Temperamentally, Elizabeth Sermon was the polar opposite of James Bleak. Though she apparently did not keep a journal during the trek, many years later she left a reminiscence of the journey. What Bleak telegraphically understates, she brings into vivid relief. Like many another pilgrim, Sermon was shocked upon arriving at Iowa City to learn that she would have to sell or abandon most of the belongings she had hauled all the way from England. Still, she put a brave face on the sacrifice:
My bed, sixty pounds, was sold for four dollars, my sheets, boots, shoes and my clothing, but a basque were sold. I remember my old dress split every time I stooped. I had no stockings or shoes. Well, I kept up pretty well; work was hard, bed was hard, but still my shoulders were to the wheel and I think I pulled first fate [rate] for a beginner in shafts. They said, “Sister Sermon will get to Zion; she draws well.” I think it was my faith did it mostly, but it weakened some before my journey was completed, but not lost.
Crossing Nebraska, the Sermon family began to break down:
We were very hungry, but did not dare touch only our allowances, one pound for each adult and one fourth for each child. I would make a scone cake, but we could eat it all in one meal. My husband’s health began to fail and his heart almost broken to see me pulling in shafts. Myself and children hungry, almost naked, footsore, and himself nearly done for. Many trials came after this. My oldest boy had the mountain fever, we had to haul him in the cart, there was no room in the wagon. One day we started him out before the carts in the morning to walk with the aged and sick, but we had not gone far on our journey before we found him lying by the roadside, unable to go farther. I picked him up and put him on my back and drew my cart as well, but could not manage far, so put him in the cart, which made three children and my luggage. My husband failing more each day, the captain put a young man to help me for a short time. My other son Henry walked at seven years old.
Even at the remove of decades, a lingering sense of indignation infuses Sermon’s reminiscence:
I will here state there was no time crossing the rivers to stop and take off clothing, but had to wade through and draw our carts at the same time with our clothes dripping wet had to dry in the sun and dust as merrily on our way we go until we reach the valley, oh, like a herd of stock or something worse. I was thinking the handcart system was not very pleasant, yet I thought it was the fault of the captain.
(Even her paraphrase of “The Handcart Song” has a derisive ring.)
It was not long before the daily grind of hunger tempted some of the Martin Company Saints to steal food from one another. In his diary for September 21, John Jaques glumly recorded, “Cold, wet, rainy morning. Someone stole a cow’s foot from my cart, also treacle, spice, meat, etc. from Brother John Oldham’s cart. and a meat dumpling from another brother’s cart.” In an 1879 reminiscence published in the Salt Lake Daily Herald, Jaques recounted in much greater detail a petty theft that would seem comical were the emigrants’ hunger at that point not so dire:
In one family there were two or three grown-up girls, and one of them attended much to the cooking. One evening she had made and baked a very nice cake before going to prayers, and she set it up on edge against the tent while she went to prayer meeting. When she got back to her tent she went for her cake. On picking it up it seemed diminished marvellously in weight. Presently she exclaimed, with tears in her eyes, “Oh, mother, somebody has been and taken every bit of crumb out of my cake and left the crust!” Some sharper, who either had not been to prayers, or who had loiteringly delayed his going, or had got through them with singularly swift dispatch for his own ulterior purposes, had discovered the girl’s cake, taken a fancy to it, pulled it in two, eaten the soft and warm inside, put the two crusts together again, and reared them carefully against the tent as they were. The poor girl thought that was really too bad, yet no doubt she felt thankful to get even the crust of her cake back again from that hungry pilferer.
Once the company reached the buffalo country, it ought to have been able to supplement the meager daily ration of flour with bison meat. But the British and Danish Saints were novice hunters. What is more, at least two of the pioneers recorded that the party was not allowed to shoot buffalo, because to do so would antagonize the Indians who depended on the herds as a staple part of their diet. One of those two informants elaborated, “We saw a great many buffalo as we traveled up the Platte River. The people were forbidden to kill them, as it made the Indians angry. So they hired the Indians to kill what they needed to eat. An Indian sold a man a whole buffalo for five cents’ worth of tobacco. Both parties were satisfied.”
As the grassy plains of eastern Nebraska gave way to prairie farther west, stands of timber grew increasingly scarce. Material for campfires was often hard to come by, so the pioneers went to bed supperless, or cooked dinner on smoldering piles of buffalo chips. Despite the fact that the party was following the North Platte River, sand hills and other obstacles often forced them far from its banks, and water was frequently hard to find. On more than one occasion the company pushed on well into the night to reach water, and some of the sources were barely potable.
Many years later, Josiah Rogerson, fifteen at the time, reconstructed the morning routine that preceded the Martin Company’s setting out on the trail:
John Watkins was our bugler, and his cornet was heard every morning to “wake up” between 5 and 6 o’clock. Then again we heard his cornet to “strike tents” and to meeting—not later than 6 or 7 a.m.
These meetings every morning lasted from fifteen minutes to half an hour, when prayer was offered, a verse or two sung from one of our hymns, then a few remarks from Captain Martin, Tyler and the captains of the hundreds as to the health and condition of their companies and suggestions as to facilitating our progress; then our breakfast cooked and partaken of with haste; the tent poles and (about this date) the tents were taken to the four-mule team, the bedding rolled up, the cart packed, and we were generally in line in single file and on our journey by 7:30 to 8 a.m. at the latest.
