In his speeches and letters, Brigham Young again and again resorted to the metaphor of separating the wheat from the chaff. In the territory, the Reformation “floated off by the summer breezes” the chaff of apostates, unwilling plural wives, sinners of all stripes, and the merely fainthearted, lazy, or unclean. The thresher ranged from disfellowship to excommunication to banishment to murder.
Such a set of mind helps to explain Young’s often coldhearted attitude toward the handcart pioneers. Like the Reformation, the ordeal by handcart (in Wallace Stegner’s phrase) separated the wheat from the chaff. Those who “backed out” in Iowa City or Florence, those who despaired of finishing the trek, even those who collapsed and died along the trail, were perhaps not worthy of Zion after all.
ON MAY 4, 1856, the sailing ship Thornton pulled out of Liverpool harbor. On board were 608 English and Scottish Mormons intending to emigrate to Zion, as well as 162 Scandinavian Saints, the vast majority of them Danes. With them sailed Franklin D. Richards, president of the European Mission, who had done so much to recruit British converts and start them on their way to Utah. During the Atlantic crossing, Richards served as captain over the throng of European emigrants. From Iowa City, however, he planned to ride by light carriage with a small contingent of fellow returning missionaries, making a far more rapid journey to Salt Lake City than the handcarts could accomplish.
The Atlantic crossing was largely uneventful, except for the day on which, as twenty-five-year-old Susannah Stone would recall many decades later, “the people’s galley or cock [cook] house took fire and burned down which caused a great excitement.” Stone added, “But through the blessings of the Lord we were saved.” According to a Danish passenger, John Ahmanson, during the month-long passage six Saints died, three infants were born, and two marriages were celebrated.
Yet another Danish passenger, Peter Madsen, summarized in his journal a stern lecture on morals delivered to the Saints by President Richards in mid-voyage:
5 o’clock the president held council and instructed the brothers who had watch at night to have close supervision over the young people that no unallowable association and coming together would take place. It was discovered that such had taken place among the English; and an unclean spirit was found which should be rectified. On the other hand such lewdness was not found at all among the Danish saints.
Despite the lapses of the English young people, so well behaved were the passengers that on June 11, with New York City almost in sight, the ship’s captain declared that “no company which he had transported to America could compare with them.”
The Thornton arrived in New York on June 14, where the 770 Saints were greeted by President John Taylor. With some misgivings about the lateness of the season, Taylor sent 450 of the emigrants on by railroad and steamboat to Iowa City, which they reached after another eleven days. Back in April, Taylor had already gone on record as saying, “I wish the passengers, on their arrival at the place of outfitting, to be prepared to start the next day, or, in a day or two, at furthest.”
But it was the same old story: when the Thornton Saints arrived in Iowa City, no handcarts were waiting for them. According to forty-six-year-old emigrant William James, whose testimony was passed down to a descendant, “When the company saints from Liverpool on the ship Thornton arrived in Iowa Camp quite a stir was created of great concern for they were totally unexpected.” Workers superintended by master carpenter Chauncey Webb hastily cobbled together about a hundred handcarts. These carriages were even more rickety than the ones the first three parties had pushed and pulled westward, for “There was a scarcety of seasoned wood and other materials. They frantically gathered together what was available and went to work.”
By now, Webb was deeply disheartened by his weeks of handcart-building. According to his daughter, who would later become one of Brigham Young’s wives, Webb was not only thwarted by the insufficient supply of good timber, but by the same ruthless parsimony on the part of the Iowa City officials as would stamp the whole pageant of the hand-cart emigration.
The agents all talked economy…. They did not want to furnish iron for the tires, as it was too expensive; raw hide, they were sure, would do just as well…. A thorough workman himself, [my father] wanted good materials to work with; but the reply invariably was, “O, Brother Webb, the carts must be made cheap. We can’t afford this expenditure; you are too extravagant in your outlay.”
