Ellsworth’s pace, however, was taking its toll. On September 17, another English Saint, twenty-eight-year-old James Birch, died of diarrhea; on the 22nd, yet another, identified only as “one man of the Italian brethren.” John Oakley, who had pitilessly attributed the weaknesses and even the deaths of others to moral failings, came close to death himself. On September 24, “I had to go back 3 mi. in the dark to look for one of the teams & waggon & felt all the time that some one might have to come to look after me for I was much exhausted through the severe toil of the day—my head was dizzy.” Oakley attributed his survival to “much assistance from an unseen source.” He did not speculate what sorts of character flaws might have contributed to his own debilitation.
With the scent of Zion in his nostrils, sometimes traveling miles ahead of the main body of his company, on September 25 Ellsworth drove his party twenty miles through Echo Canyon, crossing the stream eleven times, and then over a high pass. “Crossed the bigg Mountain in 2 hours & 55 minutes,” he bragged in the official journal. Just how dangerous a passage this was emerges in a vivid account by William Butler, a thirty-year-old sub-captain:
When we got to Echo Kanyon, there came another heavy thunderstorm. litghtening and heavy rains knight coming on and the people very weary travelling. our Captain persisted in continuing our journey over a divide, which made it very hard to ascend and descend a distance of six miles, and all in the dark—and no light only as the lightening flashed the rain pouring down in torrents all the time.—I had been taken sick the day before which made me very weak and unable to follow the train and drive the stock. my wife Emma had to take and drive the stock for me.—I was left behind to travel or die.—after a while I rose on my feet and lifted my voice with uplifted hands in token of the priesthood, and said these words.—having been commissioned by the King of Kings.—I command this spirit to let loose his grasp…. from this very moment the pain left me and I was able to resume my journey, it being very dark, insomuch that I could not see the road. I fell down a great many times over all manner of rocks, steep places and holes, after awhile I came to an Italian with his little girl. I tried to get him to come along with his hand cart, but not understanding his language, nor he mine, so he did not follow me.—he died during the night, and they fetched him into camp in the morning.—soon after leaving the Italian I came across a young english girl by the name of Clark. who was alone and had lost her way—she was crying and in great trouble.—I went to her, and fetched her into Camp,—the gratitude of the girl and her parents and relatives was unbounded towards one for what I had done.—she considered that I had saved her life and next day we gathered up the dead and buried them.
By September 25, word was abroad in Salt Lake that the first handcart party was camped at the foot of Little Mountain, just a few miles northeast of the city. Resident Saints rode out to greet the Ellsworth Company and escort it the rest of the way. Brigham Young had organized a gala welcome. Charles Treseder, a young man living in Salt Lake, wrote his parents in New Jersey a letter detailing the arrival and reception:
Presidents Brigham Young, and H. C. Kimball escorted by the minute men and a company of Lancers, followed by as many of the citizens as could turn out—some in vehicles and some on foot, with the two bands, to welcome the hand-carts and they did not forget to take them something to eat.
President Brigham Young, and Kimball went part way up the little mountain in a buggy and met them coming down. Bro. Brigham was introduced to them as they formed in line, and he was so much affected with the spectacle, he could only say: My good people I am glad to see you, God bless you all. He hurried away, he could say no more. The Salt Lake Brethren then gave the emigrants plenty to eat and they once more went to their hand-carts and made the last start. As they came down the bench you could scarcely see them for the dust. When they entered the city, the folks came running from every quarter to get a glimpse of the long-looked-for hand-carts.
Like many another resident, Treseder was overcome by the joyous spectacle.
I shall never forget the feeling that ran through my whole system as I caught the first sight of them. The first hand-cart was drawn by a man and his wife, they had a little flag on it, on which were the words: “Our President—may the unity of the Saints ever show the wisdom of his counsels.”
The next hand-cart was drawn by three young women…. The tears rolled down the cheek of many a man who you would have thought would not, could not, shed a tear; but the scene was exciting in the extreme and most everybody felt sympathetic and joyous. I could scare refrain from tears. Richard [Charles’s brother] cried like a child, and amongst the women the crying was pretty near universal.
