There was a Dane named Niels Andersen, who had shown himself during almost the entire trip to be one of the strongest and bravest in the entire train. He had often loaded his fourteen-year old daughter on his cart when she was tired, and yet he still drove ahead just as happily with her. But more recently he had been attacked by dysentery, which had begun to spread to an alarming extent. By this day it had befallen Christiansen’s group, and his wife had to pull their cart by herself. Naturally she had fallen behind, and I therefore gave her a helping hand until we reached our camp location. It went pretty well that way, but we could not overtake the caravan. It was just about noon however, when we came up to her husband, who was tottering along the road and seemed as helpless as a child. He broke out with heartrending lamentation when he saw us. His wife comforted him as well as she could and gave him some food, which he ate ravenously. We stopped in order to wait for some wagons that were still farther behind, to have them pick him up as they drove by. Finally Savage came, the captain of the wagons, with a ox-drawn wagon; but he refused to take Niels Andersen up because the wagon, as he said, was already overloaded.
Eventually, however, Ahmanson persuaded Savage to give the played-out Dane a place in the wagon. It was too late: the next morning, Andersen was found frozen to death in camp.
As usual, John Chislett had the keenest eye for the sufferings of the Saints during the week beginning October 25. It was the custom, he remembered, to scavenge the clothes of the dead for the living to wear. Burying one man, however, Chislett could not bring himself to steal his “medium-heavy laced shoes.”
I wanted them badly, but could not bring my mind to the “sticking-point” to appropriate them. I called Captain Kimball up and showed him both, and asked his advice. He told me to take them by all means, and tersely remarked, “They will do you more good than they will do him.” I took them, and but for that would have reached the city of Salt Lake barefoot.
On another day, Chislett had to bury two of the dead. “This I did before breakfast. The effluvia from these corpses were horrible, and it is small matter for wonder that after performing the last sad offices for them I was taken sick and vomited fearfully.”
On November 2, the company reached Fort Bridger. At last there were enough rescue wagons so that all the Saints could ride. The two-wheeled man-tormentors were abandoned, after the Willie Saints had pushed and pulled them almost 1,200 miles from Iowa City. A cherished piece of Mormon folklore is dramatized by Wallace Stegner in The Gathering of Zion:
Margaret Dalglish of the Martin company, a gaunt image of Scottish fortitude, dragged her handful of belongings to the very rim of the valley, but when she looked down and saw the end of it she did something extraordinary. She tugged the cart to the edge of the road and gave it a push and watched it roll and crash and burst apart, scattering into Emigration Canyon the last things she owned on earth. Then she went on into Salt Lake to start the new life with nothing but her gaunt bones, her empty hands, her stout heart.
Thirty-one-year-old Margaret Dalglish was actually Irish, not Scottish, and traveled in the Willie rather than the Martin Company. If, like the other Willie Saints, she abandoned her handcart on the grassy plain at Fort Bridger, there was no steep incline down which to push her cart and watch it smash to pieces. Church historian Andrew Olsen believes the tale is probably apocryphal, passed on to posterity by Dalglish’s granddaughter.
Susannah Stone, twenty-five during the journey, later swore that “When we were within about a hundred miles from Salt Lake our captain had a dream that a company was coming from Salt Lake to meet us.” The company came, according to Stone, the next day. This anecdote, too, must be apocryphal, or at least muddled in Stone’s memory, for Fort Bridger lies 113 miles from Salt Lake City, and by the time the Saints reached it, they had been accompanied by rescuers for eleven days.
Despite finally having enough food to eat, and the luxury of riding in wagons, Saints continued to die during the week it took to cover those 113 miles. Dysentery seems to have been the main cause of mortality. Woodward’s journal systematically records the passing of from one to three emigrants virtually every day. The last of those deaths, and therefore the most poignant, occurred on November 9, the very day the Saints finally reached Zion. Woodward’s entry: “Rhoda R. Oakey from Eldersfield, Worcestershire, England, aged 11 years died this morning.” Chislett would later write that two or three Saints in the company died after arriving in Salt Lake City.
