Devil's Gate

by David Roberts

  Apparently a solo handcarter at the visitors’ center was an anomaly. I had gone only a few hundred yards when a white-shirted missionary standing sentinel along the trail called out, “Looks like you lost your family!”

  Just before I had started out, in fact, a throng of two hundred Saints from the town of Parowan, in southwestern Utah, had streamed out of the headquarters with their caravan of handcarts. They were costumed to the teeth in period outfits, and they exuded a Sunday-picnic exuberance that seemed strangely at odds with the somber chapter of history they were reliving.

  It was only 1.3 miles by the dirt road to a second visitors’ station, from which a paved walking trail loops up into the cove. It took me half an hour to cover that distance with my handcart, and I arrived sore and tired. The effort had given me a profound new respect for the courage and hardiness of the Saints in 1856. I was, after all, in good health, well fed, and in shape from a summer of hiking—not emaciated from weeks of undernourishment, nor trudging through snow wearing tattered shoes, nor played out from day after day of hypothermic bivouacs.

  I parked my cart at the visitors’ station, then hiked the trail into Martin’s Cove. It was an 80 degree day with a cooling wind out of the west, pushing high cumulus clouds across the sky. The cove itself is protected by a cone-shaped mound of earth that fronts it—a sand dune stabilized by natural grasses. The granite slabs that backed the cove gleamed in the sun, and groves of piñons and junipers gentled the place with swaths of deep green boughs. It was impossible on this August day to see Martin’s Cove as anything other than a beautiful landscape. To conjure up the misery of November 1856 required an effort of imagination.

  At the apex of the trail, midway between the fronting dune and the backing granite slabs, a group of thirty or forty visitors in period clothing sat on several rows of bleachers while a “sister” addressed them. They were members of a Mormon stake from Lehi, a small town midway between Salt Lake City and Provo. I sat at some distance from the group and unpacked my picnic lunch, not without a certain guilt about munching on cheese, crackers, and nuts while the Saints from Lehi sat in rapt and sober attention to the woman’s lecture.

  “When President Hinckley was here,” she said, “he asked if he could go alone over to where they thought they buried their dead.” She gestured at a hollow to the north, covered with grasses and low bushes. Gordon Hinckley, ninety-five years old that August of 2005, was Joseph Smith’s fourteenth successor as President, Prophet, Seer, and Revelator of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

  The speaker suddenly choked up, then began weeping. Several of the Lehi Saints stifled sobs themselves. Eventually, their lecturer regained control and finished her talk. Slowly, lingering in small groups, the modern-day pilgrims set out along the back trail toward the visitors’ station to the south. I waited till they were all gone, then read the plaque that alluded to the fifty-six Martin Company members who had died in the cove. The back trail passes close to the supposed burial ground. A sign indicates, “Fragile Soil and Vegetation—Please remain on Developed Trail.”

  Some of the most assiduous students of the Oregon and Mormon Trails believe the Mormon Handcart Visitors’ Center has mislocated Martin’s Cove—that the cirque where the ordeal transpired is actually a similar cove a couple of miles farther west. To me at the moment, the question did not seem very important. What mattered was that the Saints of the twenty-first century have a “sacred place” along the Wyoming trail where they can gather and contemplate the fate of their ancestors.

  Back at the visitors’ station, I chatted with another volunteer, whose nametag identified him as Elder Whittier. “A week ago,” he said, “I was giving a Cove talk up there. You know, it’s pretty hard not to cry. You know the Spirit’s working on them.” (By “them,” I wasn’t sure whether Elder Whittier meant the dead or the present-day visitors.) “One guy sat there for five or ten minutes after everybody else had left. Later he told me, ‘Between the cove and your talk, I’m going to change my whole life.’”

  The standard loop for modern handcarters pushes a little farther west, crosses the Sweetwater without a bridge, then trundles along the south bank of the stream back to the headquarters—two more miles, making a round trip of 3.3. I got back inside the yoke of my two-wheeled man-tormentor and trudged on. As I came to the Sweetwater crossing, I saw the Parowan stake sitting on the far bank, taking its lunch break. It was very close to here that the Martin Company Saints had made their desperate ford on November 4, 1856, as they headed for Martin’s Cove—and here that the myth of the three eighteen-year-old “boys from the valley” who carried scores of Saints across the river, only to die shortly afterward as a result of their heroic service, was first crystallized.

