Even so, Smith took the occasion to make a firm suggestion that, had it been acted on seven years later, might have averted the Willie and Martin tragedy altogether. In his letter to the Frontier Guardian, Smith (and his co-signer, William Appleby) urged, “We would earnestly recommend to all emigrating companies hereafter, coming to the Valley, not to attempt to leave the Missouri river after the middle of June, for if they start later, they will almost be certain to encounter severe snow storms as we have, in crossing these everlasting snow capped, and rock bound mountains. By starting early they will be apt to miss the snows, and have time and opportunity for recruiting a few days.”
Even seven years afterward, the close call of Smith’s party must have been common knowledge throughout Zion. And since Smith was Joseph Smith’s cousin, it seems unlikely that Brigham Young would have lightly dismissed his fervent recommendation against too late a start from the Missouri.
In the light of history, Young’s public scapegoating of Franklin Richards and Daniel Spencer to deflect blame away from himself was a brilliant stroke. A century and a half later, the blame has stuck where the Prophet flung it. At a 2005 session of the Mormon History Association, a panel of experts debated who was ultimately responsible for the Willie and Martin tragedy. The majority unhesitatingly chose Richards, while no panelist blamed the Prophet himself.
Although he continued as an Apostle and leader of the church, Richards was lastingly devastated by the Prophet’s mocking denunciation. According to Hannah S. Lapish, herself a veteran of the ninth hand-cart expedition in 1860, “Sister Richards said that for 4 yrs. Pres. Young would not speak to Bro. Richards. Sister Richards told Bro. Young that if he did not speak to her husband it would break his heart. Pres. Young said he could not speak without condemning him.”
Just as brilliant was the Prophet’s vigorous call, as soon as the missionary party had brought the bad news to Salt Lake, for a massive rescue mission to set out immediately to find the last two handcart companies of 1856. A century and a half later, the Prophet is widely viewed by Mormons as the hero of the handcart story.
Even among church historians who hold that view, there are some who concede that there is a certain logic in holding the Prophet accountable, on the blanket principle that the general of an army is responsible for what his troops carry out. But the most thoroughgoing modern effort to focus the blame squarely on Brigham Young resides in the pages of an unpublished article by that sharpest of all thorns in the side of the Mormon history establishment, Will Bagley.
An independent scholar living in Salt Lake City, Bagley grew up Mormon but became disillusioned with the church early on. In an informal lecture about the handcart emigration that would serve as a précis for the eventual article, he said, “I have a deep and passionate connection to this story. Fifteen of my sixteen great-grandparents crossed the plains to Utah, one of them in 1857.”
Concentrating on what he calls the Prophet’s “obsessive pennypinching,” Bagley takes the tack of analyzing the handcart saga in economic terms. In the 1850s, according to Bagley, Brigham had squandered hundreds of thousands of church dollars on failed development schemes. These were
based on importing industrial machinery to manufacture iron, sugar, pottery, paper, wool, and salt. After the LDS Church—or, more exactly, Brigham Young—took over managing these enterprises, it lost $12,000 invested in pottery in 1853, at least $8,500 spent on a paper mill by 1857, and more than $100,000 on the failure of the effort of the “Damn Miserable Company”—the Deseret Manufacturing Company—to make sugar from beets in 1856. By the time it folded in 1858, the Deseret Iron Company had made direct expenditures of at least $150,000 “to produce nothing more than a few andirons, kitchen utensils, flat irons, wagon wheels, molasses rolls, and machine castings.”
At the same time that his schemes were threatening to bankrupt the church, Bagley argues, the Prophet had amassed a personal fortune worth more than $150,000. The great appeal of the handcart plan was economic—to gather thousands of foreign-born Saints to Zion at a fraction of the cost of bringing them in wagons. Yet so poor were those working-class converts from Britain and Europe that the Perpetual Emigration Fund sank deeper and deeper in debt. Shockingly, Young blamed the poor themselves. In an angry speech, he told his Salt Lake congregation, “It is the poor who have got your money, and if you have any complaints to make, make them against the Almighty for having so many poor. I do not owe you anything. I cannot chew paper and spit out bank notes.”
