Devil's Gate

by David Roberts

  By the time the tidings of the last handcart company reached John Taylor’s office in New York, the disaster had been further sanitized. In The Mormon, Taylor quoted a letter from Brigham Young written in early December:

  “The weather for some time has been and continues to be cold, but through the blessings of the Lord, all our immigrating companies have arrived, except two independent ox train companies, which are now safely quartered at Fort Bridger, and will probably arrive in eight or ten days….

  “Notwithstanding the companies now out and the two last arrived hand-cart companies were caught in the cold and storms, owing to far too late a start from Florence, yet the relief so promptly, freely, liberally, and timely sent from here was so blest in rescuing them, that but few comparatively, have suffered severely, though some had their feet and hands more or less frosted; yet the mortality has been much less than often attends well fitted animal trains travelling in good season.”

  That letter closed with a characteristic Young flourish: “Business remains dull; money is scarce and becoming scarcer, which will prove a great blessing to the people, if they wisely improve the lesson.”

  In early December, however, the streets of Salt Lake City were abuzz with gossip that no amount of presidential rhetoric could stifle. Even before the Willie Company came in, news of the terrible suffering of the last two handcart companies had been broadcast through the city. Moreover, the blame was being laid squarely on the Prophet’s shoulders. Heber Kimball acknowledged as much as he spoke in the Tabernacle on November 2 (a week before the Willie party’s arrival) to complain about the people’s “murmuring”:

  Some find fault with and blame br. Brigham and his Council, because of the sufferings they have heard that our brethren are enduring on the plains. A few of them have died, and you hear some exclaim, ‘what an awful thing it is! Why is it that the First Presidency are so unwise in their calculations? but it falls on their shoulders.’ Well, the late arrival of those on the plains cannot be helped now, but let me tell you, most emphatically, that if all who were entrusted with the care and management of this year’s immigration had done as they were counseled and dictated by the First Presidency of this church, the sufferings and hardships now endured by the companies on their way here would have been avoided. Why? Because they would have left the Missouri river in season, and not have been hindered until into September.

  This had already become the party line. In all of Young’s correspondence, there is not a single word before November 1856 indicating that he explicitly warned the handcart companies not to set out from Florence too late in the season. From that date on, however, Young would insist that that had always been his counsel. The disaster (insofar as he could admit that a disaster had occurred) would not be laid to his account: it was entirely the fault of his shortsighted lieutenants.

  In particular, the Prophet singled out Franklin Richards and Daniel Spencer for his most scathing comments. At that same meeting in the Tabernacle, a month before the worst of the suffering would become known, Young outlined the ideal handcart trek as starting from the Missouri River on June 1. (The Willie Company had left Florence on August 16, the Martin Company on August 25.) Then he turned his famous talent for scorn on the returning missionaries, who, he would insist, had botched the 1856 emigration:

  Here is br. Franklin D. Richards who has but little knowledge of business, except what he has learned in the church; he came into the church when a boy, and all the public business he has been in is the little he has done while in Liverpool, England; and here is br. Daniel Spencer, br. Richards’ first counselor and a man of age and experience, and I do not know that I will attach blame to either of them. But if, while at the Missouri river, they had received a hint from any person on this earth, or if even a bird had chirped it in the ears of brs. Richards and Spencer, they would have known better than to rush men, women and children on to the prairie in the autumn months, on the 3d of September, to travel over a thousand miles. I repeat that if a bird had chirped the inconsistency of such a course in their ears, they would have thought and considered for one moment, and would have stopped those men, women and children there until another year.

  As for those who wished to blame the Prophet instead of his lieutenants: “If any man, or woman, complains of me or of my Counselors, in regard to the lateness of some of this season’s immigration, let the curse of God be on them and blast their substance with mildew and destruction, until their names are forgotten from the earth.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE MORMON MAYFLOWER

  One day in August 2006, I wandered into the Downtown Marriott hotel in Salt Lake City. In a nook just to the right of the front door, I was surprised to stumble across a small bronze sculpture. It was a replica, about one-fourth size, of the original, called The Handcart Pioneer, cast in 1926 by Torleif S. Knaphus. Just the day before, I had carefully studied that original work where it stands, in the open air in the southwest corner of Temple Square, the center of sprawling Salt Lake City and the spiritual hub of today’s flourishing LDS church.