  My cart rolled easily down into the river bottom. The current was only calf-deep, and in sandals I found it almost pleasant to splash my way across the cobblestoned streambed. But the incline up to the bank on the far side was made of soft sand. With all my might, I couldn’t get my cart up that mere ten-foot rise.

  As I struggled in place, a freckle-faced redheaded boy of about fourteen jumped up from his lunch and ran over to help me. With him pushing and me pulling, we got the cart up to level ground. “Good boy, Cody!” sang out an elder in the Parowan stake.

  “Thanks, Cody,” I said, sweat pouring down my face as I shook the lad’s hand. But then I was surprised to see that the boy’s nametag read “Ephraim Hanks.” Was he Cody or Ephraim? It took me a moment to remember the lone 1856 scout who had brought the buffalo meat to the starving Martin Saints. A sister at the handcart headquarters had told me that modern-day pilgrims often assume the identity of figures from the 1856 pageant. What Mormon boy could resist the temptation to play Ephraim Hanks on the Sweetwater?

  I trudged on along the south bank. Here there was no gravel road, but only a sandy track, and the going was correspondingly tougher. On a last twenty-foot rise, I could proceed only by unloading my cart, pulling it empty up the slope, then returning for my duffel bag and backpack.

  By the time I reached the visitors’ center I was, in the modern epithet, “wasted,” and my arms and thighs would ache for several days. Thanks to my timid loop, however, the handcart emigration had become shockingly real. With a cart far superior to the rickety, poorly lubricated vehicle of 1856, I had covered precisely 1/394th of the journey the successful Martin and Willie Saints had accomplished a century and a half before me.

  A YEAR LATER, ONCE again in August, I made my second trip to the Mormon Handcart Visitors’ Center. I had had enough of handcart-hauling: this time I simply hiked from the headquarters to the station below Martin’s Cove. I had hoped to fall in with some party of modern-day Mormon pilgrims, rather than lurk on the periphery like a voyeur, as I had in 2005 with the Lehi stake. I was in luck: a small group of eleven women and two men from West Valley, a Salt Lake suburb, promptly welcomed me into their midst.

  Each had chosen a pioneer to impersonate. In some cases, the present-day Saints had ancestors who had come across the plains, either by wagon or by handcart. Thus Trish Wade was calling herself Minerva Wade, after an ancestor whose mother, as she lay dying in Florence, had made her promise to go on to Zion so that someone in the family would complete the gathering. Minerva, according to Trish, had also had the distinction of marrying Bill Hickman, the notorious Danite who late in life had dictated his memoir, Brigham’s Destroying Angel. Others had no such ancestors, so they chose whatever personae they wished among the real pilgrims of the 1850s.

  The day before, the West Valley group had pulled their handcarts three miles to the visitors’ center campground on Cherry Creek. There, around the campfire, they had told the tales of the pioneers whose identities they had assumed.

  The West Valley women were only too glad to explicate for me the period clothing they were wearing. Their colorful blouses were made of calico, their long ruffled skirts and aprons of cotton (“It was considered immoral to show your ankles,” one woman giggled). T
hey were further garbed with bonnets, shawls, and bandannas. Despite a temperature in the high 80s, the day before one sister had worn two skirts, to get into the spirit of the exigencies the seventeen-pound handcart limit had imposed. The only discordant note in the women’s apparel was the Nikes and Adidases that peeked out from below the hems of their skirts. (The handcarts likewise carried the anachronistic freight of box lunches and coolers filled with Gatorade.)

  We hiked together up to the Lower Cove, a way station on the path to the scene of the grim vigil of 1856. There a husband-and-wife team of missionaries, Elder and Sister Schlappi, outlined the history of Martin’s Cove (with which by now the thirteen members of the West Valley ward were thoroughly conversant). “In April,” said Elder Schlappi, almost jovially, “the Sweetwater runs five feet deep. We still do baptisms in the river. It’s quite an experience for an eight-year-old to be baptized in Martin’s Cove.”