Bagley was the first historian to point to one of Brigham’s far-fetched development schemes as a leitmotif crucially interwoven with the handcart debacle. This involved the procurement of a gigantic and ultimately useless steam engine. In early 1855, the Prophet ordered Apostle Erastus Snow to buy an engine in St. Louis and ship it overland to Salt Lake. The ultimate purpose of the contraption remains uncertain, but Bagley believes it was intended to power a steamboat to navigate the Great Salt Lake.
Against his better judgment, Snow purchased an engine weighing 13,000 pounds. It was loaded in pieces into five separate wagons. A “church train” under Isaac Allred lugged the onerous burden to thirty miles west of the Missouri River, where the team gave up and deposited the steam engine in a farmer’s yard.
Furious, the Prophet ordered another party under Abraham Smoot to retrieve the engine and get it to Salt Lake City during the summer of 1856. This new train labored mightily to perform the task. In western Wyoming, as noted earlier, Smoot’s team met and interacted with the rescue party looking for the Willie and Martin Companies. Finally Smoot, too, gave up on the debilitating job and cached the cumbersome baggage at Fort Bridger.
This only further infuriated Brigham. Incredible though it may seem, the Prophet ordered some of the rescue teams to divert their resources from saving handcart emigrants to gather up the “freight” at Fort Bridger. Proof of these orders is preserved in the LDS Archives. Thus in a report filed in the capital on December 12, 1856, Caleb Grant, a member of Smoot’s team, wrote, “On [November] 3rd inst, we met an express from the Governor, stating that some one was to return & bring on from Bridger the wagons & freight we had left there as well as several useless & tired out cattle left there by us.”
Even more explicitly, another member of Smoot’s team, Franklin Woolley, recorded,
At Fort Ridges [Bridger] we left 8 waggons and their loads as it was impossible for our teams to take them all, through to the valley when at the mouth of Echo Kanyon Bro Smoot received a letter from Bro Young directing him to bring all the goods in and if he had not enough team to call upon the brethren who were out in the mountains with ox teams to assist the hand cart emmigrations, to assist in bring the waggons that we left at Bridges.
The Willie Company was made aware of this diversion of teams to haul freight instead of save lives, for on November 4, William Woodward recorded in the company’s official journal,
Franklin B. Woolley came on from A.O. Smoot’s train informing the company that President B. Young had sent word that some freight still lying at “Fort Bridger” was to be brought in this season & that some teams and men of our company were needed to go on to “Bridger.” Several teams & men were selected for the trip.
The ultimate fate of the steam engine was as bathetic as Young’s plans for it were grandiose. As Bagley writes,
Exactly what Young intended to do with a steamboat on the Great Salt Lake is not clear. It might have been part of an ambitious plan to transport coal from San Pete County, across Utah Lake, and down the Jordan River. It may be that the prophet had no clear idea what he wanted to do with the contraption for on March 1857, Young sent the engine south to the iron works at Cedar City, where like the many crippled handcart veterans he dispatched to the remote settlement it would be out of sight. The machinery replaced two existing 30-horsepower engines that had arrived a year earlier “but had not worked well.” Later that year, the Deseret Iron Company paid Brigham Young $2,181 for the engine.
Bagley gr
ants that Franklin Richards’s sending on the last two hand-cart parties from Florence was “the key blunder” in the tragedy. But in his view, the whole debacle was caused not by mismanagement on the part of officials in Liverpool, New York, or Iowa City; it was a classic case of “top-down bungling.” Brigham Young was almost solely responsible for designing the emigration of 1856, and for setting in motion the machinery that would send almost two thousand Saints from Liverpool to Iowa City and thence by handcart to Zion. But once this ambitious campaign was launched, the Prophet—quite uncharacteristically, for the habitual micromanager—seemed to lose track of the details. As we have seen, Young knew full well by July 30 that there were more than a thousand handcart Saints who had crossed the ocean on the Thornton and the Horizon preparing to set out from Iowa City in the Willie and Martin Companies. It is almost as though the Prophet lost interest in these late-arriving converts, preoccupied as he may have been by such distractions as the steam engine.
