Fire of the Covenant

by Gerald N. Lund

He shook his head. “It’s Henry Walker from the Carlisle Conference.” He looked away.

  “Is he . . . ?” Hannah asked.

  He nodded. “The lightning struck him directly. He never had a chance.”

  Chapter Notes

  As in other chapters, actual events from handcart companies other than the Willie and Martin groups have been added to this story so as to give a fuller picture of the handcart experience.

  Sisters Mary Bathgate and Isabella Park were actual handcart pioneers. Though depicted here as being part of the Willie Company, in actuality they came with Daniel McArthur’s company, the second company of 1856. Their story is included here because it provides one more glimpse into the hearts of the handcart Saints, especially the women. In the novel the rattlesnake incident and the subsequent wagon accident take place on 27 August 1856. They actually occurred eleven days earlier than that and much farther west along the trail than shown here. The details as given here come from Captain McArthur’s report of the journey of the second company, including Sister Bathgate’s disgust at finally having to ride in the wagon (see Hafen and Hafen, Handcarts to Zion, p. 216).

  Here is Brother McArthur’s description of what happened after Sister Bathgate’s injury:

  Sister Bathgate continued to be quite sick, but was full of faith, and after stopping one and a half hours we hitched up our teams. As the word was given for the teams to start, old Sister Isabella Park ran in before the wagon to see how her companion was. The driver, not seeing her, hallooed at his team and they being quick to mind, Sister Park could not get out of the way, and the fore wheel struck her and threw her down and passed over both her hips. Brother Leonard grabbed hold of her to pull her out of the way, before the hind wheel could catch her. He only got her out part way and the hind wheels passed over her ankles. We all thought that she would be all mashed to pieces, but to the joy of us all, there was not a bone broken, although the wagon had something like two tons burden on it, a load for 4 yoke of oxen. We went right to work and applied the same medicine to her that we did to the sister who was bitten by the rattlesnake, and although quite sore for a few days, Sister Park got better, so that she was on the tramp before we got into this Valley, and Sister Bathgate was right by her side, to cheer her up. Both were as smart as could be long before they got here, and this is what I call good luck, for I know that nothing but the power of God saved the two sisters and they traveled together, they rode together, and suffered together. (In Hafen and Hafen, Handcarts to Zion, pp. 216–17)

  Henry Walker was a member of the Edmund Ellsworth Company, the first handcart company to come west in 1856. On Saturday 26 July, just west of the Loup Fork ferry, about eighty-five miles west of Florence, a terrible thunderstorm swept over the camp. Archer Walters, a member of the company, kept a daily journal. On that day he records:

  We had [not] got far and it began to lightning and so on the thunders roared and about the middle of the train of hand carts the lightning struck a brother and he fell to rise no more in that body, - by the name of Henry Walker, from Carlisle Conference; aged 58 years. Left a wife and children. One boy burnt a little, named James Studard [Stoddard]; we thought he would die but he recovered and was able to walk and Brother William Studard, father of the boy was knocked to the ground and a sister, Betsy Taylor, was terribly shook but recovered. All wet through. This happened about 2 miles from the Ferry and we then went 2 miles to camp. I put the body, with the help of others, on the hand cart and pulled him to camp and buried him without coffin for there was no boards to be had. (In Carol Cornwall Madsen, Journey to Zion, p. 616)

  Chapter 15

  Near North Bluff Creek,

  Nebraska Territory

  I

  Thursday, 4 September 1856

  It was like a string of pearls, Eric decided. There were occasional jewels of interest or excitement strung together on an endless thread of monotony. Every day was the same as the one before. Rise at dawn. Get breakfast (often cold), strike the tents, pack the carts, roll out at eight or nine o’clock (later, if any of the stock had strayed and couldn’t be found), stop or “noon” at midday to rest and eat, roll out again, stop somewhere before sundown and make camp.

  And even some of the “pearls” were only notable in contrast to the boredom of the other days. In other circumstances they would probably not even have been worthy of comment. There had been a birth one day and a few days later a death. As on the ship, life went on along the trail as well.

