Devil's Gate

by David Roberts

  Hanks then narrates his reception by the Saints as the heaven-sent angel of the legend this meeting would become.

  When they saw me coming, they hailed me with joy inexpressible, and when they further beheld the supply of fresh meat I brought into camp, their gratitude knew no bounds. Flocking around me, one would say, “Oh, please, give me a small piece of meat”; another would exclaim, “My poor children are starving, do give me a little”; and children with tears in their eyes would call out, “Give me some, give me some.”

  It took only five minutes for all the buffalo meat to be unloaded from the pack horse and cooking on the fires. The next day, Hanks took some of the strongest men in the party back to the carcass of the buffalo, which they butchered and carried to camp.

  In his own telling, Hanks was not only the prodigal supplier of meat, but a healer who moved through the Martin Company performing miraculous cures. They began with a brother Blair, whose prostrate body the leaders of the company had given up for dead. Inspired, Hanks ordered several men to build a fire, next to which they laid Blair. He then washed the apparently lifeless man “from head to foot” and anointed him with consecrated oils. Several men laid hands on Blair and “commanded him in the name of Jesus Christ to breathe and live.”

  The effect was instantaneous. The man who was dead to all appearances immediately began to breathe, sat up in his bed and commenced to sing a hymn. His wife, unable to control her feelings of joy and thankfulness, ran through the camp exclaiming: “My husband was dead, but is now alive. Praised be the name of God. The man who brought the buffalo meat has saved him.”

  During the next several days, according to Hanks, he went “from tent to tent administering to the sick.” Scores of moribund Saints recovered, as Hanks “rebuked the diseases in the name of Jesus Christ…. I believe I administered to several hundreds in a single day.” The scout further rallied the company by promising them that more rescue wagons were not far ahead along the trail.

  Hanks, however, had no cure for frostbite. As he recalled in 1891,

  Many of the immigrants whose extremities were frozen, lost their limbs, either whole or in part. Many such I washed with water and castile soap, until the frozen parts would fall off, after which I would sever the shreds of flesh from the remaining portions of the limbs with my scissors. Some of the emigrants lost toes, others fingers, and again others whole hands and feet; one woman who now resides in Koosharem, Piute, Co., Utah, lost both her legs below the knees, and quite a number who survived became cripples for life.

  WHERE, DURING THESE days, were the rest of the rescue teams sent out from Salt Lake City? The question vexed Grant at the time, and it has vexed historians ever since. In Rescue of the 1856 Handcart Companies, Rebecca Bartholomew and Leonard Arrington offer a cogent if dismaying explanation. The essence of it is that the rescue teams themselves found the going so arduous, they had to worry about their own survival. “These later rescuers,” the historians write, “were in as much danger of frozen limbs and starvation if they pushed too far too fast as were the immigrants.” They quote one rescuer as recording snow on Big Mountain, only eighteen miles out of Salt Lake, as “up to the tops of our wagon bows.”

  In the face of this early winter, some of the rescue teams turned back. The hardier ones fought through to Fort Bridger, 113 miles from Salt Lake City. But there, according to Bartholomew and Arrington, they found “no word on what to do next.” Two rescue leaders pushed a single day farther east, but decided against crossing South Pass to look for the refugees on the Sweetwater. Returning to the fort, they persuaded all the other potential rescuers to give up the search. Seventy-seven wagons started west again along the trail back to Salt Lake City.

  Meanwhile, Brigham Young had learned by express courier of this failure to pursue the mission. He sent out a fast team under William Kimball and Hosea Stout to turn the rescue wagons back eastward again. Stout’s diary gives the clearest account of the thinking of the fainthearted rescuers, as he summarizes the excuses offered by John Van Cott, one of the leaders of the returning teams.

  Van Cott justified himself for returning and abandoning the Hand Cart Company as he could get no information of them and had concluded they had returned to the states, or Stopt at Larimie, been killed by the Indians or other wise gone to the devil and for him to have gone further was only to loose his own team and starve to death himself & do no good after all.

