DURING MY TWO August forays in western Wyoming, the weather had been sublime. It had thus been almost impossible to plunge into an empathic appreciation of what the trail had been like for the played-out Saints in the snows of October and November 1856. Finally I decided to take three days to traverse the trail from Salt Lake City to eastern Wyoming in early February 2007, retracing by automobile in reverse the latter half of the Martin and Willie Companies’ journey, and also seeking out those odd locales where the dire and momentous events of a century and a half before were commemorated by no plaques or visitors’ centers.
My trip began at This Is the Place Heritage Park, on the northeastern outskirts of Salt Lake. The spacious grounds, crowning a low hill, enclose a splendid replica of the city as it looked during the early years, wide dirt streets, wooden sidewalks, quaint clapboard shops, and all. The park—named after the most famous pronouncement Brigham never uttered—is dominated by a sixty-foot-tall pylon atop which the Prophet stands flanked by his two faithful Apostles, Heber C. Kimball and Wilford Woodruff. Nearby, of far humbler stature, yet another handcart sculpture strikes its poignant and heroic pose, annotated by a plaque derived from Hafen and Hafen’s Handcarts to Zion detailing the statistics from the handcart companies. I was amused also to find a latter-day attempt at PC rehabilitation of the Lamanites: a statue of the great Shoshone chief Washakie, with the legend: “Known all over the western country as one of the most intelligent and able of the Indian chiefs…. Sometimes referred to as the ‘George Washington’ of the western tribesmen.”
Heading up Emigration Canyon into the Wasatch Mountains, I found the road, which I had twice driven in summer, closed on account of winter snows. I was forced to resort to the soulless detour of Interstate 80. I pulled off at the Castle Rock Observation Point and surveyed Echo Canyon below me. Somewhere near here, on November 26, 1856, Echo Squires had been born, in what the Martin Saints regarded as one of the last miracles along the home stretch of their journey.
The canyon is a dreary place today. Under a leaden sky, I surveyed the semi–ghost town of Castle Rock below me and the grim railroad workers’ camp, first established as part of the effort to push the transcontinental track toward the golden spike that would revolutionize westward emigration after 1869. The birthplace of Echo Squires, who would live to the age of eighty-seven, is annotated by no roadside sign.
Six miles on from Castle Rock, I crossed the Wyoming border. For the fifth or sixth time, I stopped at Fort Bridger, which has been superbly reconstructed as a Wyoming historic monument. A reconstructed stockade, authentic to the last detail, stands near where the original was built, the foundations of which are gradually emerging from the ground in an ongoing archaeological dig.
The trading post was erected by the great mountain man Jim Bridger in 1843. Four years later, Brigham Young’s pioneer company passed through. The Prophet pumped Bridger for all that he knew about the Great Basin to the southwest, but from that first meeting on, bad blood coursed between these haughty antagonists. In 1853, Young sent a party of armed men, some of them Danites, to arrest Bridger, ostensibly for inciting the Utes against the Mormons. The mountain man feared very few enemies, but rather than shoot it out with the Saints, he went into hiding in the hills. Whereupon the Mormons essentially stole the fort from its founder. Later, Young paid $4,000 to Bridger’s partner, Louis Vasquez, but for the rest of his life, Bridger claimed he had been cheated by the Mormons and never paid anything for the fort.
By the time the handcart Saints passed through, then, Fort Bridger was in Mormon hands. It was to be an important locus both of hope and disappointment—the latter, when Franklin Richards’s promised resupplies never materialized, the former, when the numerous rescue teams that met the Martin Company there at last allowed every Saint to ride on to the Valley in a wagon.
From Fort Bridger, I followed Interstate 80 east toward Rock Springs, but turned off north on U.S. Highway 30 to visit the town of Granger. The little hamlet (population 125) seems all but forgotten by history, but the site, at the junction of Blacks Fork and Hams Fork (which combine as a western tributary of the Green River), was once an important place. An orgiastic mountain man rendezvous took place here in 1834, the celebrants including such luminaries as Jim Bridger and Kit Carson. And a carefully researched guidebook informed me that both the Willie and Martin Companies had camped here in 1856. No monument in Granger records those one-night layovers, but the gentle river bottom must have seemed a refuge after the rigors of crossing South Pass and ferrying across the Green River.