The new company of Saints had to wait three weeks before they could be outfitted with handcarts. That delay would prove hugely consequential. “When William first saw the carts he wanted to laugh and then he wanted to cry,” reported William James’s descendant. “How could such a contraption get his family to Zion?”
One of the men in the company saw these hardships as an opportunity for building character. “Here is the place to try a man what he is,” he wrote to President John Taylor in New York. “If a brother comes in camp and don’t catch hold of an axe and cut down a tree for to make hand carts, or break in a pair of oxen, or make himself useful in some way, he is but little respected. This is the place to make a man know himself.”
According to Peter Madsen, it was only on June 30, after the Saints had lingered for almost a week in Iowa City, that the agents in charge informed the emigrants about the strict handcart weight limit. As Madsen wrote in his diary:
It was announced to the handcart company that no person would be able to bring more than 17 pounds per person on the carts. The remaining goods could be transported to the valley for ______ dollars per 100 pounds by some of the inhabitants. Some people sold their clothes in Iowa…. Sold flour to Line Larsen for 35 cents. At 8 o’clock prayer meeting. Speeches by Ahmunsen, Christiansen, and Larsen were given against grumbling, dissatisfaction and complaining which had crept in among some of the company’s members who had not yet learned their duties and obedience to God’s law and his servants.
The hardship that this unforeseen restriction worked on Saints who had hauled their most precious belongings all the way from Britain or Denmark to Iowa is made clear in a rueful July 5 entry in Madsen’s diary (which was not translated until the twentieth century):
At 8 o’clock some of the brethren went to Iowa with transport handcarts loaded with bedding and other items to sell. Some went through the city and sold a few items for a low price. Brother Ahmunsen, who was present, had discovered an auction place and showed the brethren where it was and helped with the sale there. The bedding was sold for 27 to 55 cents per pound. Linen and clothing did not sell well. We have much to do to be able to dispose of our surplus items in order to recover what was paid for the extra weight to this place. I have to pay $8 for 105 pounds of weight. The freight from here to the valley is so high that it has to be materials of good quality in order to pay for itself.
No doubt this draconian edict contributed to a lowering of morale among the handcart Saints, for the leaders kept scolding them in camp meeting lectures. Madsen again, on July 7: “The health of the company is good. To the contrary, it is difficult to preserve a good spirit when many false teachings creep in. This causes the authorities to have much to combat and watch over.”
Finally, on July 15, about five hundred Saints were ready to set out from Iowa City. This fourth handcart company was under the leadership of James G. Willie, a forty-one-year-old Englishman who had come to America and joined the church in New York in 1842. Four years later, he and his American fiancée set out for Nauvoo, but when they found the Mormon stronghold nearly abandoned, they pushed on to Winter Quarters, where, with the hundreds of Saints under Young’s leadership, they spent the winter of 1846–47. The next summer they traveled on by wagon train to Salt Lake City, arriving only three months after Young’s pioneer company.
In 1852, Young ordered Willie back to his native country to serve as a missionary. By now, Willie and his wife had three small children. He was forced to leave them behind during the four years he served his mission in England. A condition of his relea
se in February 1856 was that he take a leadership role in the handcart emigration.
It is hard to glean just what sort of man Willie was. Apparently he never wrote a word about the fateful trek he led, even though he lived to the age of eighty, dying in Cache Valley, Utah, in 1895. The official journal of the company, written by William Woodward, may reflect Willie’s views. Judging from the comments of emigrants in his company, Willie seems to have been a stern taskmaster in the mold of Edmund Ellsworth and Edward Bunker. In one of the few extant photographs of the man, taken late in life, he is nearly bald. His mouth is fixed in a crooked down-turning rictus, and his eyes have a haunted, far-away stare. It is easy to imagine that in this portrait Willie still bears the pain of the ordeal he survived in 1856.