With Salt Lake City almost in sight, some of the women in the Willie party began to worry about the sorry appearance they might present. Euphemia Bain recalled that “When I left Scotland I had five pairs of shoes, but when I reached Salt Lake City I had to tie grass around them to hold them together.” Susannah Stone later remembered, “When we got near the City, we tried to make ourselves as presentable as we could to meet our friends. I had sold my little looking glass to the indians for buffalo meat, so I borrowed one and I shall never forget how I looked. Some of my old friends did not know me. We were so weather beaten and tanned.”
As the Saints entered the city, John Ahmanson later claimed, “the prophet did not honor us with a personal visit; presumably he was ashamed to look upon our miserable and wretched condition, the result of his own shortsighted and ill-conceived plan.” But Susannah Stone remembered, “When we got near Salt Lake Valley, President Young with a company of our brethern and sisters came out to meet us, and bade us welcome.”
In any event, the main greeting party was made up of Mormon bishops, who had been assigned the task of finding families to take in all the Saints who did not already have relatives living in Salt Lake. The reminiscences of the Willie Saints are uniform in expressing gratitude for the hospitality that was immediately lavished upon them. Of both bishops and families, Chislett wrote, “Their kindness…cannot be too highly praised.”
Along with joy at the Willie Company’s arrival, the citizens of Salt Lake felt shock at seeing the condition to which the emigrants had been reduced. Captain Willie, the proud leader, still unable to walk, appeared with his legs wrapped in burlap. The horror of the toll that frostbite had taken among the party is captured in a vignette in the family history of the Reeder clan. George Reeder, living in Salt Lake, had come out to greet his relatives, including his brother-in-law, James Hurren. “Presently George inquired, ‘What is this odor I can smell?’ ‘Little Mary’s legs are frozen’, replied James.” A doctor was consulted, who recommended amputation of both legs to save the seven-year-old’s life.
No definitive count of the number of dead in the Willie Company will ever be reckoned. Saints in the party put the toll generally in the range from sixty-six to seventy-seven, though Robert Reeder, nineteen during the journey, believed that one hundred had died. In Handcarts to Zion, LeRoy and Ann Hafen, who are inclined to underestimate, list the deaths as sixty-seven. After careful research, church historian B. H. Roberts fixed the number at seventy-seven. Andrew Olsen, in his recent The Price We Paid, totals up seventy-four, including deaths incurred between Liverpool and Iowa City.
The already embittered Danish sub-captain John Ahmanson resolved to file a formal complaint against the “snow prophet,” William Kimball, with Brigham Young himself. He apparently did so, for in his Secret History, Ahmanson writes ruefully, “Oh, you trusting simpleton! The prophet laughed right in my face.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Willie Company’s arrival, church authorities went out of their way to minimize the tragedy. Millen Atwood, Willie’s fanatical second-in-command, rose in the Tabernacle a week after the party came in and told a large congregation, “We did not suffer much; we had a little bit of snow, but that was nothing; and we had enough to eat as long as it lasted, and when that was gone you furnished us more; we fared first rate.”
And on November 12, just three days after the frostbitten and emaciated Saints had arrived in Salt Lake, the Deseret News editorialized,
After all the hardships of the journey, mainly consequent u
pon so late a start, the mortality has been far less in br. Willie’s company, than in many wagon companies that have started seasonably and with the usual conveniences for the trip. The eminent feasibility of the hand-cart movement had been previously demonstrated; its healthfulness is now proven by the experience of this company.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MARTIN’S COVE
Acurious footnote to the rescue mission launched on October 7 is the fact that, six days later, Brigham Young indeed set out on the trail, hoping to reach Fort Bridger and greet the handcart Saints as they came in. That the Prophet himself, like Franklin Richards, seriously underestimated the gravity of the situation emerges in the makeup of the party: along with eight men, Heber Kimball and Young each took along a favorite wife, as if the trip were as much picnic lark as errand of mercy. In any event, the presidential train got no farther than East Canyon Creek, just a few miles outside Salt Lake City, when Young became violently ill.