  The day that stood out most clearly in Eric’s mind was what he thought of as the day of the Indians. After nooning, the company met a large party of Omaha Indians. They were friendly, but carried a letter from an army captain stating that a small wagon train he was escorting had been attacked by a marauding band of Cheyenne. Two soldiers and a small child were killed, and a woman was carried off captive. That sent a shiver through the company, especially among the sisters, but their captains assured them that even warring Indians would not attack a company as large as theirs. That assurance helped, but more than one pair of eyes scanned the horizon anxiously for the next several days. As yet the emigrants weren’t knowledgeable enough to understand the differences between the tribes. Children were kept close, the stock was watched with greater care, and those few men with weapons kept them close at hand.

  Later that afternoon, as the company moved on, the Indians rode along with the train, fascinated by the carts. One old chief who spoke a few words of English kept pointing and howling with laughter. “Little wagons,” he said over and over. “Little wagons.”

  The day of the Indians ended that evening when subcaptains Millen Atwood and Levi Savage rode to the Indians’ camp. There they bartered for a supply of buffalo meat. That night the company had their first taste of the sweet meat about which they had all heard so much.

  But even that experience quickly lost its novelty. Seeing buffalo was now almost as common as seeing the ever-present prairie dogs. The great shaggy beasts came close to camp often enough that buffalo meat became a regular supplement to their diet.

  “Whoa there, Eric!”

  His head came up as the front bar of the cart pulled him to a stop. Olaf, who was standing beside him in the shafts, was looking at him strangely. “Is the heat getting to you?” he drawled. “We’re stopping.”

  Eric grinned, a little sheepish. “Sorry. I was just thinking about how fascinating this journey is. Every day a new and exciting experience.”

  Elsie Nielson hooted softly. “So where have I been when this was happening?”

  Eric only grinned the more broadly. “One thing about monotony,” he chuckled, “it doesn’t require a lot of attention.” Then he looked around. “So why are we stopping?”

  Jens Nielson came up. “I think this is where we’re stopping for the night,” he said wryly, looking at Eric. “Should we join them, or were you thinking of going on by yourself?”

  “Oh, you boys,” Elsie chided them. “Leave poor Eric alone.”

  “All right, all right,” Eric said. “So my mind was elsewhere.” He looked around again. Today their fifth hundred was in the middle of the train. Up ahead the lead carts were already stopped, and people were starting to untie the ropes that held their goods in place. A little farther to the right he could see the wagons of the independent company. For a change, they had been out ahead of the handcarts, and they had already unhitched their teams and turned them out to graze with the beef cattle and the milk cows. That was how it was with a long train like this, Eric thought. It was not a cohesive unit but more like several little pieces which hung loosely together. The first and the last arrivals into camp might be as much as an hour to two hours apart.

  He turned and looked. Sure enough, the back half of the train was still coming on, strung out for another quarter of a mile or so.

  Elsie was looking around. She pointed. “Let’s camp over there.”

  They turned, then nodded in agreement. The place she had chosen was on an elevated rise, just big en
ough to hold the tent and give them a place for a fire. If it rained—as it probably would, judging from the gray wall of clouds to the west—the water would not flood their tent.

  Jens turned and called back to the others who were part of their tent group. “Over there?” They nodded and also started moving in that direction. Then Eric stopped again.

  “Now what?” Olaf exclaimed.

  “Listen!”

  Eric cocked his head, thinking at first it was the first low rumble from the approaching storm. But then as others stopped and the line quieted, Eric turned. The sound was not coming from the west and it hadn’t died away as thunder always did. It was a continuous sound, almost too low to discern but distinct now against the silence.

  “What is it?” Elsie said, turning to look in that direction.

  Jens raised a hand for silence. Then as they strained to hear more clearly, a shout went up somewhere down the line. “Look!”