Bagley was also the first historian to argue, as he put it in his public lecture, that “If there’s anyone in the story who’s a hero, it’s John Taylor.” The record bears out this assertion. Months of correspondence between Taylor in New York and the Prophet in Salt Lake reveal that the former was constantly worried about the logistics of the massive operation—and in those worries, he anticipated many of the problems that would contribute to the catastrophe. As early as January 18, 1856, Taylor wrote to Young, “I have ordered one hundred carts made at Saint Louis I have done this, as good seasoned timber can be had there for wheels. I am afraid of these new countries for wheel making…. If the wheels should break down on the road the company would be ruined.”
By March 4, Taylor was so disturbed by the lack of explicit instructions from those in charge of the emigration that he offered to resign as president of the New York office. “I asked Bro.s Grant & Kimball in council if they had any private instructions from you,” Taylor complained to Franklin Richards. “They informed me that they had not; but that they were perfectly free to carry out any measure that I wished…. I really felt sorry that our blundering should have placed them in such a position.”
In April, Taylor began to feel overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of emigrants streaming into New York from the old countries. “We have had a great many calculations about the hand cart operations and sometimes have felt almost at a loss what course to pursue,” he wrote to the Prophet. “Whilst on the one hand we have felt an ardent desire to do what we could and forward as many as possible with as little outlay, on the other hand we have been afraid of throwing a great many into the wilderness in a helpless condition.”
A June 30 letter from Young to Taylor promises relief trains to meet the handcart parties: “We expect to start teams with provisions to meet the emigration so soon as we can get flour from the present harvest.” Those relief trains would prove vital in seeing the Ellsworth, McArthur, and Bunker Companies through to Salt Lake, but they never materialized to come to the aid of the Willie and Martin Companies. Was this one more detail of the handcart emigration of which the Prophet somehow lost track?
Taylor’s letters make it clear that some kind of power struggle between himself and Franklin Richards was hindering the organization of the exodus. In August he pleaded with the Prophet for explicit orders as to who was in charge.
On September 18, in phrases that mingle exasperation and relief, Taylor wrote, “The emigration is now beyond my bounds.” He hopes for the best, but “I must confess that I felt a little fearful, as to its practicability with so many weak aged & infirm.”
Having ignored all the warning flags hoisted by Taylor over the months, on October 30, as the disaster began to loom on the Salt Lake horizon, the Prophet wrote an angry letter to Taylor scolding him for not better superintending the emigration. And for the first time, Young blamed others—in this case, Taylor—for the lateness in setting out of the last thousand emigrants. Young’s harshest criticism, however, was an attack on Taylor as fiscally irresponsible: “We…feel gratified at the exertions you have made…but you are aware Bro Taylor that we do not hold in very high estimation your financial talent and ability. You must not blame us for this, as we do not attach any to you, beleiving it to be a natural weakness. But you must excuse us for not wishing to pay two or three extra dollars on each passenger.”
For Taylor, this must have been the last straw. In February 1857, he sent the Prophet a letter that came as close to outright criticism as any high church official would get away with during Young’s lifetime. That letter also adumbrates the first cogent critique of what had gone wrong in 1856. Among other sharp remarks, Taylor wrote,
On the death of br. Spencer and in the absence of br. Snow, without being able to obtain communications from you, I knew that the responsibility rested somewhere…. I would give $500 for five minutes conversation with you. You must here excuse me Br. Young, I may be obtuse and so may those who were with me; but however plain your words might be to yourself on this matter, neither I nor my associates could understand them.
With barely contained sarcasm, Taylor added,
The Hand-Cart system was to me, and to us all a new operation. I considered that the utmost care and prudence was necessary. I wanted if a train started, to know that it would go through. I knew of the weakness and infirmity of many women, children and aged persons that were calculated to go, I did not consider that a few dollars were to be put in competition with the lives of human beings.
