent to keep the wolves from digging up the remains.
On October 19, as the Willie Company forced its passage across the sixteen miles between the fifth and sixth crossings of the Sweetwater, the violent snowstorm struck almost without warning. The party had reached a marshy lowland known as the “Ice Slough” or “Ice Spring,” an anomalous tundralike meander where thick grasses kept the winter’s ice beneath frozen well into each following summer. Oregon Trail pioneers had come to count on the Ice Slough as a source of clear, cold water even in July or August.
In the midst of the storm, as Sarah James remembered, “Suddenly we heard a shout.” Mormons have always been partial to premonitory dreams, but twenty years later, George Cunningham, fifteen years old during the trek, would swear that the previous night
I dreamed a dream. That morning had come, the storm had subsided some and that we had started out on the road. I thought that I saw two men coming toward us on horseback. They were riding very swiftly and soon came up to us. They said that they had volunteered to come to our rescue and that they would go on further east to meet a company which was still behind us and that on the morrow, we could meet a number of wagons loaded with provisions for us. They were dressed in blue soldier overcoats and had Spanish saddles on their horses. I examined them, particularly the saddles as they were new to me. I also could discern every expression of their countenance. They seemed to rejoice and be exceedingly glad that they had come to our relief and saved us.
Indeed, in the midst of the October 19 snowstorm, the express rescue train of Young, Wheelock, Taylor, and Garr rode into view. Various Saints recorded their reactions. The Dane Michael Jensen, only eleven at the time, recalled, “How we laughed and cried, sang and praised the Lord!” And John Chislett averred, “More welcome messengers never came from the courts of glory.” According to some, the rescuers were equally moved. Euphemia Bain remembered that Cyrus Wheelock was the first rescuer to close ranks with the company: “He stood by and said how he never expected to see brethren and sisters in such a condition as we were. Tears ran down his cheeks as he spoke to us and encouraged us, saying help would reach us in two hours, and we should have plenty to eat.”
In the official journal, William Woodward reported the rendezvous in less emotional terms:
The company rolled on again, & were soon met by Cyrus H. Wheelock & Joseph A. Young & two other brethren from the Valley, bringing us the information that supplies were near at hand, the camp halted, a meeting was called. Bro. Wheelock informed us of the liberality of the Saints in the Valley, of Bro. Brigham Young’s kindheartedness in speaking in behalf of the Handcart companies now on the Plains, & of himself fitting up ten teams & wagons & supplying them with flour, &c., & others in proportion.
For all the joy the meeting brought, however, it did not pose an immediate solution to the company’s plight. Within hours, the express train moved on eastward in search of the Martin Company, which, the four scouts now realized, must be in an even more perilous predicament than the Willie party. According to Chislett, “As they went from our view, many a hearty ‘God bless you’ followed them.” No Saint’s diary or reminiscence records receiving even a scrap of food from the express train.
Euphemia Bain’s memory of promised relief within two hours is undoubtedly wrong. Chislett recorded, “They informed us that a train of supplies was on the way, and that we might expect to meet it in a day or two.”
That night, buoyed by wild hopes, the Willie Company camped on the banks of the Sweetwater at the sixth crossing. The last stragglers did not come in until 10:00 P.M. But hope was no antidote to utter debilitation: that day and night and following morning, five more Saints died. The official journal dutifully recorded, “During the day Eliza Smith, from Eldersfield, Worcestershire, England, aged 40 years died; also John Kockles, from Norwich, Norfolk, England, died; also, Daniel Osborn, from Norwich, Norfolk, England, died; also Rasmus Hansen, from Falster, Denmark, died…. Monday 20th This morning…. Anna F. Tait from Glasgow, Scotland, aged 31 years died.” Chislett elaborated on that stormy bivouac:
We finally, late at night, got all to camp—the wind howling frightfully and the snow eddying around us in fitful gusts. But we had found a good camp among the willows, and after warming and partially drying ourselves before good fires, we ate our scanty fare, paid our usual devotions to the Deity and retired to rest with hopes of coming aid.