  The cynosure of the ten-acre square is the soaring Temple, built of quartz monzonite quarried in Little Cottonwood Canyon, twenty miles to the southeast. Begun in 1853 with a groundbreaking ceremony presided over by Brigham Young, the Temple was not completed until 1893, sixteen years after the Prophet’s death.

  Temple Square also encloses the rotunda-shaped Tabernacle, where the celebrated Mormon Tabernacle Choir performs virtually every Sunday; two of Young’s residences dating from the 1850s, the Beehive House and the Lion House, the former restored as a National Historic Site, the latter converted into a popular “pantry” where luncheon crowds feast on Mormon home-cooking; the towering Church Office Building (housing the LDS Archives, where I spent weeks doing research); and the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, home of the FamilySearch Center, arguably the world’s leading genealogical resource. The square is also festooned with statuary, including not only Knaphus’s tribute to the handcart emigrants but a colossal sculpture of Brigham Young facing south from the center of the southern gateway to the square. (Even faithful Saints joke that Young’s hand is raised in salute not to the Temple, which stands behind him on the right, but toward Zions Bank across the street.)

  Knaphus’s skillful sculpture powerfully evokes the grit and the pathos of the handcart pioneers during the 1856 ordeal. Inside the yoke, a tired but determined man pulls the cart’s burden. A young lad with a brimmed hat pushes gamely from the rear. The wife, walking on the left side of the cart, holds her hand to her breast as she turns to gaze anxiously at her tiny daughter, who, with a resigned look on her face, rides the box on top of the family’s baggage.

  In the Marriott lobby, however, what caught my attention was not the Knaphus replica, but a laminated plaque affixed to it. In bold print, the caption named six ancestors of J. Willard Marriott, the founder of the hotel chain, who had “crossed the plains” to Salt Lake City during the pioneer days. Two names leapt out at me:

  ELIZABETH STEWART MARRIOTT, J. Willard Marriott’s grandmother, pulled a handcart from Kirtland, Ohio to Salt Lake City in 1853.

  WILLIAM MORRIS, J. Willard Marriott’s maternal grandfather, crossed the plains with a handcart company in 1855.

  By this point in my research, I knew that neither claim could be true. No Mormon handcart company was ever organized before Edmund Ellsworth’s in 1856. And no Mormon ever pulled a handcart from Kirtland, for that erstwhile LDS stronghold had been abandoned by 1838.

  I walked to the front desk and told the clerk the reasons that I doubted the claims on behalf of William Morris and Elizabeth Stewart Marriott. He was dumbfounded. “You’re the first person who’s ever brought anything like this to our attention,” he told me. Then a wan smile crossed his face. “But you can be sure,” he confided, “they’re never going to change it.”

  It was Saturday night, and all the higher-ups were enjoying their weekend elsewhere. I turned to go, resolved to file away t
he erroneous captions as just one more example of apocryphal signage—of which I had discovered an abundance over the years all across the West, as well as elsewhere. But the impasse nagged at me. It was always possible that Marriott’s two ancestors had indeed performed their handcart feats, but that the dates and origin points had gotten garbled in the retelling. A quick check of the partial rosters of the 1856 handcart companies revealed no William Morris and no Elizabeth Stewart [Marriott], but that still could not rule out the participation of those shadowy pioneers.

  Thus began eight frustrating months of e-mail exchanges between me and the Marriott corporate headquarters in Washington, D.C. As the hotel clerk had predicted, corporate headquarters was not amenable to correcting the captions on the plaques. The Marriott corporation’s reluctance sprang not merely from institutional inertia, but also from wounded pride. After a century and a half of hindsight, having a hand-cart pioneer as an ancestor had been transformed from a semisecret family tragedy into a badge of courage, and even beyond that, into a seal of authenticity. By this time, the handcart was no longer John Ahmanson’s “two-wheeled man-tormentor” or “infernal machine.” It had become the Mormon Mayflower.

