Devil's Gate

by David Roberts

  The work went on nonstop for fourteen months. When enough facts became known about the unbaptized pilgrim, his or her proxy was ready to perform the necessary temple ordinances. Riverton has no temple, so the ceremonies had to be performed in Ogden, Utah. The details of those rituals are not readily disclosed to Gentiles, although Lorimer assured me, “The ordinances are not secret, but sacred. They have to do with being sealed for eternity. The endowments allow you to go through the veil. This life is a progression. We have the potential to be where God is, even to be like Him. As Christ on the Cross said to the thief, ‘Tomorrow I’ll be with you in Paradise.’”

  By the end of this orgy of effort, some 4,200 temple ordinances had been vicariously performed. The scope had expanded from the Willie Company to the Martin Company, the rescuers, and the families of all of the above. Lloyd Larsen told me, “I would say we rescued 97 percent [of the unbaptized Saints involved in the handcart campaign].”

  Madsen’s The Second Rescue contains a chapter titled “Testimonials.” It reproduces drawings of handcarts pulled by pioneers executed by Riverton kids as young as five. The most charming testimonials, of course, are those of youngsters. A good example is that of Heika Lorimer, the president’s eleven-year-old daughter:

  I went to church with just my scriptures but walked out with a huge smile and a packet with James Alfred Peacock’s name written on it. My Dad and I could not find him on the computer so we ordered some microfilm. We searched for a very long time and we did not find him. Just when we were about to stop we both felt that we should keep going. We were both so excited when we finally found him that we both let out a big happy yell.

  Twelve-year-old Kristen Gard wrote:

  The youth got to go to the temple and got baptized for the dead. The spirits of the pioneers were really strong and encouraging. Once we got out of the temple their spirits seemed to evaporate. I wanted to go back into the temple.

  Before traveling to Riverton, I was aware that the LDS archivists in Salt Lake took a fairly dim view of the Second Rescue. Lyndia Carter was even more blunt. “The Riverton folks are very sincere. From inside their culture, the Second Rescue makes sense. The whole effort was very unifying for the stake. But I went through all their records. Their documentation is very poor. I have to dismiss a lot of their history.”

  I was also aware that, in the name of baptism for the dead, Mormons had enraged Jewish groups by performing temple ordinances for victims of the Holocaust, without bothering to ask the families of those who had died at Dachau and Auschwitz whether their martyred relatives wanted to spend eternity in the heaven of the Latter-day Saints.

  Before arriving in Riverton, I had told Lorimer and McKinnon that I was not a member of the church. In view of my skepticism, I thought it was gracious of them to meet with me. And it was obvious that both men were thoroughly used to the incredulity that the Second Rescue tends to provoke in nonbelievers.

  Toward the end of our interview, Lorimer acknowledged the doubters. “Some people get upset about all this,” he admitted. “But for us it’s a gift. We don’t have to fake it.” He paused as he peered deeply into my agnostic eyes, then said softly, “And what if we’re right?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  A DAY OF RECKONING

  On November 9, 1856, George Grant’s rescue party had finally gotten the Martin Company moving again. As the Saints staggered westward from the death trap of Martin’s Cove, they left behind, in the ruins of Fort Seminoe, the twenty “volunteers” appointed to guard the goods of the Martin, Hunt, and Hodgetts parties through the long winter.

  That we know much at all about the experience of those twenty men during their perilous wintering over is thanks almost exclusively to Daniel Jones’s lively memoir, Forty Years Among the Indians. And given the details of that vigil, it is not surprising that Jones waited until after Brigham Young’s death to tell his story, publishing only in 1890.

  Early on, Jones was voted by his peers to be one of three leaders of the band. If his memoir is not unduly self-serving, the former mountain man also emerged as the sturdiest and most useful member of the entourage. Given the scarcity of provisions that November near Devil’s Gate, that men were expected to perform such a desperate service is testimony to what a premium the church put on material possessions—an emphasis that trickled down from Young himself.

