The next entry in Savage’s journal (which he would again keep through October 1858) does not appear until January 1, 1857. Neither that brief note nor any subsequent entry contains a single word of judgment on the Willie Company’s ordeal—not even the hint of an “I told you so” in reference to his tearful, prescient, and finally fruitless plea to winter over in Florence rather than risk the snows of Wyoming.
It may well be that for the majority of Saints in the two decimated handcart companies, the experience was too traumatic even to call to mind. Sarah Hancock Beesley, a veteran of the 1859 handcart party, which came through relatively unscathed (Hafen and Hafen list only a single death), was interviewed years later. Before her interrogator could finish the first question, Sarah burst out:
“Don’t ask me anything about that. You should go and talk to Mrs. Lapish. She can tell you all about it…. Those are dreadful stories and I don’t see why we shouldn’t try to forget them. I say ‘Bury them with the dead who died on the plains.’ My children have often tried to get me to write my handcart story but I will not.”
The advent of the Willie and Martin Companies in the capital presented every citizen who greeted them with the most appalling evidence of frostbite suffered by scores of survivors. Even the Prophet could not ignore the ravages inflicted by the cold and snow. On November 30, the day of the Martin Company’s arrival, he preached to his audience in the Tabernacle, “Some you will find with their feet frozen to their ankles; some are frozen to their knees and some have their hands frosted. They want good nursing, and if you do not know how to treat frozen flesh, let me inform you that the same treatment is needed as in a burn, and by pursuing that method you can heal them.”
In his pragmatic way, Young went on:
The afternoon meeting will be omitted, for I wish the sisters to go home and prepare to give those who have just arrived a mouthful of something to eat, and to wash them and nurse them up. You know that I would give more for a dish of pudding and milk, or a baked potato and salt, were I in the situation of those persons who have just come in, than I would for all your prayers, though you were to stay here all the afternoon and pray. Prayer is good, but when baked potatoes and pudding and milk are needed, prayer will not supply their place.
There is no record of the number and severity of amputations performed on the Willie and Martin survivors. The stories that have endured lean toward the miraculous, like the saga of seven-year-old Mary Hurren recorded almost a century later by a descendant. As recounted earlier, George Reeder, greeting his brother-in-law James Hurren, suddenly asked, “What is this odor I can smell?”
“Little Mary’s legs are frozen,” replied James.
Mary was placed on a bed in the Tithing Office and a doctor was sent for. He examined her frozen limbs and said he could do nothing for her as mortification had already set in. He returned the next morning with his instruments expecting to amputate her legs. “She will die easier,” he said.
Her father protested, “This little [girl] didn’t walk a thousand miles to have her legs cut off. If she dies, she will die with her legs on.”
The family was loaded into a wagon and taken to Brigham City (Box Elder). A pioneer nurse, Mrs. Snyder, looked at the limbs and recommended trying fresh raw-beefsteak on them. Fresh meat was not obtainable at Box Elder so her father walked to Ogden and obtained some round steak. This was placed on the frozen parts and in several days the rotten flesh dropped off. They trimmed the sinews and applied a home-made ointment to assist in the healing. She was able to walk again in two years. When she grew up she married Joseph Wight and became the mother of ten children. She was a great nurse in Brigham and surrounding areas.
In the gilding mirror of decades of retrospect, even the horrors of frostbite could be turned into a parable of uplift. The most famous case is that of Nellie Pucell Unthank, whose panegyrist was the same William Palmer who remembered the long-ago Sunday school class in which the old man in the corner, Francis Webster, had spoken out so passionately to defend the handcart emigration against its gossiping critics.
In The Instructor for April 1944, Palmer published “She Stood Tall on Her Knees,” a short biography of a woman whose story, claimed Palmer, was “unlike any other and surpassing most of them in the qualities of sheer heroism,” of “a woman who, in spite of crushing handicaps, carried on the highest mission of womanhood.” At age nine, Nellie was the youngest of five children who crossed the ocean with their parents on the Horizon to gather to Zion. (Palmer implies that all five children joined the Martin Company, but Andrew Olsen clarifies that three of them stayed in Boston.)
