Jones recounts the ensuing showdown as a classic dime-novel drama, with his allies stationed inside the fort, their rifles cocked and aimed through “port holes” in its walls, as he himself faces down the angry leader of the apostate throng. “We have been here all winter eating poor beef and raw hide to take care of these goods,” Jones tells the leader. “We have had but little fun, and would just as soon have some now as not…. If you think you can take the fort just try it. But I don’t think you can take me to commence with; and the first one that offers any violence to me is a dead man.”
Jones’s bluster does the trick: the apostates back down, and no blood is shed. Whether the disillusioned Saints abandoning Zion ever received their belongings, the chronicler does not say. Jones’s account proves that a sizable number of apostates among the last three 1856 parties turned their backs on Mormonism only months after arriving in Salt Lake City. But it also makes clear another condition of their plight: that on top of their debt to the Perpetual Emigration Fund, the always dollar-conscious Brigham Young expected the handcart pioneers to pay “freight bills” to recover the very belongings the handcart plan itself had made them too weak to carry beyond Devil’s Gate.
Remarkably enough, not one of the twenty “volunteers” perished during their interminable winter at Fort Seminoe. By early summer 1857, they had returned to Salt Lake City. If Jones expected to be greeted as a hero, he was in for a rude shock. In his absence, he learned, “strange stories had been put in circulation about me.” He was “accused of stealing and hiding away thousands of dollars’ worth of goods.” One indignant family went so far as to come to Jones’s house to search for the purportedly stolen belongings. And a “teacher” visited Jones’s wife in Provo, “telling her that she ought to leave me and marry some good man.” Mrs. Jones’s answer: “Well I will not leave Daniel Jones. I cannot better myself, for if he will steal there is not an honest man on earth.”
With these sorts of rumors flying about, Jones felt understandably “stiff” as he had in his first audience with the Prophet. Young asked him if he had left everything in order upon leaving the fort. “I hope I did but do not know,” Jones answered.
“Well, you acted according to my instructions, did you not?”
“I don’t know. I did not get any instructions, and it was pretty hard on me.” Jones then handed the Prophet a “book” in which he had recorded the doings of the twenty men during their near-starvation winter. In front of its author, Young began to read the book. As he did so, he murmured, “This is right; this is right. Well, you seemed to get along all right.”
It was as close to an encomium as Daniel Jones would receive for his heroic job of guarding the emigrant belongings. As he wrote of that day in the Prophet’s office more than thirty years later, “I began to feel pretty good.”
AS MENTIONED EARLIER, even before the last two handcart companies arrived in Salt Lake City, Young launched a strenuous campaign to minimize the disaster. The Prophet himself never publicly reckoned the number of dead in the Willie and Martin parties; instead, he found ingenious ways to imply that the toll was not very high. Thus, speaking in the Tabernacle on November 16, when the Martin Company was limping across Rocky Ridge, still 260 miles and two weeks away from Salt Lake, the Prophet reassured his congregation,
Count the living and the dead, and you will find that not half the number died in br. Willie’s hand-cart company, in proportion to the number in that company, as have died, in past seasons by the cholera in single companies traveling with wagons and oxen…. With regard to those who have died and been laid away by the roadside on the plains, since the cold weather commenced, let me tell you that they have not suffered one hundredth part so much as did our brethren and sisters who have died with the cholera.
And even as he acknowledged the snuffing out of lives in the hand-cart companies, Young painted the most romantic picture possible of death on the Wyoming plains:
Some of those who have died in the hand-cart companies this season, I am told, would be singing and, before the tune was done, would drop over and breathe their last; and others would die while eating, and with a piece of bread in their hands. I should be pleased, when the time comes, if we could all depart from this life as easily as did those our brethren and sisters. I repeat, it will be a happy circumstance, when death overtakes me, if I am privileged to die without a groan or struggle, while yet retaining a good appetite for food. I speak of these things, to forestall indulgence in a misplaced sympathy.