  According to Jones,

  Captain Grant asked about our provisions. I told him they were scant, but as many [among the handcart emigrants] were suffering and some dying, all we asked was an equal chance with the rest. He told us there would be a lot of worn out cattle left; to gather them up and try to save them.

  Scant indeed:

  On taking stock of provisions, we found about twenty day’s rations. No salt or bread excepting a few crackers. There was at least five months of winter before us and nothing much to eat but a few perishing cattle and what game we might chance to kill. The game was not very certain, as the severe storms had driven everything away.

  During the first few days after the Martin Company left its cove, Jones rode out to see how the Saints were faring, and he witnessed “deaths occurring often” along the trail. Back at the fort after the first such foray, he offered his fellow volunteers the chance to back out. (Whether this option was sanctioned by Grant, Jones does not say.)

  I told them in plain words that if there was a man in camp who could not help eat the last poor animal left with us, hides and all, suffer all manner of privations, almost starve to death, that he could go with me the next day and overtake the trains. No one wanted to go. All voted to take their chances.

  Finally Jones had to sever his tenuous connection with the Martin Saints whom he had helped to save. As he later wrote, “I left the company feeling a little downcast, to return to Devil’s Gate. It was pretty well understood that there would be no relief sent us.”

  Grant’s advice to the volunteers to live off the “worn out” cattle left behind by the emigrants would prove far too sanguine. The hope of Jones’s men to get the cattle “on good feed and recruit them a little” was dashed in the first few days. Some two hundred dead cattle strewed the trail for a day’s march either side of Fort Seminoe, and their carcasses emboldened the wolves to a terrible ferocity. These predators came right into camp and killed twenty-five living but emaciated cows within the first week. Remembered Jones, “In fact, it became dangerous to face these wolves, they were at times almost ready to attack men.”

  The only solution was to slaughter the last fifty living cattle before the wolves could devour them. As Jones wryly put it, “We killed them to keep them from dying.” One of the charms of Forty Years Among the Indians is a certain Bunyanesque irony, a tone that had become the stock-in-trade for the yarn-spinning mountain men who had met and wildly celebrated at the yearly mountain men rendezvous between 1825 and 1840. Thus:

  We had a first-class butcher from London, who dressed everything in the best style. Everything was saved that we thought might be eaten. We hung the meat up. The poorest of it we did not expect to eat, but intended to use it for wolf bait…provided we could get traps.

  As Jones had feared, the hunting proved lean. Day after day, men went out looking for wild game, but saw none. Sometime in December, twelve miles away from the fort, Jones felled a buffalo that was charging him with a single shot. So cumbersome was the toil in the snow, the men by then so weakened, that “it took all hands three days to get [the buffalo meat] into camp.” By then, the little store of “bread” had given out, and the men were living on cattle carcasses alone.

  A day or two before Christmas, the men had their first visitors—the indefatigable Ephraim Hanks and Feramorz Little, Brigham Young’s nephew, who were engaged in a mind-boggling two-man effort to carry the mail from the Valley to the eastern settlements in midwinter. They carried a letter written on December 7 by Brigham Young, which addressed the guardians of the cached goods. Jones published the letter in full in Forty Years (as he would not likely have do
ne when the Prophet was still alive).

  It is a rather astonishing document. Micromanaging in his fussiest style, the Prophet offered “suggestions and words of counsel” that the Saints who received the letter took as inflexible orders. “You are in an Indian country,” Young reminded the men, from a distance of 330 miles, “few in number, blockaded by the snows, and far from assistance at this season of the year.” Therefore it was vital to be “constantly on the alert, to be firm, steady, sober-minded and sober-bodied, united, faithful, and watchful, living your religion.” (One wonders what the men at Fort Seminoe would have drunk had they felt the temptation to lapse from a sober-bodied state.) More particularly,

  Do not go from your fort in small parties of one, two or three at a time. But when game is to be sought, wood got up, or any other operation to be performed requiring you to travel from under the protection of the fort guns, go in bands of some ten or twelve together, and let them be well armed; and let those who stay by the stuff be watchful while their comrades are out. And at all times and under all circumstances let every person have his arms and ammunitions ready for active service at a moment’s warning, so you cannot be surprised by your foes nor in any way taken advantage of.