Oddly enough, that same guidebook cannot identify with certainty where the last two handcart companies crossed the Green River. To get a feeling for that pivotal step westward, I made my way along State Highway 28 to its bridge over the river, in the middle of the Seedsakee National Wildlife Refuge. Here, we do know, the first two handcart parties, under Captains Ellsworth and McArthur, crossed the Green at what was then called the Lombard Ferry. For the impoverished Saints, the charge levied by the mercenary ferrymen—from $3 to $16 per wagon—must have been hard to bear.
My February outing was at last paying empathic dividends. I stood on the west bank of the river, shivering in a stiff wind at 36 degrees. A few ducks gliding on the current advertised the wildlife refuge, but cakes of ice floating downstream conjured up the ordeal of the November fords of the Sweetwater that the Martin Company had been forced to perform.
I crossed South Pass and rejoined U.S. Highway 287 south of Lander. The Sixth Crossing visitors’ center was closed for the winter. At the Ice Slough, I saw generous pans of ice peeping through the grasses. The Handcart Visitors’ Center stays open year-round, but on this chilly day—the wind up to forty miles an hour, the temperature in the low 40s—I was only the fourth visitor of the day. Remembering the throngs of the previous two Augusts, I found a quiet delight in the emptiness of the place. “We had eight visitors yesterday,” the elder on duty told me. “But not a single one on the four days before that.” I didn’t bother hiking the trail up to Martin’s Cove.
East beyond Devil’s Gate, the trail was new to me. On my second afternoon, I stopped beneath the Red Buttes, on the Bessemer Bend of the North Platte. Here the Martin Saints had been marooned for ten terrible days and nights, as they began to give up hope. And here, Joseph Young had ridden into sight on his white mule, with his two companions—the vanguard of the rescue effort that got the company moving again. Even in winter, the river bottom looked like a nice place to camp, nestled in a cottonwood grove, with the ruddy buttes to the south catching the golden light of late afternoon. Once again, no sign or plaque signaled the ordeal of 1856.
I pushed on and by dusk reached Casper, where I rented a motel room. In the morning, there was frost coating every vacant lot, and the temperature was a raw 24 degrees under an overcast sky. I had hoped to find the site of the desperate Martin Company ford of the North Platte, the one narrated so vividly years later by Patience Loader. Gradually I realized that the ford lay today smack in the middle of downtown Casper.
From Casper east for some eighty miles, Interstate 25 follows the Mormon Trail along the North Platte. Careening along at seventy miles an hour, I stared at the bleak, treeless landscape on either side. I turned off at Exit 165 and trundled two miles north into the town of Glenrock. This middling burg (population 2,200) sports a welcome sign boasting “Big enough to enjoy—small enough to care.”
At Glenrock, Deer Creek flows into the Platte from the south. The cozy, tree-lined basin that enfolds the town today makes it evident why this had been one of the favorite campsites for the pioneers, as the shelter, abundant firewood, and clear drinking water afforded a welcome respite from the agoraphobic emptiness of the plains. It was here that the first two handcart companies, under Edmund Ellsworth and Daniel McArthur, had been overjoyed to meet the resupply wagons from the Valley. But it was also here, on October 17, that the Martin Company had made its desperate and ultimately foolhardy decision to burn its “excess�
� baggage and reduce the handcart load to ten pounds per adult.
In the center of town stands diminutive Deer Creek Station Historic Monument. The signage, however, says nothing about the handcart parties, choosing instead to celebrate a trading post and saloon established in 1857 by former mountain man Joseph Bissonette and a Pony Express station built a few years later.
I pushed on past Douglas and the Glendo Reservoir, then left Interstate 25 to branch east on U.S. Highway 26, which rejoins the Platte at Guernsey. South of town, I spent some time surveying the best-preserved trail ruts anywhere along the 1,300 miles between Iowa City and Salt Lake. Here, the wagons inexplicably left the meandering valley bottom to crest a hill where shelves of soft sandstone protrude as bedrock. In places the ruts are shoulder-deep. It seemed unlikely, however, that handcarts had contributed much to the depressions worn by hundreds of heavy wagons rumbling west, not only toward Zion but to Oregon.