A CONSISTENT THEME THROUGHOUT the thirty-three years of Young’s tenure as Prophet is what we would regard today as the undervaluing of human life. Apostates who wanted to flee Zion were better off dead. To be sure, Young sincerely believed that it was preferable for a Saint to die on the handcart trail than to languish in Babylon.
Like all despots, Young found himself virtually incapable of admitting that he was wrong or had committed a mistake. He never acknowledged the handcart disaster for the tragedy it was. Yet in his blithe pronouncements that the handcart scheme was not only fundamentally sound, but had already proved by the end of 1856 to be the best way of gathering the poor to Zion, there may be something more than the spin of a master propagandist. A modern psychologist might call it denial; a good Mormon would call it faith.
The baldest expression of that bedrock conviction came in the Fourteenth General Epistle, Young’s state of the union address disseminated to all of Zion on December 10, 1856.
This season’s operations have demonstrated that the Saints, being filled with faith and the Holy Ghost, can walk across the plains, drawing their provisions and clothing on hand-carts. The experience of this season will of course help us to improve in future operations; but the plan has been fairly tested and proved entirely successful.
It was widely predicted by skeptical observers at the time that with the Prophet’s death, the Latter-day Saints would collapse as a church. By far the greatest of Brigham Young’s achievements was that he not only ensured the survival of the church after his death, but propelled it toward its current status as the most successful homegrown religion ever spawned in the United States, as well as one of the fastest growing faiths in the world, with twelve million adherents all over the globe.
Even a critic as acerbic as Will Bagley can see Young’s virtues. “He was a great American and a great leader,” says Bagley. “But he was a man with horrific flaws. In some sense, he was a victim of his own history. He always lived with the fear that he couldn’t do what Joseph Smith had done.”
To the Prophet’s skeptical 1925 biographer Morris Werner, “It is my conviction that without Brigham Young the Mormons would never have been important after the first few years of their institutional life, but without the Mormons Brigham Young might have been a great man.” For Bernard DeVoto, Young’s cardinal achievement was the pilgrimage to Utah. “Without him, the church must have perished,” DeVoto wrote in 1930. “He did not originate the idea of going west, but he did make the decision and carry it out. That emigration
saved Mormonry.” Yet “His genius was commercial shrewdness, and only that. He was not a statesman. He devised the hand-cart emigration, a bitter and gratuitous tragedy.”
In concurrence with Bagley and DeVoto, I must conclude that, far from being the hero of the handcart saga, Brigham Young was the architect of an emigration plan so ill-conceived that it had built into it the fatal flaws—chiefly the seventeen-pound baggage limit and the ration of a pound per day of flour—that would ineluctably lead to unbearable hardships and scores of deaths. And further, that in failing competently to supervise the emigration once he had set it in motion, or even coherently to delegate that supervision, the Prophet compounded a disaster that has no parallel in American history.
In concurrence with Ann Eliza Young, I have to conclude that the 1856 handcart debacle was the worst blunder of the Prophet’s long career—worse in terms of human suffering even than his dogged championing of polygamy, a diehard clinging to a hopeless cause that delayed Utah statehood until 1896 and helped bring the territory to the brink of war against the United States.
The most pernicious of all the myths about the handcart campaign—a myth still cherished every summer by the throngs of reenactors who flock to the Mormon Handcart Visitors’ Center in western Wyoming—is that “because they came to know God,” all the tribulations of the Saints in the Willie and Martin Companies were “worth it.” That myth effectively annuls the terrible realities of starving to death, of dying from exposure to the cold, of incurring frostbite so severe as to cripple one for life.
It is a testament to the power of myth to rationalize senseless evil that many of the Saints in the Willie and Martin Companies apparently subscribed to that justification for their suffering. Yet not all the victims so believed. Across the century and a half that separates us from the handcart tragedy, a few voices still ring out in protest.
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