A brief notice of this aborted expedition appeared in the Deseret News on October 22:
RETURN. On the morning of the 15th inst., and while encamped on East Kanyon Creek, en route for Green river, Governor Young was suddenly seized with so severe an attack of illness that it was deemed unadvisable to prosecute the journey, and the party arrived in this city on the evening of the above date. Since then the Governor’s health has improved rapidly, and is now in a good degree restored.
A much more elaborate and bizarre version of Young’s short-circuited trip that October has been handed down by the family of Arza Erastus Hinckley, who may have also played a crucial role in the rescue of the Martin Company. As told by descendant Earl S. Paul, the party consisted only of the Prophet and Hinckley, who had often served as Young’s carriage-driver. In this version, the two men travel along in silence, each preoccupied with fears about the fate of the handcart companies. Suddenly Young says, “Arza, I have been having some trouble lately with my stomach. The terrible worry is causing me to feel sick.”
“We are just about to Canyon Creek,” Arza answers. “When we get there we had better stop.”
That bitterly cold evening, camped in a tent, Young begins to shake all over with fever. His solicitous attendant serves him herbal tea, piles quilts on the invalid, and builds up the fire. Finally Hinckley takes a bottle of consecrated oil out of his handbag.
Arza got the oil and anointed him then laid hands on his companion’s head and blessed him asking his heavenly Father to relieve him of his suffering. After Arza had completed the administration, President Young seemed to be much better, a calmness came over him, he went to sleep and when he awakened in the morning his pain was gone.
Nonetheless, the two men decide to return to Salt Lake. On the way back, Young voices out loud the moral lesson of his sudden illness:
“After the time I have had I can realize more fully how the hand-cart people are suffering, even more than I have…. After my experience in this storm they would not be able to carry the needed protection in the small handcarts. Their small children, babies and elderly people must be freezing. They should not have left so late in the season, they should have waited until spring.”
Probably this version, which has never been published, is apocryphal, or at least much embroidered with retrospective pieties as it was handed down from one generation to the next. Yet the dates jibe with the Deseret News account, the treatment with consecrated oil was standard Mormon practice, and just possibly Hinckley was the “doctor” dispatched from Salt Lake City mentioned in other accounts.
AFTER MAKING INITIAL contact with the Willie Company in the midst of the October 19 snowstorm, the express rescue train—Young, Wheelock, Taylor, and Garr—hurried on to search for the Martin Company and the Hodgetts and Hunt wagon companies, of whose whereabouts Captain Willie knew nothing. During three days of constant storm, pushing through deepening snow, the rescue team covered forty-five miles, reaching Devil’s Gate. A striking landmark along the Mormon and Oregon Trails, the Gate is a three-hundred-foot-high sheer cleft in a granite ridge, carved by the Sweetwater as it turns briefly north in its generally eastward course.
George Grant had ordered the express train to stop near Devil’s Gate. Precisely why is unclear: in a November 2 letter sent to Brigham Young from that camp, Grant vaguely remarks, “Not thinking it safe for them to go farther than Independence Rock, I advised them to wait there.” (Independence Rock is a low granite dome covered with trail signatures; it lies five miles east of Devil’s Gate. The latter, however, offered the express train a far better camping place, for the half-decrepit remains of Fort Seminoe, a trading post built by French voyageur brothers in 1852, gave the men welcome shelter from the storms.)
The eternally overoptimistic Franklin Richards had assured Grant that he would meet the Martin Company at Devil’s Gate or farther west. When the express team reached the Gate and found no sign of the missing company, they grew deeply alarmed. Nonetheless, they obeyed orders and waited there for four days.
Meanwhile, having dispatched William Kimball and six wagons to shepherd the Willie Company toward the Valley, Grant pushed on eastward with ten wagons and about sixteen men on October 21. It was not until October 26 that this main rescue caravan reached Devil’s Gate. There, consternation prevailed. Grant began to speculate that the companies lagging behind had stopped at Fort Laramie to winter over. His own horses were getting played out, and feed was increasingly hard to find in the snowdrifts. Grant thus came perilously close to calling off the rescue mission, or at least to waiting at Devil’s Gate for the laggards to come to him.