Mary Powell Sabin, a twelve-year-old Welsh girl in the Ellsworth party, later recalled that Brigham Young himself and several Apostles gave the emigrants their first food—watermelons: “Pres. Young told us to eat moderately of the mellon, to eat the pink, not to eat into the green.” The Prophet then spoke to the whole company. “He told us that we had fulfilled a prophecy. He also said that although we had endured privations and hunger on the plains we should never again feel the pangs of starvation if we would do right and live right.”
Only hours behind the Ellsworth train, the McArthur Company entered Salt Lake City in time to share in the celebration. Yet not every handcart pioneer’s heart was filled with joy as he reached Zion. William Aitken, a thirty-six-year-old dentist in the McArthur Company, who had traveled with his eleven-year-old son and fourteen-year-old daughter, would apostatize within the year and flee Salt Lake City the next April. In a letter published in the Edinburgh News in 1857, Aitken described the emigrants as they entered Salt Lake as “wearied and worn down, the bones almost through the skin, not only of myself but of all that were in the company.” He added that the party “were half starved to the bargain, our whole allowance being 12 ounces of flour per day, and we did not even get so much.”
Aitken’s most serious criticism is nowhere corroborated in the surviving records of the Ellsworth and McArthur Companies. It may be merely the bitter exaggeration of a disillusioned apostate. Yet if it is true, it indicates that the kind of sanctimonious judgments reflected in John Oakley’s callous diary entries—if a Saint faltered or died on the trail, it was proof of moral failure—were built into the very handcart plan. “It is the policy of the Church,” wrote Aitken, “to leave the weak, the infirm, and the old by the way, that they may have no paupers to support.”
AN ACCURATE COUNT of the number of deaths within the Ellsworth and McArthur Companies will probably never be made. The official Ellsworth journal lists 272 Saints by name, of whom thirty-three are identified as “backed out,” twelve as “dead.” But as this list omits any mention of the thirty “Italian” Saints—at least four of whom are recorded in various diaries as dying along the way—that roster cannot be complete. McArthur acknowledged “only the loss of 8 souls. 7 died, and one, a young man, age 20 years, we never could tell what did become of him.”
Hafen and Hafen fix the number of deaths as thirteen and seven, respectively. (The admitted disappearance of the twenty-year-old in the McArthur Company is not counted by the Hafens as a death.) Without citing sources, the company narratives in the LDS Archives elevate the numbers slightly, to sixteen deaths in the Ellsworth Company, ten among the McArthur emigrants. In all likelihood, even these counts are too low. None of the diaries, for instance, mentions perhaps the cruelest death of all, that of John McCleve, an Irishman from Belfast traveling with his wife and seven children in the McArthur Company, who gave up the ghost on September 24, only two days short of Salt Lake City.
The original counts of 280 Saints in the Ellsworth Company, 220 in the McArthur, seem reliable. If we take fifty as a minimum estimate of dropouts between the two parties, and accept the LDS Archives’ count of twenty-six dead, then the mortality rate in the first two handcart companies was about 6 percent. If we guess a hundred dropouts, that figure rises to almost 7 percent. Either rate is slightly above
John Unruh’s average of 4 percent among all emigrating parties between 1840 and 1860, but it remains a remarkably low toll, given the conditions under which the handcart pioneers traveled. Without the critical resupplies at Deer Creek and farther west, the mortality rate would have been much higher. But the ultimate credit for the Saints’ survival must go to their genuinely heroic perseverance and fortitude.