Willie’s second-in-command, Millen Atwood, was also a missionary returning from four years in England, though he had been born in Connecticut. Only a week after arriving in Salt Lake City, Atwood would rise in the Tabernacle to deliver an “account of his mission.” This remarkable speech reveals a loyal champion of the divine hand-cart plan every bit as fanatical as Edmund Ellsworth. In Atwood’s view, despite all the suffering and death they would undergo on the plains, the English Saints were lucky to have been called to Zion. Serving his mission, he recalled,
I have seen some so tired in England, after traveling only 5 or 6 miles to a conference, that they would have to go to bed and be nursed for a week. We stimulated the hand-cart companies with the words of br. Brigham, which went through me like lightning….
But when br. Brigham offered his property so liberally, and the word came that they should gather from England, it ran like fire in dry stubble and the hearts of the poor Saints leapt with joy and gladness; they could hardly contain themselves.
Back home, Atwood insisted, the working-class Saints were so destitute that “we had to buy everything for them, even to their tin cups and spoons. And let me tell you, the fare they had on the plains was a feast to them.” In general, Atwood’s testimony is so zealously upbeat that modern psychology would declare the man to be in denial. “I never enjoyed myself better than in crossing the plains in a hand-cart company,” Atwood proclaimed in the Tabernacle. “The Spirit of the Lord did accompany us and the brethren and sisters enlivened the journey by singing the songs of Zion. They would travel 16, 18, 20, 23, or 24 miles a day and come into camp rejoicing, build their fires, get their suppers, rest, and rise fresh and invigorated in the morning.”
The other sub-captains in the Willie Company, each in charge of his “hundred,” were the young William Woodward, official company clerk; Levi Savage; John Chislett; and John Ahmanson. The latter trio were among the most interesting and articulate of all the thousands of hand-cart pioneers in 1856. Chislett and Ahmanson would both later apostatize, leaving behind coolly neutral accounts of the company’s ordeal that pointedly undercut the fanatical mythologizing of a Millen Atwood.
Ahmanson’s lot was a particularly hard one. A relatively well-to-do Dane, he had planned to purchase a wagon and oxen in Iowa City and travel with his wife by traditional means to Salt Lake City. But on board the Thornton, President Richards had discovered that among the 162 Danes, Ahmanson was the only one who spoke competent English. Richards then “requested” (the word is Ahmanson’s) the man to forgo wagon transport and lead a company of ninety-three Scandinavians pulling handcarts. That request was tantamount to an order. With heavy heart, Ahmanson bade goodbye to his wife, who with other relatively affluent Scandinavians set off for Zion by wagon team, as he took charge as sub-captain of the fifth “hundred” in Willie’s company.
After he left the church, Ahmanson would live in Omaha, where he worked variously as a hardware merchant, a grocer, and a doctor dispensing homeopathic medicine before his death in 1891. In 1876, he wrote in Danish a memoir of his Mormon years, under the title Vor Tids Muhamed. The book was not translated into English until 1984, as Secret History, by which time LDS scholars could find only three extant copies of the original volume. Ahmanson’s memoir is an important contribution not only to the handcart story, but to an understanding of the Mormon kingdom during the mid-1850s, for it adumbrates one of the most trenchant critiques of the faith and its President in all the voluminous (and too often sensationalistic) apostate literature.
As with the Welsh Saints in the Bunker party, the Scandinavians in the Willie Company suffered not only the tribulations of the trail, but the confusion of an all but unbreachable language barrier. And the record of the Scandinavian Saints’ experience in 1856 remains woefully thin. Within the Willie Company, it amounts to scraps of later reminiscence by Mettie Rasmussen and Jens Nielson (himself an extraordinary pioneer, of whom more below), Peter Madsen’s invaluable diary, and Ahmanson’s percipient Secret History.
With some five hundred emigrants, about a hundred handcarts, and five wagons, the Willie entourage was nearly twice as large as any of the three handcart companies that had headed west before it. It would take the company twenty-eight days to cross Iowa and reach Florence, on the west bank of the Missouri River, as it completed the passage in exactly the same time span as the McArthur Company had a month earlier. Along the way, passing through small towns and semi-settled countryside, the Saints were the constant object of curious gawkers. Diaries and memoirs recount the occasional kindness bestowed upon the pioneers by Iowa residents, such as the donation of fifteen pairs of children’s boots on July 31 by a “respectable gentleman” from Fort Des Moines.