Both parents died in the Wyoming storms. Nellie and her sister were saved by the rescue party that found the company marooned beneath Red Buttes. They rode in wagons, claims Palmer, all the way to Salt Lake City. But:
Poor little Nellie, nothing could be done to save her feet. When they took off her shoes and stockings the skin with pieces of flesh came off too. The doctor said her feet must be taken off to save her life. They strapped her to a board and without an anesthetic the surgery was performed. With a butcher’s knife and a carpenter’s saw they cut the blackened limbs off. It was poor surgery, too, for the flesh was not brought over to cushion the ends. The bones stuck out through the ends of the stumps and in pain she waddled through the rest of her life on her knees.
Nellie ended up in Cedar City, where she became the plural wife of William Unthank. A poor man, William could afford to build only a small adobe house with a dirt floor. “Nellie kept damping and scraping that dirt floor until she had it as hard and smooth as pavement,” Palmer wrote. “That floor was never swept. It was mopped up every day with a damp rag and no spot of dust or stain was ever left upon it.”
Meanwhile, Nellie never really healed from her amputations.
Those stumps were festering, running sores as long as she lived. She never knew a moment of freedom from pain…. Dr. George W. Middleton offered to fix her legs by cutting the bones off farther up and bringing the flesh down over the ends so they would heal and enable her to wear artificial limbs, but the horrors of that first amputation were so vivid in her memory that she could never consent to another operation.
Despite being crippled, Nellie raised six children. She helped support the family by “taking in washing” and knitting stockings. Stoically, she “never asked for favors of pity or charity because of her tragic handicap.”
Nellie died in 1915, at the age of sixty-eight. Palmer closes his tribute with a glowing reminiscence:
In memory I recall her wrinkled forehead, her soft dark eyes that told of pain and suffering, and the deep grooves that encircled the corners of her strong mouth. But in that face there was no trace of bitterness or railings at her fate. There was patience and serenity for in spite of her handicap she had earned her keep and justified her existence. She had given more to family, friends and to the world than she had received.
In 1991 a bronze statue of Nellie Unthank was erected on the campus of Southern Utah University in Cedar City. The work, by sculptor Gary Anderson, depicts Nellie as a young girl who still has her feet. With a radiant, uplifted face, she dances on her toes, arms outspread, fingers extended in joy. The dedicatory ceremony was attended by the governor of Utah and by LDS president Gordon Hinckley. According to a Southern Utah University archivist, whenever a snow falls, today’s students brush the drifts off the statue’s toes.
A handful of Saints in the two stricken companies went on to attain a minor celebrity in the Utah Territory. The most remarkable may have been Jens Nielson, a Dane in the Willie Company who was thirty-six at the time of the trek. Nielson nearly died crossing Rocky Ridge, saved only by the gritty effort of his wife, Elsie, who pulled him for some distance in their handcart. The couple lost their six-year-old son on Rocky Ridge. Jens was crippled by frostbite, and though he suffered no amputations, he walked the rest of his life with one foot at a right angle to the other.
Despite this handicap, twenty-three year
s after the handcart journey, Jens became one of the leaders of the legendary Hole-in-the-Rock Expedition, charged with settling southeast Utah to forestall Gentile intrusions. Setting out from Escalante in the late fall of 1879, the expedition—230 men, women, and children in eighty-three wagons—expected to take six weeks to blaze a trail eastward to a pre-scouted settlement on the San Juan River. Instead, the journey took the party six months.
The tour de force of this extraordinary mission was the lowering of all eighty-three wagons down a thousand-foot chasm in the cliff above the Colorado River (the “hole in the rock”), then floating them across the current. The pioneers pulled off this feat without losing a single wagon, and completed their journey without a single death in the party.
