Jaques’s outpouring remained, however, an isolated evocation of the 1856 debacle. In the 1870s and 1880s, exposés written by apostates sometimes summarized the disastrous campaign. The most scathing account emerged in the pages of Ann Eliza Young’s sensational Wife No. 19. Young devoted two chapters of her tell-all book to the handcart episode, announcing her thesis at the start: “In the history of any people there has never been recorded a case of such gross mismanagement as that of gathering the foreign Saints to Zion in the year 1856.” There was no doubt in Ann Eliza’s mind as to who was to blame for that mismanagement, as she excoriated her ex-husband for “one of the very worst blunders that the Prince of Blunderers, Brigham Young, ever made.”
By the 1890s, chroniclers had begun to record the reminiscences of the pioneers who had gathered to Zion in the early years. These records included some stories of handcart emigrants from 1856. Yet according to independent historian Lyndia Carter, “Fifty years go by before people really are willing to talk about the handcart expeditions. And it’s not until the 1920s and the 1930s that Mormon pioneer history begins to be glorified.”
In 1906, several survivors of the Willie and Martin Companies decided to organize a fiftieth reunion. Even at that remove from the disaster, those men felt they had to petition the church for permission to hold such a gathering.
The reunion was held on October 4, 1906, in the 14th Ward assembly hall in Salt Lake City. The organizer was Samuel Jones, who had been a nineteen-year-old in the Martin Company half a century before. By 1906, Jones and others calculated, only twenty-three members of the Willie Company were still alive, fifty-eight veterans of the Martin Company, and fourteen of the rescuers. It was noted that some of the survivors who had been bound so tightly together during their ordeal had not seen each other in more than thirty years.
Jones’s brother Albert, three years younger than Samuel, gave a stirring address. He relived for his colleagues some of the more poignant and pivotal episodes in the Martin Company’s travails, such as the near-miraculous appearance of rescuer Joseph Young on his white mule as the company lay stalled beneath Red Buttes. Then, in his peroration, Jones explicitly drew the uplifting moral lesson of the ordeal that would serve as the church’s official version during the century to come:
In all the labors of your frontier life you have nobly taken your post of duty—& this day you feel in your hearts that the toils and labors of the past are amply rewarded in the blessings of today…. [T]hough the handcart episode is one of the unpleasant expirences of our lives, the schooling that it gave, & the training of our unpleasant episodes in our lives since then—all have tended to make our faith in our religion the stronger—& our appreaceation of Gods own hand dealing to us as a people, more easily discerned.
The tone of the reunion was not exactly jubilant, but a fierce pride in having gone through their terrible ordeal united the survivors in a solidarity they had not previously enjoyed. A few years later, in a published reminiscence, Samuel Jones would underline the sense the veterans shared of having been singled out for a special blessing: “While the journey was a hard one, we have nothing but the best of feelings for the men who advised us to make the trip. The purpose was a glorious one.”
From 1906 on, the survivors were formally united in the Handcart Veterans Association. But when Samuel Jones proposed the erection of a monument to those who had died along the handcart trail, church leaders became skittish. In a 1908 letter to Jones from the First Presidency (headed now by Prophet Joseph F. Smith, nephew of the founder), those leaders unctuously insisted, “But while we feel tenderly towards [the handcart martyrs] we hesitate to give our consent to the erection of a monument in their honor, believing the time is hardly ripe for it…. It is clear to us that this important suggestion of yours be deferred for the present.” Any such monument would be deferred for another nine decades.
The year after the fiftieth reunion, Josiah Rogerson, fifteen at the time he traveled in the Martin Company, determined to write the first comprehensive history of his own party’s 1856 emigration. He assiduously gathered and transcribed what unpublished diaries he could locate (relying primarily on James Bleak’s journal) and melded them with reminiscences by other pioneers and with his own memories of the ordeal. Between October 13 and December 8, 1907, Rogerson published nine weekly installments of his patchy but admirably rich account in the Salt Lake Herald. What drove Rogerson to distraction, however, was his inability to find the diary kept by Captain Edward Martin, who had died in 1882. As Rogerson wrote in his fifth installment:
To make the record as full as possible, I have spared neither time nor pains to get Captain Edward Martin’s journal and diary, which I know he kept daily throughout the entire journey that year, of over 1,350 miles, for I many times saw him writing, and read his entries in his journal, and it contains the names of all that died and fell by the way, and where buried, yet notwithstanding the search of his relict and children, who are quite willing these names should be had therefrom, as yet it has not been found.