Yet the company was also cruelly taunted by onlookers. According to George Cunningham, fifteen years old at the time,
While traveling along, people would mock, sneer, and deride us on every occasion for being such fools as they termed us, and would often throw out inducements to get us to stop. But we told them that we were going to Zion, and would not stop on any account. When we went through a town or settlement, pulling our handcarts as we always had to do, people would turn out in crowds to laugh at us, crying gee and haw as if we were oxen. But this did not discourage us in the least, for we knew that we were on the right track.
On July 25, near Muddy Creek, a bizarre episode occurred. It is documented in the official company journal:
The weather being very warm just before we encamped we were overtaken by the Sheriff with a warrant to search the waggons, &c. under the idea that women were detained contrary to their wish with ropes. After showing their authority, they had permission to examine any part of the Company & were fully satisfied that the report was without foundation & left us.
At the height of summer, the traverse of Iowa was carried out in blazing heat. The official company journal did its best to emphasize high morale among the company, as on July 18: “All are well and in first rate spirits.” But even in this record, William Woodward could not overlook the hardships of the voyage, as he reported five days later, “The sun was excessively hot. We then continued our journey as far as Brush Creek, 13 miles, where we arrived at 7 p.m. with a great many sick & tired out.”
Within five days of starting from Iowa City, the first dropouts left the company ranks. No accurate count of their number is even suggested by the various diaries and reminiscences. There were also deaths along the way. The most curious of them occurred on July 23, the day of “excessively hot” sun, when “Sister Mary Williams from the Worcester Branch of the Worcestershire Conference died on the way, supposed from eating green plums.”
Looking back many years later, a few of the Saints in the Willie Company could gloss over the tribulations of Iowa, claiming, in the words of one, that “the first 200 miles of our journey was filled with pleasant memories.” Another, Sarah Moulton, could even brag in a letter written to a friend from mid-trek, “I never had my health so well in my life before I walked about three hundred miles and pulled the hand cart all the way and we walked sometimes 20 & 17 miles a day and I never had a blister on my foot.”
More typical, though, was the indelible ordeal recorded decades later by Agnes Southworth, who was nine year
s old at the time: “I can yet close my eyes and see everything in panoramic precision before me—the ceaseless walking, walking, ever to remain in my memory. Many times I would become so tired and, childlike, would hang on the cart, only to be gently pushed away. Then I would throw myself by the side of the road and cry. Then realizing they were all passing me by, I would jump to my feet and make an extra run to catch up.”
Even the blindly partisan Millen Atwood was moved to observe:
I have walked day by day by the side of the hand-carts as they were rolling, and when the people would get weary I have seen them by dozens on their knees by the road side crying to the Lord for strength…. So long as you kept the bundle on the hand cart and stimulated them to lay hold of it, they were filled with the Holy Spirit and it seemed as though angels nerved them with strength.
As in all three of the handcart parties that had preceded them, a primary cause of fatigue and illness among the Willie Company was the inadequate food supply. John Chislett later cogently appraised the impact of this deficit:
Our rations consisted of ten ounces of flour to each adult per day, and half that amount to children under eight years of age. Besides our flour we had occasionally a little rice, sugar, coffee, and bacon. But these items (especially the last) were so small and infrequent that they scarcely deserve mentioning. Any hearty man could eat his daily allowance for breakfast. In fact, some of our men did this, and then worked all day without dinner, and went to bed supperless or begged food at the farmhouses as we travelled along.
Exhausted and underfed or not, the bedraggled emigrants still managed to spark their leaders’ wrath. According to the official journal, on August 5, “In the evening Elders Willie & Atwood reproved the Saints for being so dilatory & told them if they did not repent they would not have the blessings of the Lord & would not get through this season.”
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