That “misplaced sympathy,” of course, was not so easily squelched, for the streets of Salt Lake were coursing with scuttlebutt about a colossal mismanagement of the handcart migration by the Prophet himself. As noted earlier, Young deflected the blame in his fiery oration of November 2, when he scapegoated Franklin Richards and Daniel Spencer for letting the last two companies leave Florence too late in the season.
It was not only Young who perpetrated the myth that he had long counseled against too late a start from the Missouri River. At the same November 2 meeting, Apostle Jedediah Grant credited both himself and the Prophet with that convenient hindsight-as-foresight:
In relation to hand-cart companies, I have said, and I say it again, that they should start by the first of May, and then they can travel leisurely according their strength and feelings; they can then have May, June, July and August for the accomplishment of their journey….
The grand difficulty with a portion of our immigration this year has been in starting in the forepart of September instead of the first of May….
Br. Brigham has invariably advised early starts, and he gave his reasons for so doing this morning, and I do not wish to reiterate them.
Even as he spoke in the Tabernacle that day, Grant had less than a month to live. On December 1, Young’s “sledgehammer,” the “Mormon Thunder,” the architect of the Reformation, died of pneumonia and/or typhoid, probably contracted by performing one too many baptisms in freezing mountain streams. He was only forty years old.
Within weeks of the arrival of the last emigrants in 1856, the Prophet was baldly asserting the soundness of the handcart plan. In a typical letter, he reassured an official in England, “The Hand Cart scheme of immigrating the poor, is now no longer a problem. But a happy & important reality, we now know that by this mode much time and means can be saved, and the poor more numerously gathered.”
As willfully deaf to the tragedy as such a pronouncement rings, there is no reason to believe that the Prophet was cynically twisting the truth. He sincerely believed that the handcart plan was the solution to the vexing problem of gathering the foreign-born poor to Zion. And to demonstrate the efficacy of that plan, he devised an unnecessary but symbolically freighted exercise. On April 23, 1857, seventy handpicked missionaries set out from Salt Lake City to push and pull handcarts toward Florence. This team, a “Crack Company” if ever there was one, completed the journey in the remarkable span of forty-eight days, averaging almost twenty-two miles a day. Upon the missionaries’ arrival in Florence, the local newspaper proclaimed, “They were feeling fine after their trip and expressed themselves to be on hand for a foot race or wrestling match with any one in Florence who might feel inclined to indulge.”
This return mission has entered Mormon folklore as a vindication of the “divine” handcart plan. LeRoy and Ann Hafen call it “a dramatic and successful demonstration of the efficiency of handcart travel.” Yet, as historian Will Bagley was the first to point out, an eyewitness account of the missionaries’ journey flatly contradicts the Florence newspaper’s jaunty boast. On his own way from Salt Lake City to Chicago, Chauncey Webb overtook the handcart train at Devil’s Gate. Webb had been the master carpenter who had superintended the building of the 1856 hand-carts in Iowa City, and his had been the sole voice arguing against the launching out from Florence of the Martin Company in late August.
The account of Webb’s observation of the missionaries appears in the pages of his daughter’s Wife No. 19, an apost
ate screed so embittered that it may be suspect. But there is no a priori reason to doubt Webb’s assessment of the condition of the handcarters at Devil’s Gate. (Chauncey Webb was still alive when Wife No. 19 was published in 1875. One assumes that he would have objected to a misrepresentation of his testimony on his daughter’s part.)
According to Ann Eliza Young, at Devil’s Gate her father found the handcart missionaries “completely jaded and worn out.”
In truth, they were almost dead from weariness. They travelled slowly, making long stops to rest, and finally they reached the Missouri River in a perfect state of exhaustion. They left their carts there with the utmost willingness…. To this day they all aver they cannot bear to hear the word “Hand-cart” mentioned.