As Daniel Jones wrote of this impasse, “At first we were at a loss what to do for we did not expect to go further than Devil’s Gate.” But, according to Jones, the five returning missionaries still in Grant’s team had “many dear friends” among the missing companies, and thus “suffered great anxiety, some of them feeling more or less the responsibility resting upon them for allowing these people to start so late in the season across the plains.”
As of October 26, the Martin Company had been stalled for six days in their squalid camp beneath Red Buttes, a full sixty-five miles east of Devil’s Gate. With them was camped the Hodgetts wagon company, also unable to move. Even farther east lingered the Hunt wagon company.
At last, on October 27, Grant decided to send ahead yet another express scouting team, with fast horses and a pack mule, but carrying no flour, to search for the missing parties. The three-man mission was made up of Joseph Young, Abel Garr, and Daniel Jones. Jones would later claim that the scouts’ orders were “to find where the people were and not to return until they were found,” but Harvey Cluff, the young man who had posted the critical signboard on the trail near Willow Creek, contradicted that statement. In his journal, Cluff wrote, “Four days was the extent of time they were to be gone. If the emigrants were not found within that length of time the [three] men were to return and the conclusion would be that the companies had gone into winter quarters.”
That second express train would spell the difference between life and death for hundreds of emigrants. According to Jones’s account, the men rode at “full gallop,” but lost half a day when their horses strayed off from camp to follow a herd of buffalo. Even so, the trio covered the sixty-five miles in the extraordinary time of two days. The first sign of the Martin Company came when the scouts discovered a “white man’s shoe track in the road.” Joseph Young called out, “Here they are.” As Jones later recalled, “We put our animals to their utmost speed and soon came in sight of the camp at Red Bluff.”
The Martin Company and the Hodgetts wagon party had not moved for seven days. Their rations had recently been reduced to four ounces of flour per day for adults, two ounces for children. Many of the Saints had reconciled themselves to impending death. “At last the Company gave up and decided they could go no further,” remembered Louisa Mellor Clark years later. “We all gathered around and held a meeting, praying God to help us, as we knew it was Him alone who could deli
ver us from death. We were happy and willing to die for a just cause.”
Heber McBride, thirteen at the time, later reflected, “I have wondered many times since how it was we ever lived for my sister and I used [to] pray we could die to get out of our misery.” The stalwart John Jaques insisted that the Saints did all they could to maintain morale: “The outlook was certainly not encouraging, but it need not be supposed that the company was in despair…. O no! A hopeful and cheerful spirit pervaded the camp, and the ‘songs of Zion’ were frequently heard at this time, though the company was in the very depths of its privations.” But Jaques also admitted, “At the same time [the Saints] had become so accustomed to looking death in the face that they seemed to have no fear of it, nor of corpses either, the bodies of the dead having become such familiar sights as to lose their ordinary thrilling influence on beholders.”
Both Patience Loader and Jane Griffiths later remembered that at Red Buttes, nineteen members of the company died in a single night. Among their number was John, the oldest brother of eight-year-old Jane Griffiths. Josiah Rogerson went even further, insisting many years later that after October 23 in the Red Buttes camp there were “six to eight and more deaths every twenty-four hours. The aged and worn-out seemed in an hour or two to relinquish all their desire for life, passing away like an infant in slumber.”
By now, virtually none of the Martin Company diarists was still keeping a journal, and the reminiscences of others from years later tend to be cursory, as if that stalled week in the snow was too terrible a time to be remembered in detail. But twelve-year-old John Bond in the Hodgetts wagon company later re-created several memorable scenes from what he called the “Snow Bound Camp of Death.” He recalled “the saints [w]ringing their hands and stamping their feet they were so cold.” Bond described a mass burial, as hymns were sung and prayers spoken, while in the background “the wolves were howling around in all directions on the snow clad mountains.” While the service was going on, “Captain Martin stood over the graves of the departed ones with his shot gun in hand firing at intervals to keep the crows from hovering around in mid air.”
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