  Half-jokingly, I shared my insight with Ardis Parshall, a freelance researcher and devout Mormon whom I had hired to guide me through the labyrinth of the LDS Archives. I was surprised to receive her wholehearted agreement. “Mormons are proud of our pioneer ancestors,” Parshall told me. “Most of us secretly feel that having ancestors who came by wagon is better than having ancestors who came by train. It’s even better when your ancestors came by handcart. And of course you’re practically royalty if you can claim someone in the Martin or Willie Companies.”

  I asked Parshall to apply her formidable talents to a genealogical ferreting out of William Morris and Elizabeth Stewart. In only a day or two, she came back to me with the definitive results. Elizabeth Stewart, born in 1829 in Bedfordshire, England, was indeed J. Willard Marriott’s grandmother. She had in fact come across the plains in 1853—not by handcart, but in the fifty-six-wagon Moses Clawson Company. Parshall confirmed this finding with three published sources.

  Marriott’s maternal grandfather was harder to find, but the indefatigable Parshall came up with some solid facts:

  William Morris cannot yet be placed with any specific overland company. He and his family (a wife previous to the one we are concerned with) are on the 1850 census living in Alton, Madison County, Illinois. He appears on the Utah 1856 territorial census, living in Weber County, suggesting that he had emigrated at least by 1855…. Whichever company he traveled with, he cannot have come by handcart because no handcarts were used by Mormons prior to 1856.

  By now I had given up on the Marriott corporation bureaucrats. Instead, I did what I should have done in the first place. I telephoned the hotel in Salt Lake City and asked to speak to the general manager. Within minutes, a man named Steve Lundgren was on the line. I summarized Parshall’s research, offering to send him her report. If he was dismayed by the news, Lundgren didn’t let on. Instead, he emphasized that J. Willard Marriott, Jr., son of the founder and CEO of the corporation, who Lundgren said was his good friend, would be the first to insist that the laminated plaque in the lobby, if untruthful, be corrected. Lundgren, in fact, would be meeting with the CEO in a couple of weeks and would be glad to share my findings.

  I forwarded Parshall’s report. A few weeks later, I received an e-mail from Lundgren:

  I spoke with Bill Marriott regarding the research you presented regarding his family and their travels to Utah. He acknowledged that Elizabeth Stewart did not cross the plains in a handcart company; he did not have recollection of William Morris. He was also unaware of the specifics on the caption on the handcart statue in the hotel lobby. We have removed the caption and will replace it with a corrected one regarding Elizabeth Stewart and William Morris. Thank you for sharing this information.

  As of this writing, a revised plaque has been installed.

  FOR MORE THAN two decades the handcart catastrophe of 1856 was swept under the Mormon rug. At the time, the Prophet used his formidable talents to put the most positive possible spin on the debacle. The death toll was minimized, while Young insisted again and again that the 1856 emigration had proved the handcart plan fundamentally sound. As a gratuitous demonstration of this tenet, in April 1857 Brigham sent seventy handpicked missionaries eastward from Salt Lake along the Mormon Trail, pushing and pulling better-designed handcarts than the ones carpentered out of green wood from the forests around Iowa City.

  It was not until 1878 that any survivor of the 1856 tragedy publicly disputed the official version. Fittingly, the veteran who spoke out was John Jaques, the former associate of Franklin D. Richards in the Liverpool office of the church. No longer the zealot who had shamed his in-laws, the James Loader family, into undertaking the handcart pilgrimage by printing Patience’s timorous letter in the Millennial Star, Jaques had become a thoughtful witness to the history he had helped create. What drove him to publish a seven-part memoir of the Martin Company’s ordeal in the Salt Lake Daily Herald between December 1, 1878, and January 19, 1879, was Jaques’s indignation that twenty-two years later, the church was still trying to collect from the battered survivors the Perpetual Emigration Fund loans that had launched them on the handcart trail. With Swiftian eloquence, at the end of his seventh installment, he made his own modest proposal. He couched that proposal in an ironic anticipation of the objections he knew would greet it. “In conclusion,” Jaques wrote, “I have a benevolent suggestion to offer. I may be blamed for it by some persons, but I cannot help that. Namby-pamby sycophancy may deem the suggestion rashly presumptuous.”