To this day, Martin’s diary, which scholars would give much to be able to read, has never been found. A persistent rumor has it that after Martin’s death, the diary was “consigned to the flames.” Historian Lyndia Carter discusses this murky business: “Martin’s wife later said the diary was ‘accidentally burned.’ But was it burned while he was still on the trail? Or only after his death? Because he was the leader of the party, he always bore a certain blame and sense of guilt. One descendant whom I interviewed said that the Martin family has always had a taint because of the tragedy. His widow might have burned the diary on purpose.”
In the end, Rogerson never managed to put his newspaper articles together as a book. The Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University holds a poignant testimonial to that failed effort: a sheaf of clippings of the original Herald articles with Rogerson’s penciled-in corrections and second thoughts.
The loss of Martin’s diary raises the question of censorship and expurgation in the handcart record. Beginning in the late 1930s, Kate B. Carter, an editor and chronicler for the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, published multivolume miscellanies of memoirs and historical sketches under such titles as Heart Throbs of the West and Treasures of Pioneer History. These books contain relentlessly upbeat, sentimental, and pious homilies based on historical fact, as gathered over the years in the voluminous DUP archives. Another persistent rumor has it that Kate Carter made it a regular practice to destroy documents that fell into her hands that could be construed as casting an unflattering light on the church. If the rumor is true, we shall never know what other accounts of the 1856 handcart campaign disappeared into Carter’s wastebasket.
The first book-length history of the handcart emigration did not appear until 1960, when LeRoy and Ann Hafen published Handcarts to Zion. As noted earlier, the Hafens were spurred to their effort in part by the fact that their mother, as a girl of six emigrating from Switzerland, had come to Salt Lake City with the last of all the handcart companies in 1860. The Hafens honestly concede that the Willie and Martin exodus ended up as “the worst disaster in the history of Western migration.” But they subscribe to the myth first propagated by Brigham Young that the handcart plan was basically sound: “Taken in its normal operation, with adequate preparations and proper scheduling, the handcart plan was an economical, effective, and rather beneficent institution.”
The last paragraph in the Hafens’ narrative (not counting their substantial and useful appendices) amounts to a ringing affirmation of the spiritual boon of handcart travel:
Like Israel of old, these modern “Children of God” responded to a Prophet’s voice. From their zeal for a new religion, they drew strength. From an abiding faith in God and his overruling care, and from a firm belief in the divinity of the command for Latter-day Saints to gather to Zion, they were enabled to gird up their loins and walk the long scourging trail.
The first non-Mormon historian seriously to chronicle the handcart
campaign was Wallace Stegner, in The Gathering of Zion (1964). More than half the book is devoted to the pioneer trek of 1846–47, but Stegner allocates three chapters to the handcart campaign and its aftermath. Fascinated all his life by the Latter-day Saints, and on the whole an admirer of them as people, Stegner colors his chronicle with the ironic style he learned from Bernard DeVoto, which in this instance has the odd effect of lightening the tragedy with an almost jaunty overtone. As its title indicates, the third handcart chapter, called “The Man That Ate the Pack Saddle,” treats the desperate wintering-over at Fort Seminoe by Daniel Jones and his nineteen fellow “volunteers” as a swashbuckling saga in the vein of Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone.
IN THE 1960S, when Stegner was writing, he received no help from church authorities. So uncooperative, in fact, were the Mormon archivists that Stegner complained in his Acknowledgments, “Several libraries have helped to compensate for the fact that the most logical source of information, the library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is opened to scholars only reluctantly and with limitations.”