In the days and weeks after the first two handcart companies reached Salt Lake, the colony engaged in an orgy of joy and self-congratulation. The Deseret News baldly asserted, “This journey has been performed with less than the average amount of mortality usually attending ox trains.” In an emotional speech in the bowery meeting hall only two days after the companies’ arrival, Heber C. Kimball, the church’s First Counselor and Brigham Young’s closest confederate, gave vent to a characteristically apocalyptic vision of future emigration:
I am very thankful that so many of the brethren have come in with hand-carts; my soul rejoiced, my heart was filled and grew as big as a two-bushel basket. Two companies have come through safe and sound. Is this the end of it? No; there will be millions on millions that will come much in the same way, only they will not have hand-carts, for they will take their bundles under their arms, and their children on their backs and under their arms, and flee; and Zion’s people will have to send out relief to them, for they will come when the judgments come on the nations.
At the same meeting in the bowery, Young basked in the success of his “experiment”:
I think it is now proven to a certainty that men, women and children can cross the plains, from the settlements on the Missouri river to this place, on foot and draw hand-carts, loaded with a good portion of the articles needed to sustain them on the way.
To me this is no more a matter of fact this morning, after seeing the companies that have crossed the plains, than it was years ago.
The Prophet elaborated in this I-told-you-so vein by spinning out an odd homily:
My reasoning has been like this: Take small children, those that are over five years of age, and if their steps were counted and measured, those that they take in the course of one day, you would find that they had taken enough to have traveled from 12 to 20 miles.
Count the steps that a woman takes when she is doing her work, let them be measured, and it will be found that in many instances she had taken steps enough to have traveled from 15 to 20 miles a day; I will warrant this to be the case. The steps of women who spin would, in all probability, make from 20 to 30 miles a day.
So with men, they do not consider the steps they make when they are at their labor; they are all the time walking. Even our masons upon the walls are all the time stepping; they take a step almost at every breath.
“I am not a good walker,” the Prophet asserted, “though I have walked a great deal in the course of my life.” He went on to recount the longest pedestrian journey of his life, an 1834 missionary tour, during which he claimed to have walked two thousand miles, averaging forty miles a day for weeks on end with little trouble. Young did acknowledge that “the hand-carts look rather broken up, but if they had been made of good seasoned timber, they would have come in as nice as when they started with them.” And, “True, the brethren and sisters that came in with hand-carts have eaten up their provisions, and some have hired their clothing brought, and they had but little on their carts when they came in.”
Yet the moral was plain. In the euphoria of the moment, Young was happy to voice it:
As for health, it is far healthier to walk than to ride, and better every way for the people….
To have to walk a thousand miles?—Those who get into the Celestial Kingdom will count this a very light task in the end, and if they have to walk thousands of miles they will feel themselves happy for the privilege, that they may know how to enjoy celestial glory.
If anything, at that bowery meeting Young was upstaged by Edmund Ellsworth, who delivered a truly fanatical analysis of his company’s success. Ellsworth sincerely believed that the devil was in his party’s midst, causing all the troubles the pioneers faced, “using his influence and doing his best, with sickness, weakness, and fatigue, breaking down the carts, etc., to discourage the faithful and sink their spirits.”
Given his druthers, Ellsworth would have accomplished the journey in even purer style. He told the bowery congregation:
I regret that there was a wagon in our company, for I realized that wagons had a tendency to destroy the faith of our brethren and sisters; for if they were sick a little they felt that they could get into the wagons.
I am persuaded that if there had been no wagons for such people, there would have been none sick, or weak, but that their faith would have been strong in the name of the Lord.
A few deaths happened in our company, but this was doubtless due mainly to the fact…that it was in a great degree composed of infirm people, and many of them had been accustomed to different kinds of labor to what they have experienced this year.
Some had been raised at work under ground all their lives, and been subject only to that kind of exercise, and through this they had accumulated diseases and their lungs had been affected; and some were nearly dead when they left the old country.
In a speech given two weeks after the monumental bowery meeting, Young boasted that “Br. Ellsworth performed the journey in 63 days and br. McArthur in 61½.” This is so far from the truth that it can only be characterized as a deliberate lie. In reality, the Ellsworth Company, leaving Iowa City on June 9 and arriving in Salt Lake City on September 26, had been 110 days on the trail. The McArthur Company was a mere two days faster. But the average Saint in Salt Lake had little idea when the handcarts had departed from Iowa, and the congregation dearly wanted to hear what their leader was telling them.