  Brigham’s fears of Indian attack are curious. As he must have known by December 7, among the thousands of far more vulnerable handcart emigrants who had crossed the plains that year, not one had been assaulted by Indians. The “stuff” cached at Seminoe might have been a tempting target for raiders, but it had never been the indigenous nomads’ style—whether Sioux, Cheyenne, Ute, or Shoshone—to attack a fort guarded by well-armed men.

  On with the counsel, in the tone of a sergeant addressing raw recruits: “Always have plenty of water about the buildings, and be very careful about fires…. You had better kill some of the cattle than run much risk in quest of game…. Try to so ration out your flour as to have it last until we can send you relief.”

  What flour? Had Grant failed to inform the Prophet about the actual scarcity of the provisions left the men who were wintering over?

  As Jones dared to write in 1890, “From this letter it is plain to see that Brother Brigham was not apprised of our condition.” Yet because it was the Prophet who so addressed them, the men at Fort Seminoe tried to follow his commands to the letter. Though it became absurdly inconvenient to do so, for weeks the men never ventured from the fort in groups of fewer than ten.

  As for “relief,” Young’s promises were vague and even contradictory. “We will send teams to your relief as early as possible in the spring,” he vowed; but they “may not reach you until May, depending somewhat on the winter snows and spring weather.”

  As winter deepened, the hunting grew hopeless: “Game soon became so scarce we could kill nothing.” In a vivid passage laced with self-deprecating humor, Jones evokes the onset of starvation:

  We ate all the poor meat [from the slaughtered cattle]; one would get hungry eating it. Finally that was all gone, nothing now but hides were left. We made a trial of them. A lot was cooked and eaten without any seasoning and it made the whole company sick. Many were so turned against the stuff that it made them sick to think of it.

  We had coffee and some sugar, but drinking coffee seemed to only destroy the appetite, and stimulate for only a little while. One man became delirious from drinking so much of it.

  Things looked dark, for nothing remained but the poor raw hides taken from starved cattle. We asked the Lord to direct us what to do…. We had cooked the hide, after soaking and scraping the hair off until it was soft and then ate it, glue and all. This made it rather inclined to stay with us longer than we desired. Finally I was impressed how to fix the stuff and gave the company advice, telling them how to cook it; for them to scorch and scrape the hair off; this had a tendency to kill and purify the bad taste that scalding gave it. After scraping, boil one hour in plenty of water, throwing the water away which had extracted all the glue, then wash and scrape the hide thoroughly, washing in cold water, then boil to a jelly and let it get cold, and then eat with a little sugar sprinkled on it….

  We asked the Lord to bless our stomachs and adapt them to this food. We hadn’t the faith to ask him to bless the raw-hide for it was “hard stock.”

  In such grim conditions, with nothing to do most of the day but sit and wait, guarding the stored belongings against an enemy who never came, the morale of the men inevitably plunged. Jones only hints at the dissension that broke out among the ranks: “During meeting we became impressed that there were some wrongs existing among the brethren in camp that should be corrected, and that if we would make a general cleaning up, and present our case before the Lord, He would take care of us.”

  By March 4, “the last morsel had been eaten for breakfast.” The men took stock of anything in the fort that could be considered edible. “We were now in a tight place,” writes Jones dryly. “There was a set of harness and an old pack saddle covered with rawhide still on hand, that some of the boys considered safe to depend on for a few days.” The company actually “were getting the pack saddle soaked up ready for cooking,” when a fortuitous event saved them from this extreme measure, with the sudden arrival of a second midwinter express mail team from the Valley, led by the Danite Bill Hickman. “Of course we were rejoiced to see them,” records Jones, “especially so when we learned they had a good supper for us…. I remember about the first thing I did after shaking hands, was to drink a pint of strong salty broth, where some salt pork had been boiled.”