As I began my own research, I was fearful that the same sort of roadblock would bar my path to the Mormon truth. Making my first visit to the LDS Archives in April 2005, I thought it best to slip in, as it were, under the radar, registering at the desk as if I were simply another out-of-towner curious about his ancestors in Utah. To my great surprise, I found that the archivists not only knew I was coming, but welcomed me with open arms. During the subsequent two years, they went out of their way to aid my research, even putting me on the track of documents I would not otherwise have known existed.
This new generation of archivists, partly in reaction to their predecessors’ obstinacy, practices a truly enlightened and disinterested openness even to non-LDS scholars. Furthermore, under the direction of Mel Bashore, the diaries and reminiscences of all the pioneer emigrating parties between 1847 and 1868 have been faithfully transcribed by volunteers and posted online under the subheading “Mormon Pioneer Overland Travel” on the official church Web site (http://www.lds.org/churchhistory). This matchless resource saved me (as it will save other scholars to come) countless hours of squinting at microfilm and transcribing in pencil, word for word, documents that are all but unreadable in the original.
As I would do in 2005 and 2006, in the early 1960s Wallace Stegner retraced much of the Mormon Trail by automobile. At the time, however, virtually no plaques or monuments called attention to the hand-cart saga. Standing before the granite cirque in western Wyoming where so many Saints had died, Stegner conjured up the scene out of thin air: “At Martin’s Cove, just above Devil’s Gate, the pilgrim may stop and try to imagine how that cliff-backed river-bottom might have looked to a shivering, exhausted, starving handcart emigrant in November, 1856.”
By the time I began my own research, I knew that a visitors’ center—opened in 1997, to mark the sesquicentennial of the pioneer trek of 1847—had been built near Martin’s Cove. The first of my three trips to the Mormon Handcart Visitors’ Center, however, in August 2005, was full of surprises.
I had not expected such an ambitious operation. The church had bought and refurbished the Sun Ranch, an assemblage of buildings erected in 1872 by a French-Canadian settler at the southern entrance to Devil’s Gate. Nothing remains of nearby Fort Seminoe, where Daniel Jones and his fellow sufferers had wintered over in 1856–57 to guard the handcart pioneers’ possessions, though an archaeological crew out of the University of Wyoming had excavated the site in 2001. (In the following year, a faithful reconstruction of the old fort was begun.) Nearby, the main Sun Ranch building had been turned into a handsome museum. I started my visit with a leisurely tour.
By now, having already spent considerable time in the LDS Archives in Salt Lake City, I was prepared for the sanctifying platitudes with which the visitors’ center converted a needless tragedy into a saga of perseverance and faith. A sign at the entrance to the museum formed a précis of the center’s purpose:
In 1856…portions of the ground were made sacred by the sacrifices of a company of handcart pioneers who struggled through the snow of Wyoming enroute to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. This is the story of those stirring events and the legacy of courage and faith wrought by all ten companies of handcart pioneers. This visitors’ center is dedicated to honor their courage, faith, and triumphs in the face of terrible adversity.
Like Mormon docents everywhere, the “elders” and “sisters” staffing the museum were eager to give me help and information. I politely fended them off so I could concentrate on the displays. As the visitor wends his way from room to room, the story of the westward migration unfolds. The captions emphasized the persecution of the Saints in the East and Midwest: they had chosen to head for Utah to thrive in a place “free of injustice, bigotry and malice.” One panel acknowledged that the handcart plan was Brigham Young’s scheme for saving money, but insisted in bold print, “The Poor Welcomed Less Expensive Travel.” Moreover, “The plan was received with rejoicing by needy Saints in Great Britain and throughout Europe. It was the answer to fervent prayers.”
Likewise, the exhibits acknowledged the seventeen-pound weight limit for personal goods, “including bedding and clothing.” But as things started to go wrong, it was as if an unforeseeable fate had jinxed the plan: “Church emigration officials at Iowa City could not keep up with the demand for handcarts.”