  Van Cott and his colleagues knew that Grant’s team of rescuers was somewhere out there to the east, still searching. But, in Stout’s withering paraphrase, Van Cott thought that “as for G. D. Grant and those with him who had gone to meet [the Martin Company] they had probably stoped at Ft. Larimie. So on these vague conclusions he had not only turned back but had caused all the rest of the teams to return and thus leave the poor suffering Hand carters to their fate.”

  Meeting the returnees on the trail on November 12, Kimball and Stout turned them around once again. Those wagons would save the lives of scores of Saints.

  The lack of resolve of Van Cott and his colleagues eventually became general knowledge, for Daniel Jones, wintering over at Devil’s Gate, learned of it. In Forty Years Among the Indians, he would write of these so-called rescuers, “I will not mention their names for it was always looked upon by the company as cowardly in the extreme.”

  The chief credit for the rescue, however, must go to the vanguard party led by Grant and Burton, and reinforced by the doughty Ephraim Hanks. In getting the Saints to shake off the deadly torpor of Martin’s Cove and start moving west again, Grant turned the corner of an ordeal that could have proved far worse than what in fact ensued after November 9. At last the Martin Saints were able to abandon their handcarts, as the weakest of them now rode in the wagons supplied not only by Grant but by the Hunt and Hodgetts Companies. Not everyone could ride, however. About a dozen years later, Heber McBride, thirteen at the time, recalled that after Martin’s Cove “all the small children and the old and those that [were] weak and worn out had the privilege of riding in the wagons so my Sister and me would see Mother and Peter and Maggie fixed in the wagon then Ether Jennetta and me would walk along with others.” As John Jaques later indicated, “One perplexing difficulty was to determine who should ride, for many must still walk, though…the cart pulling occupation was gone. There was considerable crying of women and children, and perhaps of a few of the men, whom the wagons could not accommodate with a ride.”

  Some of the Saints actually chose to walk because, exhausted though they were, the exercise warmed their bodies as sitting stationary in a wagon could not. And indeed, the temperatures remained brutally cold through the middle of November.

  From the 9th of that month on, however, virtually every day at least two or three Martin Saints died. It is curious that Robert Burton’s diary mentions not a single one of those deaths. It is almost as though the whitewash that church leaders would soon apply to the tragedy began with the very entries the sub-captain of the rescue allowed himself to write. The only time Burton touches on the question is in an entry on November 14: “No deaths in camp tonight.”

  For decades afterward, however, the Martin Saints vividly recalled the losses of their brothers and sisters who almost made it all the way to Zion. From the collective record, poignant vignettes emerge. Fifty-eight years later, Jane Griffiths Fullmer, eight at the time of the emigration, could say, “I remember two women that died while sitting by me. My mother was cooking some cakes of bread for one of them. When she had passed one to her she acted so queer then tossed it in the fire and dropped over dead.”

  Some of the Saints effectively gave up on life. As nineteen-year-old George Housley later remembered:

  At this time I was permitted to sleep in a tent with two of my companions. Each of them dying by my side where I slep by them ’till morning when they were taken away and buried…. At the time of my companions death I became despondent through weakness that I longed for death and tried to hide myself from the company th
at I might die, but one of the brethren returning back for something, found me sitting behind the rock where I had hoped to die. He took me along with him for a day before we caught up with the company. I was permitted to sleep in a wagon that night, where I slep with a dead man all night.

  In a stormy camp on the Sweetwater, Elizabeth Sermon reached kindred depths of hopelessness, as she mused, “My eldest boy John’s feet decaying, my boys both of them losing their limbs, their father dead, my own feet very painful, I thought, ‘Why can’t I die?’”

  Twenty-two years later, John Jaques could not clearly distinguish one Sweetwater camp from another, except for the site where the party spent the night in a grove of “quaking aspens.” There, he remembered, “sixteen corpses were interred, the largest number at any one camp.”