Near the trail ruts looms a sandstone bluff called Register Rock, where the finest collection of pioneer inscriptions anywhere along the trail covers two sides of the cliff. The bitter weather continued, with temperatures in the low 20s and that relentless wind out of the west, but I spent an hour walking the base of Register Rock as I struggled to decipher signatures and initials, many eroded almost into illegibility. The earliest date I found was 1850. I discovered only a single 1856 inscription, that left by a pioneer named Caffey—not, so far as I could ascertain, a handcarter.
Eleven miles farther east, I came to Fort Laramie National Historic Site. The wind had picked up, and the reconstructed fort, spread across a bare hill, felt like a Hudson’s Bay outpost in the Arctic. Here I was the only visitor of the day, and my advent seemed to startle Sandra Lowry, the librarian staffing the headquarters.
Historians of the handcart emigration have long wondered whether Fort Laramie might preserve records that could cast a new light on the 1856 campaign—explaining, for instance, why Richards’s promised resupply had failed to materialize, or following up on the subsequent lives of the backouts who had chosen to stay here rather than push on to Zion. Yet none of those scholars had visited the place. Lyndia Carter had made many an inquiry by mail and telephone, only to come up with nothing new—a failure she attributed to bureaucratic confusion, not to the absence of records.
In a few minutes, however, Lowry dashed all my hopes. “We know that the traders kept journals,” she explained. “But the fort today doesn’t have any of their day books or logs. We have no idea what happened to them. Remember that this was a privately owned trading post in 1856.”
From 1867 to 1877, the U.S. Army took over the fort to use as a base in its campaign against the Sioux. Then in 1890, the fort was closed and abandoned.
“The old-timers,” Lowry continued, “reported finding all kinds of stuff here that the army had just walked off and left. A lot of records probably ended up in private hands. When the National Park Service took over in 1937, there was nothing left.”
Lowry helped me identify the only three reconstructed buildings that had stood in 1856. Leaning into the wind, my parka hood closed tight around my face, clutching my notebook clumsily with gloved hands, I made a quick tour of the Magazine (1850), the Trader’s Store (1849), and a prisonlike edifice called Old Bedlam (1849)—the oldest standing building in Wyoming, a sign proclaimed. In 1856, Fort Laramie must have seemed to the handcart pioneers an immensely appealing haven of civilization. I recalled Josiah Rogerson’s wistful evocation of the place: “The comfortable adobe quarters, and the snug and warm log rooms were quite tempting for a winter’s rest, with plenty to eat.”
But on that grim February day, Fort Laramie seemed to me only a forlorn collection of shuttered and locked historic buildings, exposed naked on its hilltop to the lashing west wind. Even the headquarters where Sandra Lowry stood vigil was barely warmed by its potbellied stove. I was glad to get back in my car and crank up the heater.
I could, I supposed, push on across Nebraska and into Iowa. But at Torrington, eight miles from the border, I turned south, with visions in my head of the cozy motel room and the hearty steak dinner that awaited me in Cheyenne. The February traverse of Wyoming had served its purpose. I had gained a minimal but intensely visceral sense of what the trail had been like in the early winter of 1856. And that was enough to make me profoundly glad that I would never go backpacking (let alone crossing the plains) with only seventeen pounds of baggage, that my camp meals would always be richer and more varied than a single pound of flour, and that in my whole life the farthest I would ever pull a handcart was 3.3 miles.
THE PREVIOUS AUGUST, to plumb what I considered the most bizarre and misguided of all the modern responses to the handcart tragedy, I had left the Sweetwater valley of western Wyoming to drive north to the town of Riverton. Here, between 1991 and 1992, had unfolded what the local stake leaders called the Second Rescue.
The campaign, in which virtually every member of the stake, including young children, got passionately caught up, is well documented in Susan Arrington Madsen’s book The Second Rescue (1998). It began with a chance conversation among three Riverton church leaders and a visitor from Salt Lake City, who told them about some groundbreaking new computer technology being developed in the Utah capital that vastly simplified and sped up the process of compiling genealogical information. The computers, the software, and the CD-ROMs were, however, still in the experimental stage.