  To lend authority to the proposal, before he spelled it out Jaques conjured up his own suffering in the Martin Company, as one who “for weeks together stood face to face with Death in the repulsive aspects outlined in these papers, who witnessed his victories daily under heartrending circumstances, who saw those near and dear to me succumb to his attacks under such circumstances and fall helpless victims to his all-conquering power, and who at that time would scarcely have cared the toss of a button to avoid a decisive wrestle with the grim monster myself.”

  Now the proposal:

  The suggestion is this: It would be entirely proper for the president of the Perpetual Emigration Fund company and his assistants to be asked to freely and fully cancel the indebtedness for passage, if any remains, of every member of this unfortunate and sorely tried emigrant company, and it would be a righteous, beneficent and graceful act for those gentlemen to readily accede to such a request. For if anybody ever worked his passage, to the uttermost farthing, these poor emigrants did. They paid not only the principal, but the interest also, with the latter rigorously compounded. They paid it in the hardest and most precious and most costly coin—by enduring daily hard labor, wasting fatigue, and pinching privations, by passing through untold hardships, by suffering cold and hunger, wretchedness and starvation, nakedness and famine, by frozen limbs and injured health and broken constitutions and many by giving their earthly all. Most of them lost old and valued friends and near relatives, and not a few sacrificed their own lives. In this most painful and most rigorous manner did these poor creatures pay dearly for the privilege of being brought over land and sea. Methinks that even stern Justice herself, inflexibly rigid and relentlessly exacting as she is, if she were to speak, would say, with no uncertain voice, that they had paid enough, and much more than enough.

  Whether Jaques succeeded in getting the handcart pioneers’ debts to the PEF annulled is not a matter of record. It seems, however, that many an overdue loan was quietly forgotten.

  In Jaques’s seven vivid installments, there is no hint yet of turning the handcart tragedy into a Mormon Mayflower. Instead (as the many quotations from those newspaper dispatches cited earlier attest) he unblinkingly recorded the suffering, the losses, and the horror of the Martin Company’s trial by starvation and cold. Jaques gave a
cogent explanation for the two-decade veil of silence that had settled over the disastrous emigration:

  This is the first time that the story of this handcart expedition has been written from beginning to end, so far as I know. It was not done before, partly for the reason that, for years after the journey was made, nobody wished to say or hear much about it, and those who were in the company cared to remember little of it. The affair was one of those disagreeable things, like some hateful dream, or dreadful vision, or horrible nightmare, that people seem indisposed to refer to but rather tacitly agree to forget, as much as possible, at least for a time.

  Yet, in a famous conclusion that is often quoted today by apologetic historians, Jaques wrote in his last installment, “The question may be asked, whom do I blame for the misadventures herein related. I blame nobody. I am not anxious to blame anybody. I am not writing for the purpose of blaming anybody, but to fill up a blank page of history with matters of much interest.”

  Brigham Young had died the year before Jaques published his testament. Perhaps when the Prophet was still alive, it would have been heretical to argue for cancellation of the PEF indebtedness. Perhaps even after Young’s death, it was still dangerous to blame any of the high-ranking officials involved for the outcome of the handcart “experiment”—even the officially scapegoated Franklin Richards. Yet Jaques’s disavowal of blame sounds sincere, as he credits Captain Martin for his ceaseless care and vigilance, cites the “most commendable spirit of liberality…manifested by the residents of this valley” who took in the ill and maimed after they arrived in Salt Lake, and gives the highest marks to the rescuers, saluting “the self-denying exposure, privations, and labors of those who went with the teams from this city to help the emigrants along.”