I was beguiled and puzzled by the medley of pious obfuscation and frank admission of suffering that the museum presented. A glass case holding a day’s ration of flour made vividly clear how little food the Saints were forced to subsist on. One caption granted, “Children chewed rawhide to quiet their pains of hunger.” Yet the rescue came across as a deus ex machina: “But President Young was true to his word”; “Martin Handcart Company Found and Saved.”
Most conspicuous by its absence was any count of the total number of dead in the Willie and Martin Companies. The only retrospective quotations from survivors were blindly loyal ones, such as that of Francis Webster, a twenty-five-year-old pilgrim in the Martin Company in 1856: “We came through with the absolute knowledge that God lives for we became acquainted with him in our extremities…. I knew that the Angels of God were there.”
Somehow the museum curators realized they had to account for the tragedy. A single display case accomplished this task by stacking ten oversized dominoes beside each other, frozen in the moment that the chain started to topple. From left to right, the dominoes were labeled thus: “Left England Late,” “Many Elderly & Children,” “Handcarts Not Built,” “Frequent Repairs to Carts,” “Oxen Lost in Storm,” “Flour Transferred to Carts,” “Clothes Left to Lighten Load,” “Rations Cut, then Gone,” “Cattle Weaken & Die,” “October 19 Storm.”
So that was it: the whole handcart tragedy was the result of a bad alignment of dominoes. As many a literary critic and scholar has pointed out, the passive voice is a handy structure for evading the question of human responsibility. According to the visitors’ center museum, it was not the agents in Iowa City who grievously erred by failing to have hand-carts ready for the Saints; it was “Handcarts Not Built.” It was not the foolhardy decision by Captain Martin and his lieutenants to burn extra clothing and baggage at Deer Creek that plunged the company into a more desperate plight; it was “Clothes Left to Lighten Load.” And the last and fatal domino was the most impersonal of all: an early snowstorm that no one saw coming.
The Mormon Handcart Visitors’ Center, however, amounts to far more than a museum. My chief aim in stopping there that August, like that of 90 percent of the 32,000-odd visitors who arrive each summer, was to pull and push my own handcart. The church has purchased hundreds of handcart wheels built by Amish craftsmen in Pennsylvania, then used its own carpenters to build the boxes and yokes that complete a veritable fleet of modern handcarts. From slow beginnings in 1997, the Handcart Visitors’ Center has become quite the place to spend a few summer days or even a week, as whol
e Mormon stakes make the pilgrimage from their far-off hometowns to this lonely place in western Wyoming to pull their own handcarts, visit Martin’s Cove, camp together, and sing songs and tell tales about their ancestors. The most serious groups dress for the occasion in 1850s garb.
Before launching out with my cart, I chatted with Elder Hadley in the compound’s machine shop. An expert on the design of the “replicas,” Hadley pointed out the differences between the carriages furnished visitors today and the ones Chauncey Webb and his helpers cobbled out of green wood in 1856. The modern handcarts are considerably bigger and heavier than the originals (about 150 pounds each, compared to the 60 or 65 pounds of the pioneers’ carts), but they also have the inestimable advantages of iron rims on the wheels, ball bearings in the hubs, and steel axles. The trail leading west from the visitors’ center, moreover, is a dirt road today, far smoother and easier than the sodden track of 1856.
Finally I approached the headquarters where the handcarts were stabled. I was surprised that no one charged me a rental fee, or even required an ID as deposit. A cheerful elder assigned me handcart No. 155. Knowing that a typical load for an 1856 handcart manned by five emigrants was about two hundred to three hundred pounds, I threw what I considered an equivalent load of sixty pounds of backpack and duffel bag into my cargo box and set out.
Even along the gravel road, I was shocked by how hard it was to move my handcart. I alternated pushing and pulling, unable to get the hang of either. When I stood inside the yoke and pushed, the crossbar banged uncomfortably against my hips or my chest, depending on whether I grasped it with an underhand or overhand grip. When I stood in front of the yoke, reached back for the crossbar and pulled, my forearms grew sore from the unnatural twisting the act required.
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