One of the Riverton counselors, Kim McKinnon, became fascinated by the news. The Riverton stake had two family history centers, but no computers. McKinnon launched a series of appeals to Salt Lake City to get Riverton on the waiting list for the requisite equipment and software. For two months, he received no response. Frustrated, he took a day off work to drive to Salt Lake—twelve hours round-trip—and plead his case in person. “We really need those computers!” McKinnon exhorted the head of the Church Purchasing Department. As Madsen writes, “Two weeks later, on April 24, 1991, two computers, two printers, and two full sets of family history CDs arrived in Riverton.” McKinnon was told that they were the only family history systems operating outside of northern Utah.
Greatly excited, McKinnon set up the systems, one in the library in Riverton, the other in nearby Lander (part of the Riverton stake). But as he drove one evening with stake president Scott Lorimer toward Fort Washakie on the Wind River Reservation, McKinnon began to muse out loud. “Why have I felt so pushed about obtaining these computers? Why the great sense of urgency?”
President Lorimer did not at first answer. Then, suddenly, he burst out, “It’s the Willie people!”
“What?” replied McKinnon. “What made you think of them?”
“That’s why we have the computers. Their temple work has not been done.”
Growing up in Casper, Lorimer had heard stories told by his mother about the handcart exodus, for her Danish grandfather had been a member of the McArthur Company. In 1977, Lorimer had first visited Rock Creek Hollow, where the 1933 monument commemorates the fifteen Willie Company Saints who had died there on the night of October 23–24, 1856. He had been deeply moved by the visit.
What Lorimer now meant by his revelatory outburst during that evening drive toward Fort Washakie depends on a complicated and (to outsiders) arcane Mormon doctrine, called “baptism for the dead.” As theologian Bruce R. McConkie explains it, “The Lord has ordained baptism for the dead as the means whereby all his worthy children of all ages can become heirs of salvation in his kingdom.” McConkie elaborates:
Obviously, during the frequent periods of apostate darkness when the gospel light does not shine, and also in those geographical areas where legal administrators are not found, hosts of people live and die without ever entering in at the gate of baptism so as to be on the path leading to eternal life. For them a just God has ordained baptism for the dead, a vicarious-proxy labor.
The sudden, alarming insight Lorimer had in the car that April night was that the Saints who had died in the Willie Company,
working-class poor from Britain and Scandinavia, might never have been baptized into the LDS church. McKinnon’s obsession with the computers must have been a divine urging to the Riverton stake to rectify the problem.
To enter heaven, a Saint must have performed a series of what are called temple ordinances. These rituals, which include “washings, anointings, endowments, sealings,” and the like, “pertain to exaltation within the celestial kingdom.”
In Riverton, during two separate visits, I met with Lorimer and McKinnon, and with the current president of the stake, Lloyd Larsen. As Larsen explained to me the plight of the unbaptized handcart Saints, “These folks who died without ordinances are in Paradise waiting, but they can’t progress. We feel a great responsibility to seek out kindred dead, and vicariously do the work for them. That work can only be done in the temple.”
In other words, a living Saint could stand in as “proxy” for the unbaptized dead, even a century and a half later, and perform the ordinances for him or her, ushering the lost soul into the celestial kingdom. But to perform baptism for the dead, a certain list of facts had to be ascertained. As Larsen told me, “We need the birth date, where the person was born, if he or she was married, if he or she had children, and where and when he or she died.”
Whence the computers and their software, with their power to ferret out the most obscure and far-flung genealogical data. In 1991, Lorimer and McKinnon put the stake to work researching the handcart victims, starting with the fifteen who had died at Rock Creek Hollow. This was no easy task, given how poor the records were (and are) of the thousands of Saints in the 1856 migration, how complete rosters of the five parties will never be compiled. But the stake was soon swept up in its messianic mission. Each Riverton Saint was assigned a handcart pioneer. A record form was drafted, with blanks to be filled in for everything from “Name, Last” to “Year of Birth” to “Sealed to Spouse” to “Baptism: Date” to “Research Date Completed.”
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