Meanwhile, Young was busy organizing two more handcart expeditions to bring European and British Saints to Zion in the summer of 1857. Eventually they would be complemented by a single handcart train in 1859, and by two more in 1860. In all, then, ten handcart caravans crossed the plains between 1856 and 1860. The fact that none of the subsequent five suffered a major disaster akin to that of the Willie and Martin Companies has solidified the myth, current today among Mormons, that the handcart plan was fundamentally sound and benign. Thus Andrew Olsen, in The Price We Paid, argues that the Willie and Martin catastrophe should not “be seen as an indictment of the hand-cart plan. Three companies before them made the journey successfully, and five companies after them would do the same.”
The diaries and reminiscences of the participants in those last five handcart parties, so assiduously collected in the LDS Archives, tell a different story. They are full of the same kinds of heart-wrenching testimonies to exhaustion and near-starvation as the more oft-quoted Willie and Martin sources. Thus, in the 1857 company led by Israel Evans, Robert Fishburn complained, “We could not help but feel that somebody was at fault for the scanty supply of provisions furnished us.” Of the same expedition, Susan Witbeck remembered forty years later, “There could not have been a more difficult mode of travel. We would push and pull these carts across more than a thousand miles of trackless plains, barren desert, and towering mountains. I knew when I left England that ours was to be an handcart company, but it was impossible for me to realize the hardships I had to meet.”
In the second 1857 company, led by Christian Christiansen, twenty-year-old Kersten Erickson, who left her parents and grandmother behind in Florence, later recalled:
About the fifth day out, I was so worn out pulling over the rough roads—up hills—and through the sand and discouraged because I did not believe that I could stand the journey, and I came to the conclusion that I might as well die there as suffer longer—and I was lonely for I had no relatives in the company.
So I purposely staid behind while the company were travelling and laid down in the grass expecting to die there.
Captain Christiansen discovered the young woman and rallied her to continue the journey.
There is good evidence that the death toll among the last five hand-cart expeditions has been seriously undercounted by Mormon historians. Andrew Olsen asserts, “In those five companies, totaling 1,071 people, only 12 deaths were recorded.” Hafen and Hafen list the death toll in the Israel Evans Company as “(?).” Annotating the Christian Christiansen party, the Hafens claim “6 (?)” deaths.
The Christiansen expedition is the most sketchily documented among all ten handcart companies, largely because most of its members were Scandinavian. Yet two participants in the party later swore that “One tenth of the company died for want of care and nourishment.” Since 330 emigrants set out from Iowa City in the Christiansen Company, that rate of attrition would put the death toll in the vicinity of thirty-three—not “6 (?).”
Will Bagley calculates the death rate among all ten handcart companies at 10 percent, versus a rate of 4 percent among all Mormon wagon companies. His characteristically acerbic conclusion: “There were more than two handcart disasters: there were ten handcart disasters, plus the comedy that the handcart missionaries staged in the spring of 1857.”
THE CHRISTIANSEN COMPANY arrived in Salt Lake City on September 13. Two days earlier, the Evans Company had come in. And on that very day, September 11, 1857, an unfathomable tragedy befell another emigrant party, camped in a high basin 280 miles southwest of the capital.
That party, made up of some 140 men, women, and children, was not made up of Mormons but of Gentiles, most of them hailing from Arkansas. They had passed through Utah along the Mormon and old Spanish Trails, en route to California, where they hoped to begin new lives. Some accounts have them trading insults with the Mormons as they traversed the territory, but no violence had yet broken out.
On September 6, the Baker-Fancher party (named after its leaders) had stopped to camp in a lush, well-watered valley bottom known today as Mountain Meadows. The emigrants were some forty miles beyond Cedar City, the southwesternmost Mormon settlement in the Utah Territory, and the simmering tensions between themselves and the hostile and suspicious Saints whose villages they had passed through seemed to have diffused. The party anticipated a peaceful journey onward to California.