In April 1880, these emigrants founded the town of Bluff. Jens Nielson, fifty-nine years old during this arduous journey, became the town’s first bishop, a post in which he served for the next twenty-six years, until his death in 1906, two days before his eighty-sixth birthday. He is buried on Cemetery Hill above the town, and his pioneer house is a local landmark.
Another Saint in the Willie party, twenty-year-old Emily Hill, had a talent for versifying. In Utah, as Emily Hill Woodmansee, she became a kind of unofficial poet laureate of the territory. Though she apparently kept no diary during the trek, in 1881 Emily composed a long poem about the journey, titled “Hunger and Cold.” Narrating the nadir of the expedition, in the Wyoming snows just before the arrival of the rescue express, she wrote:
At length came the climax—how well I remember—
That cold, dismal night in the month of November.
Faint and fasting, we camped by a hard frozen stream
Here nothing we had, but of plenty could dream.
Our rations eked out with discretion and care,
Had utterly vanished, “the cupboard was bare,”
Not a morsel to eat could we anywhere see,
Cold, weary and hungry and helpless were we.
Our woes were pathetic and everywhere round
Every inch of the prairie was snow covered ground,
Shut off from the world as in ocean’s mid waves,
The desolate plains offer nothing but graves.
Death seemed but a question of limited time.
Yet the faith of these faint ones was truly sublime!
On the brink of the tomb few succumbed to despair,
Our trust was in God, and our strength was in prayer.
Just as William Palmer could repackage the ordeal of the Willie and Martin Companies into an idealized Saint’s life of Nellie Unthank, so in the twentieth century the tragedy would serve as the yarn-spinning fodder for a children’s adventure book. Cedar City historian Howard R. Driggs seized upon a character named George “Beefsteak” Harrison, whom Driggs knew as the proprietor and cook of a hotel in Springville. “Beefsteak was one thing in which he took pride,” Driggs wrote in a 1944 reminiscence. “He could cook this royal meat to a queen’s taste. Beside there would be tempting salads, creamy potatoes with gravy, and peas, carrots and turnips. Of course, there were pies and cakes, and sometimes a plum pudding.”
According to Driggs’s memoir, George Harrison had been a boy in the Martin Company. Somewhere in Wyoming, overcome by the hand-cart trial, he slipped away from the party, so as to burden his family with one fewer mouth to feed. Rather than perish, George was rescued by a band of Indians, with whom he flourished in the finest Fenimore Cooper fashion, before eventually making his way to Utah as part of a later army train.
A fourteen-year-old named George Harrison is listed in the roster of the Martin Company in the LDS Archives, with little biographical information save his 1921 date of death. In Driggs’s long memoir, presented as nonfiction, the story is quoted verbatim from Beefsteak Harrison’s lips. Eight years later, Driggs converted and expanded the tale into a novel for children, told in the third person, called George, the Handcart Boy.
A sample—the moment when the starving George reaches the first Indian “teepee”:
Lifting the flap of elkskin at the opening, he saw the astonished Indian family—a mother and several children seated round a fire. On the embers was a kettle with something cooking in it.
Pointing to the kettle, George pleaded, “Give me some! Give me some!”
The mother understood. Reaching for a tin plate, she filled it with pieces of boiled buffalo meat. George seized it and began to eat ravenously.
When it was gone, he again handed the empty plate to the Indian mother, saying, “Give me some more! Give me some more!”
“Oo-oo!” she exclaimed in sympathy as she began to refill the plate.
The handcart tragedy also gave birth to an epic novel, in Gerald N. Lund’s Fire of the Covenant, published in 1999. A kind of Mormon James Michener, Lund is immensely popular among LDS readers for his sprawling works of historical fiction, supposedly buttressed by prodigious research. In his 758-page Fire of the Covenant, Lund tries to have it both ways, arguing in a prefatory note that “This story is true. Most of the characters in the book were real people…. A few fictional characters are created to help convey to the reader the fulness of the experience, but the story is not fiction.”