  About half a mile away one of the gently rolling hills of the great prairie formed the northern horizon. Eric stared. For a moment it looked like someone had spilled a giant kettle of molasses. The ridge was suddenly engulfed with a black flowing mass. Even as they stared, the rumble deepened into a soft but ominous roar.

  “What is it, Jens?” Elsie cried again, this time sweeping little Jens up into her arms.

  No one answered her. They were transfixed. It took a moment for the image to transfer to the brain and for the mind to process it. Then in one flash of clarity, Eric realized what it was. A huge herd of buffalo was coming towards them at full speed, raising a great cloud of dust behind them. Over the ridge they poured in an endless flow.

  “Look at that!” Olaf cried. “There must be thousands of them.”

  “Tens of thousands,” Eric corrected. The mass was still coming with no end in sight.

  “Stampede! Stampede!”

  They jerked around at the sound of pounding hoofbeats. Captain Willie was racing toward them on his horse, low in the saddle, whipping the reins back and forth. “Push those handcarts together,” he screamed. “Get those wagons in a circle. Hurry!”

  Eric had been so stunned by what he saw, it hadn’t occurred to him that there was danger. Now he realized that the long line of carts and wagons formed a barrier for the oncoming mass. They were coming straight toward them.

  “Get those carts out of the way,” Elder Willie shouted. “Make an opening!”

  “Bodil! Bodil!” Jens spun around, looking frantically for the girl.

  “There!” Olaf said, pointing. “I’ll get her.” He lunged forward, heading for where the group of older children stood rooted to the spot, staring at the scene unfolding before them. Olaf snatched up Bodil Mortensen at a full lope, waving his hand at the other children. “Run!” he screamed. “Get behind the carts.”

  The children scattered like chickens when a fox enters the chicken coop.

  As Eric swung their cart around and started it towards the next cart, he saw Elder Willie, another seventy or eighty yards down the column, yelling and waving at those still in the line. Eric couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he immediately saw what he was doing. He was moving those carts back, putting them double and triple. He was doing two things simultaneously—opening up a hole in the line and making a barricade for the people.

  Eric whirled and began screaming to those around him at the top of his lungs. “Make an opening! Get the carts up together. Go! Go!”

  “What?” Jens Nielson shouted. “Speak in Danish!”

  Eric shook his head in disgust. Willie had shouted at them in English, and without thinking he had used the same words. He began again. “Get the carts up in a line together. Make a place for the buffalo to get through. Otherwise they’ll go right over the top of us.”

  Jens Nielson saw it instantly. “Yes. I’ll go this way.” He leaped forward and grabbed the cart in front of them. The man and his wife were frozen in place, staring at the black mass which was thundering toward them, now less than three hundred yards away. Jens almost knocked the man down as he yanked their cart around and pulled it up beside the next one.

  Eric hurtled forward, pulling their cart beside the other two. He dropped it with a crash, leaped out of the shafts, and ran back to the cart that had been behind him. Shouting, yelling, helping where necessary, Jens and Eric began to form a hook in their end of the column, rolling each cart up and behind the others to form a solid wall and open up a great gap. On the other end, Captain Willie and some other men were doing the same, only in the opposite direction.

  The earth was trembling now, like the deck of a steamboat under full power. As he looked to the north, Eric no longer saw a shapeless, mindless mass. Now he could make out the individual animals—huge bulls with their shaggy humps and wickedly curving horns, the lighter-colored cows, here and there some yearlings running at full speed to stop from being run over themselves.

  “Behind the carts. Stay behind the carts.” He raked his eyes up and down the open space now, making sure no one was still there. Suddenly he thought of the McKensies and the Jameses. Where were they? And what about Sister Bathgate and Sister Park, who were still confined to a wagon because of their injuries?

  Then he had no more time to worry about others. A hundred yards from him, across the great gap in the line they had created, Elder Willie and some of the other men were jumping up and down and waving shirts, coats, blankets, aprons—whatever they could lay hand on. They were screaming at the top of their lungs at the onrushing animals. Jens grasped what they were doing an instant ahead of Eric. “They’re trying to turn them into the gap,” he shouted.