  On November 16, the refugees prepared to cross Rocky Ridge, the series of bare, stony swales where the Willie Company had had their most desperate day three weeks before. Providentially, it was here that the first additional wagon train of rescuers met the party. It was led not by John Van Cott or any of the other halfhearted missionaries who had previously given up and started back toward Salt Lake City, but by Anson Call. With his ten wagons, Call had met the Willie Company at Fort Bridger on November 3, and had realized at once that the Martin Company must be in an even more wretched condition. As Call later described his meeting with the Martin Saints, “We found them starving and freezing and dying, and the most suffering that I ever saw among human beings.”

  Call’s intervention meant that more of the weaker Saints could ride in wagons, and it meant more food for all. That day, the ration of flour per adult was doubled, from eight ounces to a pound. Yet during this time, hunger continued to aggrieve the Saints. Elizabeth Sermon remembered “asking one of the drivers to give me a cob of corn to eat.”

  He looked so pitiful and said, “Oh, sister, I hate to refuse you but my horses haven’t enough to eat now, and I do not know how we will get back to Salt Lake.”

  I said, “I ought not to have asked you, but myself and children are so hungery.”

  He said, “Keep up your faith, sister.”

  Many of the Saints were allowed to sleep in the wagons, rather than on the ground. This proved a mixed blessing. As Patience Loader recalled one such night,

  We made our bed there but we only had one old quilt to lie on and in the night I woke up and called to Mother I am freezing the side I had laid on was so benomed with cold Mother got up and helped me out of the wagon there was some big fiars burning in several places in the camp and lots of the sisters siting and Sleeping near the fiar to Keep warm So I went to the fiar and staid there the remainer of the night.

  Patience’s family finally figured out a sleeping system: “After we baked our bread we put the hott coles in our bake kittle and took in the wagon and that made it quite comfortable and warm for us to sleep in.”

  John Jaques had his own system, which was to sleep on the ground on top of the extinguished campfire. Unfortunately, “In the morning the same spot was found to be the most available for a graver use—it was the easiest place in which to dig a grave to bury the night’s dead. No pun is here intended.”

  Twenty-two years later, Jaques was still shocked to recall the change in character that the ordeal wrought among his colleagues: “Worn down by the labors and fatigues of the journey, and pinched by hunger and cold, the manliness of tall, healthy, strong men would gradually disappear, until they would grow fretful, peevish, childish, and puerile, acting sometimes as if they were scarcely accountable beings.”

  At South Pass, the refugees were met by more rescue teams, and again by even more at Fort Bridger. At last, every Saint could ride, and the daily pace increased until the whole party was averaging over twenty miles a day. Yet some had grown so weak that even this abundance of aid came too late. At Fort Bridger, John and Zilpah Jaques lost their two-year-old daughter, Flora. The couple carried the dead baby through to Salt Lake, so she could be buried in Zion.

  From near Fort Bridger, Joseph Simmons wrote a letter to his brother in Salt Lake:

  I am setting…on a sack of oats with the paper on my knee, by the side of a blazing Camp fire, surrounded by some eight hundred persons, one old lady lays dead within twenty feet of me, babies crying…. The suffering of the camp from frozen feet and various other causes, I will not attempt to describe, suffice to say bad. bad.

  Joseph Wadsworth, one of the rescuers, later recalled,

  The next morning after leaving Fort Bridger I was called on to help bury children that had died during the night. We were camped in a big cedar grove and buried the children on the side of the mountain.

  Everything went along all right as there was plenty of fuel and provisions, until we came to East Canyon stream. There I was called on again to bury two more children.

  In Echo Canyon, less than forty-five miles from Salt Lake, on November 27 Sarah Squires gave birth to a girl. The successful delivery seemed something of a miracle to the Saints. How Sarah managed to persevere through Martin’s Cove and the last three hundred miles of the deadly trek while in her ninth month of pregnancy is but one more instance of the heroism of the everyday Saints. The parents named their infant Echo Squires. She would live to the ripe old age of eighty-six, dying only in 1943.

  The last stretch of the Mormon Trail was the ruggedest of all, as the Saints had to climb and descend narrow canyons in the Wasatch Range, crossing over high passes called Big Mountain and Little Mountain. By now the snow was so deep that a special team out of Salt Lake had been ordered to pack down the “road” and to greet the emigrants with established camps and fires.