  The elder’s tone modulated. “This is the Lower Cove. This is one of the most touching spots for me.” Suddenly he could not go on, as he fought down tears.

  A West Valley woman intervened, asking to lead a prayer. As everyone but me knelt, in a soft voice she thanked the Lord “for all that was sacrificed here on our behalf.” Elder Schlappi recovered, and recited the canonic myths about the place: that no one had ever seen a snowstorm strike western Wyoming as early as October 19, how the three young men had sacrificed their health by carrying the Saints across the Sweetwater.

  Sister Schlappi took over. “The amazing miracle,” she averred, “is that anybody in the Martin Company made it from the last crossing of the Platte to Martin’s Cove.

  “This is sacred ground,” she continued, “hallowed by the pioneers. The Spirit will speak to you, if you listen. Open your heart, and the Spirit will speak to you.”

  After a closing prayer, we moved on to the Upper Cove, where I had eavesdropped on the Lehi stake the summer before. Here another docent, Elder Harper, reeled out anecdotes from the Martin party that by now were familiar tales to me—about the tent collapsing on Peter McBride and keeping him warm, about young George Housley, who wanted only to die. “‘Young man, go cut me down three trees!’” Elder Harper dramatized an order from one of the leaders of the Martin Company. “Later, George said, ‘That man saved my life.’” At this point, Elder Harper collapsed in a fit of weeping.

  Without missing a beat, Harper’s wife took up the baton. “I get to tell a love story,” she announced almost smugly, and I knew the oft-told tale that was about to ensue. In The Price We Paid, Andrew Olsen succinctly summarizes the story:

  Sarah Franks and George Padley were engaged when they left England and planned to be married when they arrived in Salt Lake City and raise their family in Zion. George died at Martin’s Cove, however, and Sarah was extremely ill and weak even before the grief she felt in George’s death.

  Sarah survived the journey but had no relatives or friends to meet her.

  Now Sister Harper added some embellishments. “Sarah couldn’t bear the thought of the wolves getting to George. They hung his body from a tree to keep it from the wolves. Sarah left her shawl with her fiancé.

  “The rescue party later went back and got it. It’s said that the family still owns a piece of that shawl.”

  I felt uncomfortable witnessing these tableaux of piety and romance: the temptation was to retreat into cynical resistance. But the deep emotion Martin’s Cove elicited from these devout Saints moved me, despite my own agnostic distance.

  Later, back at the picnic tables beside the visitors’ station over lunch, Marsha Herbert, one of the West Valley pilgrims, told me her ancestral tale. Her great-great-grandparents were David and Jane Bowen, members of the Hunt wagon company, which had trailed the Martin Company all the way to Zion. And yet, according to Herbert, their inclusion in that party was “a blessing in disguise.”

  “They had planned to come to Zion two years earlier,” Herbert told me. “But as they got off the ship in New York harbor, David dropped his money bag accidentally into the sea. It was all he had. He had to work for two years in Pennsylvania to earn enough money for the trek. But Jane was extremely weak when she arrived in the New World, and later she gave birth. Their one-year-old came across with the Hunt Company. Two years earlier, Jane probably wouldn’t have made it.”

  David Bowen (thirty-three), Jane Bowen (thirty-six), and John Bowen (one) are indeed listed in the official roster of the Hunt Company in the LDS Archives. But no anecdotes or reminiscences are linked to their names.

  “Is that story in the Archives?” I asked Herbert.

  “No.”

  “How did you learn it, then?”

  “It came down in the family,” she replied. “My grandmother had a copy, parts of which were in David Bowen’s handwriting. I typed the story out from her copy.”

  When I had first launched my research for this book, I had fantasized about crisscrossing Utah soliciting unpublished, uncollected memoirs from the handcart pioneers. It had not taken me long to realize what an impossible task that would prove. Yet, as rich as the archival record is in Salt Lake City, there surely remain untold further riches squirreled away in attics such as Marsha Herbert’s.