Evidently, Young also wanted to pretend that his prediction of a sixty-odd-day passage by handcart had come to pass. In truth, the Ellsworth and McArthur Companies had averaged a little less than twelve miles a day—quite a creditable pace, but far short of the fifteen to twenty to thirty the Prophet had envisioned.
Among the new arrivals in Zion that September, there were some curious and poignant sequelae. Mary McCleve, a sixteen-year-old Irish girl who lost her father, John, only two days before reaching Salt Lake City, was married only six weeks after the end of her journey to a sixty-one-year-old man. “It was love at first sight,” she would report seventy-six years later, “even though he had three grown girls older than myself…. Ten children blessed our union.”
But William Butler, who had staggered through Echo Canyon in the dark, resigned himself to death, and had to turn over his stock to his wife, Emma, suffered a diametrically opposite denouement. As the couple neared Salt Lake, Butler later ruefully disclosed, “We were meet on our way going into the city by a woman wife of John Pannel Wright. from south willow creek.—she used her influence to induce my wife to leave me and go home with her. her Man was three days waiting in the City to take my wife home with him.”
Twiss Bermingham, the scrupulous diarist in the McArthur Company, saw his faith quickly dissolve in Salt Lake City. The following year, he apostatized and returned to Florence, where he became a schoolteacher. A version of his diary that was not published until 1937, in the American Legion Magazine, reveals that the church was not above expurgating original documents as they were transcribed into the official LDS Archives. In Bermingham’s last diary entry, on September 21, the sentence “Conduct of the men from the Valley who came to meet us was disgraceful” was struck from every version except the one finally published by the non-Mormon American Legion Magazine.
William Aitken, that much angrier apostate, rode out of Salt Lake City with three hundred other apostates in April 1857, well armed and apparently in fear of ambush on the trail. The men, women, and children were “all determined to get off or die,” Aitken later wrote. After a hard journey through heavy snows, the apostates reached the safety of the States. “Thousands in Utah would be glad to be with
us, though in the same condition,” Aitken averred.
As for Archer Walters, the loyal carpenter and burier of the dead—he succumbed to dysentery only two weeks after reaching Zion. His death, according to contemporary experts, was “caused by eating corn-meal and molasses, and aggravated by his weakened condition and lowered resistance resulting from exposure, under-nourishment, and physical exhaustion during the thirteen hundred mile journey.” Walters’s five children remained loyal to the church, and by 1937 he had five hundred descendants in Utah.
Meanwhile, even as the Saints in Zion rejoiced in the arrival of the first two handcart companies, the portent that would ultimately develop into catastrophe was already coalescing hundreds of miles to the east. In New York City, President John Taylor had received more than 1,600 Saints who had sailed from Liverpool in May: 764 aboard the Thornton, 856 aboard the Horizon. He had sent them on to Iowa, not without worrying about the lateness of the season. The Thornton emigrants reached Iowa City on June 26, the Horizon Saints not until July 8. These pioneers would make up the fourth and fifth handcart companies of 1856.
Brigham Young would later claim to know nothing about these late-arriving pilgrims, not even of their existence, but this, too, is a demonstrable falsehood. On June 11, from Iowa City, William Woodward, one of the officials in charge of the eastern end of the handcart migration, wrote to Heber Kimball in Salt Lake City. His newsy epistle contained this pregnant paragraph:
We have heard that another ship load of emigrants have arrived at New York by the ship “Thornton” numbering when they left Liverpool 764 souls. James G. Willie, Millen Atwood, & Moses Clough preside over the Thornton’s company. We expect them at this point by the 16th or 17th of June.
When did this letter reach Salt Lake? Normally the arrival dates of such documents are by now impossible to determine, but in this case, a clerk in Young’s office marked a filing notation on the back of the original letter: “Recd July 30/56, Eastern Mail.”
Devil's Gate Page 14