In the morning, new snow lay heavy on the ground: Chislett says a foot deep, Woodward’s journal only four inches. The last ration of flour had been issued the day before. Captain Willie now distributed what was left of the “hard bread” (soda crackers) he had bought at Fort Laramie, but that paltry breakfast did nothing to allay the emigrants’ hunger.
On October 20, for the first time during the whole journey, the Willie Company found itself unable to move forward. Wrote Chislett, “Being surrounded by snow a foot deep, out of provisions, many of our people sick, and our cattle dying, it was decided that we should remain in our present camp until the supply train reached us.” It was also decided, however, that Captain Willie and one of the strongest Saints, Joseph Elder, should set out westward on horseback to try to find the rescue wagons. It would turn out to be a providential mission.
What no one could know at the time was that George Grant’s rescue team had stalled in the same storm. On October 19, the remaining men and wagons had turned into a brushy stand and set up their own camp on Willow Creek, twenty-five miles west of the sixth crossing where the Willie Company was marooned. Robert Burton’s noncommittal journal notes only:
Sunday, Oct. 19. Killed one beef. Started in the afternoon in p.m.; camped below the mouth of Willow Creek. Tonight commenced storming; very cold; good feed.
Monday, Oct. 20. Stayed in the same place today.
In their camp at the sixth crossing, instead of waiting two hours, or even a day or two, for the blessed rescue, the Willie Company spent three days without relief. The journals and reminiscences from this vigil spell out the erosion of hope. Ann Rowley, the widowed matriarch, swore that for forty-eight straight hours during those three days, the Saints ate nothing. Levi Savage’s journal entry for October 20 is a quiet testament of despair:
This morning when we arose we found Several inches of Snow on the ground; and is yet Snowing. The cattle, and people, are so much reduced with Short food and hard work. That except we get assistance, we Surely, can not move far in this Snow.
Brothers Willey and Capt, and Elder, Started on horseback, about 10 oclock. To cerch for the wagons. Wagons that Wheelock reported, a Short distance in our advance. This morning we isued the last bread, or breadstuffs in our po
ssession. It continued Snowing Severely during the day. We expected Bro Willey would return this evening, but he has not come.
Twelve-year-old John Oborn later remembered October 20 simply as “the most terrible experience of my life.”
SETTING OUT ON horseback on the morning of October 20 to try to intercept the rescuers, Captain Willie and Joseph Elder expected to find the flour-laden wagons within a few hours and a few miles. But after covering twelve miles and finding no sign of the party under the leadership of George Grant, the two scouts grew deeply alarmed. Ahead of them loomed Rocky Ridge, a barren, five-mile-long series of hills that rises more than six hundred feet to an altitude of 7,300 feet, one of the highest eminences on the whole Mormon Trail. The climb of Rocky Ridge had become part of the standard itinerary, a northern detour to avoid a stretch where the Sweetwater carves a narrow and all but impassable gorge.
The scouts felt they had no choice but to tackle this daunting obstacle. Wrote Elder later, “The snow and an awful cold wind blew in our faces all day.” On the far side of the summit, the two men on horseback descended to the banks of the Sweetwater, but still found no sign of their potential rescuers. Elder swore that he and Willie rode twenty-seven miles during that single day. But just as they were beginning to give up hope, a providential piece of luck—or, rather, a canny deed of logistical forethought—saved their mission. Willie and Elder stumbled upon a makeshift signboard on the trail.
On the evening of October 19, Grant’s party had veered off the trail to camp in a clump of bushes on Willow Creek, a small northern tributary of the Sweetwater, where they found shelter. In that camp, Grant’s team remained throughout the 20th, waiting out the storm. But it occurred to one rescuer, twenty-year-old Harvey Cluff, that the willow-shrouded camp could not be seen from the trail. Anticipating the return of the express team—Young, Wheelock, Taylor, and Garr—Cluff realized that they might ride past Willow Creek without knowing the main party was camped nearby, in which case the four men might continue westward, missing Grant’s team altogether. Sometime during the 20th, then, Cluff erected his signboard, which directed passersby to the hidden camp.
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