  Jens ripped off his shirt and began to wave it frantically. Olaf shoved Bodil into Elsie’s arms and darted to the cart. In a moment he was at Eric’s side with two blankets. They too began jumping up and down.

  Now just fifty or sixty yards away, the lead animals closest to the cluster of carts wheeled sharply inward. On the far side the lead animals did the same, squeezing the front of the stampede like water pouring into a funnel. Like sheep, the mass behind followed.

  “Get behind the carts!” Jens yelled as the first huge bull bore down on them. He dove and threw his arms around Elsie and the children. Eric and Olaf were right behind him.

  For Eric, the only thing that came close to describing what happened next was to compare it to the most severe thunderstorm they had yet experienced. The roar of the hooves was deafening, now added to by the grunts, snorts, and bellowing of the animals and the cries and screams of terrified people. Clods of dirt thrown up by the flashing hooves rained down on them like hail. The dust was thicker than even the strongest wind could create, and they had to throw their arms across their faces to stop from choking.

  Behind him, Eric heard a crash and whipped around in time to see a handcart overturned as a large bull tried to leap over it but didn’t quite clear it. A woman with a baby screamed and scrambled out of the way. Here and there other animals were breaking through the line and pushing through the wall of carts, but for the most part, Eric saw in relief, Elder Willie’s quick thinking had saved the train. The great herd was pouring through the gap in the line, half-hidden in the billowing dust, their hooves churning the soil into powder.

  It seemed to Eric as though the dark shapes ran past them for over an hour, but when the last was gone and they slowly stood up, he realized it was probably no more than five or six minutes.

  “Oh my!” someone down the line exclaimed.

  “Whoo-ee!” cried another.

  Elsie looked up at her husband, half-dazed, then finally let go of her son. Little Jens ran to his father. The senior Jens picked him up, still gaping at the disappearing herd.

  “Eric! Eric Pederson!”

  Eric stood slowly and looked around. He saw Elder Willie’s one hand come up and wave. “Eric, can you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Check up and down the line. See if anyone is hurt.”

  Eric waved back an acknowledgment an
d turned to Olaf. “Let’s go see,” he said. “Jens, you stay here with Elsie. We’ll let you know if we need help.”

  •••

  Ten minutes later the first of the handcarts from the back end of the train came up to join the front of the line. Everyone was still talking excitedly, pointing out the great scar in the prairie that marked the path of the buffalo. It was not hard to follow with the eye. If there was a blade of grass that had survived in that path, Eric couldn’t see it. Sarah, Emma, and Reuben James had come back with Maggie and Robbie McKensie to see where the stampede had passed. They had been near the front end of the column, preparing to make camp, and the stampede had missed them completely. They were now talking quietly with Eric and Olaf.

  At the sound of the carts, Eric turned. James G. Willie was beside them, leading his horse. His eyes scanned the crowd, then stopped on Eric.

  Eric didn’t wait for him to ask. “Everyone is fine, Elder Willie,” he reported.

  “What about Elder Woodward’s company?”

  A man raised his hand. “One girl in our group got a slight cut when a handcart overturned.”

  John Chislett, captain of the fourth hundred, stepped forward. “A brother in our tent group was hit in the panic to get the carts moved, but other than a bruise, he’s all right.”

  “Thank heavens,” Brother Willie said. “Everyone back here is all right too.”

  “And thank the Lord for that,” Johan Ahmanson said in Danish. Those close enough to hear him and understand nodded fervently. “Amen,” someone said softly.

  “It could have been a lot—”

  “Captain Willie!”

  Everyone turned. A man was trotting towards them from the direction of the wagons. The captain whirled. “Yes? Is everyone all right in the wagon companies?”

  “No one hurt, sir.” He frowned. “But . . .” He stopped to catch his breath.

  “But what?”

  “The cattle stampeded with the buffalo, sir. The whole herd is gone.”

  II

  Saturday, 6 September 1856