  A little later, though, one of the West Valley women repeated the story about the three eighteen-year-olds carrying the Saints across the Sweetwater. I could not bite my tongue. “You know, that’s a myth,” I blurted out. “Chad Orton has written a paper that completely debunks the story. It didn’t happen.”

  This was not welcome news to the West Valley ward. An awkward silence ensued, as I began to feel like a drunken guest at a party who has just committed some unforgivable faux pas.

  “How do we know what’s really the truth?” asked Trish Ward, in conciliatory tones. I started to utter some piety of my own about relying on authentic primary sources, but instead, a young woman who had previously spoken not a word mused out loud, “Maybe we could pray.”

  THE MORMON HANDCART Visitors’ Center stands about thirty miles west of the small town of Alcova, on State Highway 220. The road is not heavily traveled, although it serves as the truck route for rigs barreling between Rawlins and Casper. After bidding goodbye to the West Valley ward, I got back on the highway and headed west. At Muddy Gap, where a lone gas station (the only one for miles around) marks the junction with U.S. Highway 287, I took the northwest fork, still following the Sweetwater toward its headwaters below South Pass. The ambitiously named Jeffrey City proved a ghost town of some six or eight derelict buildings.

  Low ridges with granite outcrops and swaths of forest marched along on either side of the Sweetwater basin. On my left, a small herd of antelope bounded with consummate grace across the grassland, as if racing my rental car. There was no shaking the perception that this was one of the most beautiful places in Wyoming. A perfect August day was interfering with my attempt to see the Mormon Trail as the gauntlet of suffering and death it had proved in 1856.

  About ten miles west of Jeffrey City, I stopped at the Ice Slough. It was here, on October 19, 1856, in the middle of the snowstorm, that the Willie Company had been met by the advance rescue team of Young, Wheelock, Taylor, and Garr. The roadside sign, however, made no allusion to that propitious rendezvous, restricting its information to the fact that Oregon Trail emigrants counted on the slough for fresh water even in the heat of summer.

  Nine miles farther west, I came to the Sixth Crossing. It was here that the Willie Company, buoyed by the arrival of the quartet from the Valley, camped as they prepared for their hardest day of all—the storm-lashed ascent of Rocky Ridge. Back at the Handcart Visitors’ Center, Elder Hadley had told me that more vigorous modern pilgrims than those who loop the 3.3-mile trail to Martin’s Cove and back pull handcarts over Rocky Ridge, taking two days to cover the twenty-eight miles between the Sixth Crossing and Rock Creek Hollow, where the Willie Company had met up with the main rescue party led by George Grant.

  In recent years, the church has built another (much
smaller) visitors’ center at the Sixth Crossing, just off Highway 287. A small flotilla of handcarts rested in a yard behind the tiny museum. I parked and read the plaque out front, which proclaimed in part about the Willie Saints,

  With much faith in each footstep, they struggled on through thick dust, mud, and snow…. Bound together in faith and with tears of joy and sorrow, mothers, daughters, and sisters worked together for one cause and one purpose. They walked on, enduring one of the most tragic, yet most heroic events of the pioneers going west. They left a treasured legacy to their descendants.

  Inside the museum, I perused a replica of an 1856 handcart (significantly smaller and frailer than the ones parked out back), another display case holding a day’s ration of flour, and a case that laid out a typical handcart woman’s seventeen pounds of belongings: besides clothing and a blanket, a dish, cup, fork, spoon, and knife; a button case, with thread and thimble; and a Bible.

  It was hard for me to concentrate on these artifacts, however, because the docent assigned to the place, having seized on her first visitor of the day, was oozing with inspirational chatter. As she started from scratch to explain the significance of the Sixth Crossing, I tried to let her know that I was familiar with the story, but failed to stanch the flow of her spiel. I noticed that her nametag read “Sister Willie.” Was she related, then, to the captain of the ill-fated fourth handcart company? Yes, she said proudly, a direct descendant by marriage. Then on she chattered: Wasn’t it inspiring to stand here where—?