As the emigrants gathered for breakfast, a shot broke the tranquil scene, and one of the children collapsed, struck by a bullet. Assuming they were being attacked by Indians—the emigrants caught glimpses of dark-skinned gunmen wearing war paint—the Baker-Fancher party quickly circled its wagons and returned fire.
So began a five-day siege. The attackers probably included Paiutes, but they were organized and led by Mormons who had dressed up as Indians and painted their faces. The Arkansans defended themselves well, and the siege dwindled into a stalemate. On September 11, a Mormon hoisting a white flag warily approached the makeshift wagon fortress. He told the leaders of the besieged party that the Mormons had interceded with the Indians, and would now guarantee the emigrants safe passage out of Mountain Meadows, if the Arkansans would turn over their guns.
The women and children were led away from the camp first, followed by the Baker-Fancher men, each guarded by an armed Saint. Half an hour into this procession, Major John Higbee, on horseback, fired his rifle, then uttered the command, “Halt! Do your duty!”
In a matter of seconds, every man in the Baker-Fancher party was gunned down from point-blank range. The women and older children were slaughtered with guns, knives, and gunstocks used as clubs. Only seventeen were spared, all of them children five years old or younger, under the presumption that they would not remember enough of the carnage to testify credibly against its perpetrators.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre—a depredation unmatched before or since in Western annals—remains all but inexplicable today. What was the motive? Theories range from simple greed (the Arkansans had a thousand head of livestock, as well as handsome wagons full of valuable possessions) to an apocalyptic spasm of the mass paranoia first engendered by the Reformation. By September 1857, hatred of Gentiles had reached a new pitch in the Utah Territory, whose inhabitants lived with the nagging fear that Zion was about to be invaded by federal troops. Such a denouement indeed unfolded during the coming winter, as President James Buchanan sent 2,500 soldiers west to Fort Bridger, in the opening act of what would eventually become the relatively bloodless Utah War.
And who commanded the massacre? Both then and now, suspicion fell on the Prophet himself. Whether or not Brigham Young ordered the carnage, there is no doubt that he covered it up and hindered federal investigations into it. Only one participant was ever tried and executed for the massacre, and that only twenty years later, as John D. Lee, stepson of Young and one of his most reliable lieutenants, stood before a firing squad and took the bullets that scapegoated him as the alleged mastermind of the massacre.
The first comprehensive account of this dark episode was published in 1950, as The Mountain Meadows Massacre, by Mormon historian Juanita Brooks. In 2002, that treatise was superseded by Will Bagley’s definitive Blood of the Prophets. Bagley labors to demonstrate that
Young himself commanded the slaughter, but if so, the Prophet was careful not to leave behind a smoking gun. Still, Blood of the Prophets amasses a powerful circumstantial case against Brigham Young. The book is so disturbing to the faithful that during the last five years, a triumvirate of high church officials has spent millions of dollars and collected bookshelves full of “evidence” in support of a book intended to refute Bagley at every turn.
FOR THE MODERN student of the handcart exodus, a striking feature of its written legacy is the paucity of later reflection upon or analysis of the experience by the Saints who survived. To be sure, the average working-class Danish or Scottish convert was perhaps not temperamentally inclined to such reflection, or if he or she was, it did not issue in written form.
Once they arrived in Salt Lake City, the veterans from the Willie and Martin Companies seemed only to want to get on with their lives. Patience Loader, otherwise so vivid a memoirist, recounts her first days in Salt Lake as a forlorn business, as her extended family was broken up so that various residents could take in its members as boarders. Within a few weeks she found work in her old occupation as seamstress. Not once in “Reccolections of past days” does Patience stop to ask herself whether the whole desperate journey had been worth it.
Levi Savage, who had faithfully kept his journal from the start of the trek through October 25, when he grew too exhausted to continue writing, appended a final entry after his company’s arrival in the capital. The last line reports, “We overtook Bro Smoot’s Com. in emegration, in the a.m. that afternoon arrived in G.S.L. City, deposited the people among the Saints w[h]ere they were made comfortable.”
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