  With mock indignation, Jones refutes the rumor that emerged from this timely arrival of the mail team. “[George] Boyd [a member of the express] always calls me the man that ate the pack saddle. But this is slander. The kindness of him and others prevented me from eating my part of it. I think if they had not arrived, probably I would have taken a wing or leg, but don’t think I would have eaten the whole of it. As it was, the saddle was allowed to dry up again, and may be in existence yet and doing well so far as I know.” (From this jaunty paragraph, Stegner took his chapter title in The Gathering of Zion, “The Man That Ate the Pack Saddle.”)

  The arrival of Hickman’s mail team, however, did not save the faithful cache-guarders from starvation. The crowning irony of that wintering over is that, for all of Young’s warnings to the men to be on guard against Indian attack, in the end it was Indians who saved the twenty men.

  It was not until February that the first Indian arrived at Fort Seminoe. He was a solitary man from the Snake tribe, and one must read between the lines of Jones’s narrative to appreciate the courage born of desperation that allowed this wanderer to approach the outpost guarded by twenty Mormons. He, too, was starving. Out of pity, according to Jones, “Some of the boys hunted up a small piece of raw hide and gave it to him. He said he had eaten it before. None of us were able to talk much with him; we invited him to remain with us over night.” The volunteers were able, however, to glean the information that the main Snake band was camped a day’s travel up the Sweetwater; that their own efforts to hunt had proved fruitless; and that they lived in daily fear of attack by their enemies, the Crows. The next morning, “The Indian went away saying he would tell his people about us, and if they could find any meat they would divide.”

  Jones’s account of the solitary Indian visitor also reminds us that in the nineteenth century (and no doubt in pre-contact times), every winter posed the threat of mass starvation for most if not all of the nomadic tribes ranging across the West. In the weeks to come after the February encounter the peaceful interchange bore dividends, as groups of Snakes and Bannocks dared to approach the fort. And as Jones was the first to admit, the Indians were better hunters with bows and arrows than the Saints were with their rifles. From his mountain man days, he recalled that

  These Indians of the plains years back killed a great many buffalo with arrows. They would stick two arrows into a buffalo’s heart, crossing their direction so that as the buffalo ran these arrows would work and cut his heart almost in
two. This would soon bring the poor brute down; whereas with a single arrow in the heart they would run a long distance.

  By March, the Snakes and Bannocks in the Sweetwater valley had in fact succeeded in killing numerous bison. Now they entered into a wary trade with the strangers ensconced in the decrepit fort. Jones himself organized the barter, weighing each pound of buffalo meat on a scale and establishing its value in nonedible goods. “We exchanged various articles with them, many of the company trading shirts, handkerchiefs and such things as they could spare. We had some coffee, for which the Indians traded readily.” Jones records the purchase of three hundred pounds of buffalo meat on one occasion, of “hundreds of pounds” on another. Thanks to the skill of the Indian hunters, the Fort Seminoe volunteers turned the corner of their starving winter. As Jones admiringly noted, “An Indian will manage to kill game where it is so scarce and wild that but few white men would even see it.”

  Finally, in late spring (Jones does not give a date), with the trail opened up again, the long-awaited relief train arrived—twenty men from the Valley carrying “a ton of flour and other provisions.” These blessed emissaries also brought startling news: that a party of more than fifty apostates fleeing Salt Lake City was close on their heels.

  In the debate about how many of the handcart emigrants later apostatized, this crucial passage in Forty Years Among the Indians seems to have been overlooked by historians. The apostate exodus, Jones makes clear, included quite a number of Saints from the Martin, Hunt, and Hodgetts Companies:

  The goods we were guarding belonged to the last season’s emigrants…. Some of the owners had become dissatisfied with “Mormonism” and were going back to the States. As their goods had not arrived in Salt Lake City, they demanded that they should be delivered at Devil’s Gate. Quite a number settled their freight bills and brought orders for their goods and received them all right. Others refused to settle, but threatened that if the goods were not given up they would take them by force.