The fullness of the experience requires Lund to center his novel on a pair of made-up characters, the winsome Hannah McKensie in the Martin Company and the doughty rescuer, David Granger. Their slow-burning love affair culminates, we are promised on the last page, in a proposal of marriage and the prospect of happily-ever-after in Zion. Meanwhile, the Danish Saints in the companies, far from being isolated in their monolingual vacuum, are taught English along the trail by their British brothers and sisters. They cannot cure themselves of uttering “Yah” instead of “Yes,” but they express their gratitude to their tutors in accents like “Olaf’s”: “We learn music? That is good.”
Many Mormon readers, impressed perhaps by the bibliographical notes Lund appends to each chapter, believe that the novel, dialogue and all, is a faithful reconstruction of the Willie and Martin Companies’ ordeal. Lund’s saga, however, reads not as tragedy so much as a patchwork of back-to-back episodes in which brave men and women perform one selfless and heroic deed after another, all in the fulfillment of their “covenant” to gather to Zion. Thus on October 20, 1856, as Captain Willie and Joseph Elder set out to cross Rocky Ridge to scout for the rescue wagons:
“It’s you two that we’re worried about,” John Chislett said softly. “Do you think you can find the trail in the snow? If that wind picks up again…” He just shook his head.
James Willie nodded slowly, his eyes dark and brooding. “We ride with the Lord, firm in the faith that He has not forsaken us. Brethren, Brother Elder and I will not be alone. Nor will you. We ask that you and the camp pray to God with all the energy of your souls that the Lord will hear our cries in this our extremity and bring us deliverance. We must find those wagons.”
Then, suddenly determined, he turned to Brother Elder. “Are you ready?”
“Yes, sir. Let’s do it.”
He handed Captain Willie the reins of his mule and they both swung up. “May God be with you, brethren,” Brother Willie said as he wheeled his mule around.
“And with you,” Levi Savage said quietly.
MORE THAN A century and a half after the handcart expeditions of 1856, it remains an elusive challenge to affix responsibility for the greatest disaster in Western migration history. The toppling dominoes on display at the Mormon Handcart Visitors’ Center do not give an adequate answer.
Despite his many retrospective claims that he had always counseled against too late a departure from Florence, Brigham Young in fact never dictated firm cutoff dates until after the catastrophe. That he did not do so is all the more puzzling in view of the experience of the company led by George A. Smith in 1849. This party, made up of between 370 and 447 emigrants riding in 120 wagons, set out from Kanesville, Iowa (present-day Council Bluffs), on July 14. The advance guard of the company did not arrive i
n Salt Lake City until October 26.
On October 2, near the summit of South Pass, the company was engulfed by a severe snowstorm. Smith himself published only a sanitized version of the ravages of that storm, in a letter to the Frontier Guardian, but even that dispatch was given an alarming subhead: “Account of travel—tremendous snow storm—60 head of Cattle Perished—Chickens and Pigs froze to death—no person died on the journey.”
In his 1889 History of Utah, the magisterial historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, who probably got the details directly from Smith, elaborated on the story:
Toward night on the 2d a strong wind set in from the north-east, accompanied with driving snow. The company encamped on a branch of the Sweetwater, driving their cattle into a willow copse near by, as to build a corral was impossible. The wind freshened into a gale, and then into a hurricane, howling incessantly for thirty-six hours, and drifting the snow in every direction. For two nights women and children lay under their frail covering, exposed to the blast, with no food but a morsel of bread or biscuit. Tents and wagon-tops were blown away, and the wagons buried almost to the tops of their wheels in the snow-drifts….
At length the storm abated, and making their way toward the willow copse, the men found nearly half their cattle lying stiff amid the snow-banks, while others died from the effects of the storm. Not a single human life was lost, however.
The difference between the survival rate in the George Smith party and that in the Willie and Martin Companies derives from several obvious causes. As handcarts never could, the wagons themselves shielded the 1849 emigrants from the brunt of the storm; they presumably had adequate clothing and bedding; and they had not arrived at South Pass weakened by months of undernourishment.
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