  Finally, on November 30, the Martin Company entered Salt Lake City. The meeting with the residents, John Jaques later reported, was “not very joyous.” Years later, Louisa Mellor Clark remembered that “President Young met us, and when he saw us he was so melted down with grief at sight of our condition he had to go home sick, but he blessed us first.”

  But eighteen-year-old Langley Bailey, who for weeks had been unable to walk, experienced a more momentous reception: “I was lifted up in the wagon, more dead than alive, and saw in the distance houses…. When [illegible] the city the people were coming out of meeting. Hundreds came and viewed us with much amazement.”

  The Saints who had relatives in the city were taken into their homes; others were more or less arbitrarily assigned to families to nurse them back to health. From much previous experience with near-starvation, the Saints knew that they could not let the refugees gorge themselves on the food that was suddenly available in abundance. Remembered George Housley many years later, “Brother Slack, our kind friend, would not allow me only a limited amount of bread as he was afraid it would kill me. But after they had gone to meeting I finished up the whole pot pie which had been prepared for the family, and I am alive yet and I have been hungry to this day.”

  At least three of the Martin Saints made it all the way from Liverpool to Zion, only to die the day after they arrived. Half a century later, Josiah Rogerson remembered seventeen-year-old Alice Ollorton, “whose feet and back became so badly frozen between the Red Buttes and Bridger that she was brought into Salt Lake more dead than alive, expiring the next day.”

  Rescuer Thomas Steed had been overjoyed to meet his good friend from England John Bailey (Langley’s father) among the Martin Saints a day’s drive east of Fort Bridger. But he would later report, “Brother Bailey was so severely frost bitten that his daughter had to carry him.” Instead of accompanying Bailey the rest of the way to Salt Lake, Steed pushed on eastward to rescue others still in the rear. “We wept together when I had to tell them of that decision. My poor friend Bailey died in arriving to Salt Lake.”

  And in the plainest of language, Margaret Griffiths later recorded, “My father died the next morning after we got in to Salt Lake. He was frozen to death, He was 47 years of age.”

  Because the rescuers had concentrated their efforts on the handcart Saints, the two wagon
companies lagged well behind in the home stretch. The Hunt and Hodgetts wagons trickled in through the first two weeks of December. The last of all the Saints in the monumental 1856 emigration did not arrive in Zion until December 15.

  WITH FAR GREATER uncertainty than that attending the Willie Company, the true death toll among the Martin Company can never be reckoned. The Saints themselves in the party could not keep count. Their retrospective estimates range from a low of one hundred to a high of three hundred. Hafen and Hafen cite 135 to 150. LDS archivist and historian Mel Bashore, who has carefully studied the question, sets the toll at 150 to 170.

  If we take the range of the death toll in the Willie Company as between sixty-six and seventy-seven, and the range in the Martin Company as between 135 and 170, then the total mortality count in the last two handcart companies amounts to between about 200 and 240. In contrast, the toll in the much more famous Donner Party disaster of 1846–47 was forty-two—only from one-fifth to one-sixth the number of deaths incurred by the handcarters. The conclusion is inescapable: the Mormon catastrophe of 1856 remains far and away the most deadly in the history of westward migration in the United States.

  At once, however, the propaganda machine of church publications began to cover up the disaster. Only four days after the Martin Company’s arrival, the Deseret News acknowledged, “As was to be expected, they have suffered considerably from storms and inclement weather, and several have had their feet and hands more or less frosted, but are now comfortably housed and cared for.” But the Lord was watching over even this ill-fated caravan of Saints, for “we can plainly recognize the kind hand of an overruling Providence in opening a way of escape for so many.” In that peculiarly Mormon vein, with its sense of collective persecution, the brief newspaper notice closed with a defiant vaunt: “Let the world oppose the gathering of Israel, let the wicked scoff, rage and imagine vanity, so long as the Saints give diligent heed to the counsels of those placed to direct, the gathering will progress as shall please the Most High.”