Also many years later, John Southwell could not banish the sound of that “cornet” from his memory: “But oh! That bugle, that awful bugle. How disgusting it was to the poor, weary souls who needed rest rather then to hear the tirade of abuse uttered by that man who liked to talk and call down the curses of Almighty God upon the disobedient after a hard days march.” (It is not clear if this tyrant was Edward Martin or one of his sub-captains.) “Tired and weary as they were, some of the older people would lie down on their hard beds and almost instantly be in the land of dreams. Than that accursed bugle would blow the call for prayers.”
Many of the pilgrims were already weak or ill as they left Florence, and their numbers swelled with the hardships of the voyage. The tales of invalids being carried by their relatives and friends on their hand-carts challenge our modern imagination. Forty-one-year-old Margaret McBride, traveling with her husband and five children, ages two to sixteen, became too ill to walk not far out of Florence. About a dozen years after the trek, her son Heber recalled,
I being the oldest boy just past 13 years and my sister 3 years older than me we had to pull the handcart all the way but Mother being sick and nothing for her comfort she failed very fast she would start out in the morning and walk as far as she could then she would give out and ly down and wait till we came along, and we would take her on our cart and haul her along till we came to camp.
On September 7, twenty-two-year-old Samuel Openshaw had to pull a cart on which lay his two sisters, aged fourteen and twenty: “Eleanor has the Ague and Diree and is so badly that we had to pull her in the hand cart. Eliza also is yet so weak that we had to pull her also in the hand cart which made it just as much as we could pull.” Eleanor recovered, but a week later Eliza was still prostrate on the cart.
One of the bravest emigrants was a crippled boy, whose “lower limbs were paralyzed and his body badly deformed but he was strong in the faith. He was able to propel himself with surprising spe
ed with the use of crutches.” Fifty-seven years after the journey, John Southwell would recall his fate on the Nebraska trail:
On the road the old father missed him. The road followed down an old dry bed of a creek but finally crossed on to the other side where we expected to get back of him. There were, on the road he was traveling, faint tracks that had been used by stock, perhaps buffalo, and the poor fellow followed those tracks instead of crossing on the other side. We camped for noon near the loup part of the Platt River. Myself and two other men, taking a hand cart, went back to where we left the buffalo tracks and followed down about a mile when to our horror we saw around an old tree two large gray wolves prowling around, and half a dozen eagles hovering over the tree waiting for him to quit his screams and gestulations with his crutches so they would pounce upon him and devour him in his cramped position under the roots of the tree, screaming out his death knell.
We arrived in time to save him from his pending fate, took him out and placed him on the cart we had brought, placed him in position to ride back to camp. How the poor fellow begged us to let him walk, as he said he had promised brother Tyler when we started on our trip that he would walk every foot of the way to Salt Lake City.
The rescue, alas, went for naught. Southwell: “We only saved him to travel a few days longer, which at the close of the sixth days march his trouble in this world came to an end and he was buried on the banks of the Elkhom River where one other passed beyond the veil of tears.”
Through the month of September, the Martin Company suffered a number of other deaths. The count is uncertain, but decades later, Josiah Rogerson reckoned it at about a dozen. The terse, numbed phrases with which various emigrants recorded these deaths indicate just how fatalistically the company took the toll for granted. “A man fell down dead.” “An old sister died this morning, which delayed us until 10 o’clock.” “A change for worse occurred and at three o’clock the old man breathed his last. He was taken from the van and the old lady became so prostrated she became unconscious. She lived until seven o’clock, when she joined her husband in the land of spirits.”
Perhaps the strangest of all the deaths in the Martin Company during this period was recalled in considerably fuller detail many years later by Josiah Rogerson:
Two bachelors, named Luke Carter, from the Clitheroe branch, Yorkshire, England, and William Edward, from Manchester, England, each about 50 to 55 years of age, had pulled a covered cart together from Iowa City, Ia., to here: slept in the same tent, cooked and bunked together, but for several days previous unpleasant and cross words had passed between them.
Edwards was a tall, loosely built and tender man physically, and Carter more stocky and sturdy: he had favored Edwards by letting the latter pull what he could in the shafts for some time past. This morning he grumbled and complained, still traveling, about being tired, give out, and that he couldn’t go any farther. Carter retorted: “Come on. Come on. You’ll be all right again when we get a bit of dinner at noon,” but Edwards kept on begging for him to stop the cart and let him lie down and dee (die). Carter replying, “Well, get out and die then.” The cart was instantly stopped. Carter raised the shafts of the cart. Edwards walked from under and to the south of the road a couple of rods, laid his body down on the level prairie, and in ten minutes he was a corpse.
Like the three handcart parties that had crossed the plains before them, the Willie and Martin Companies were constantly worried about running into hostile Indians. Not long after setting out from Florence, the emigrants were warned by the relatively docile Omaha tribe that Cheyennes farther west were on the rampage. The report was probably accurate, for not long before, soldiers stationed at Fort Kearny in central Nebraska had skirmished with the Cheyennes, killing ten of their men.
From that conflict springs the vexed and convoluted saga of Almon W. Babbitt. The true story of what happened at the end of August 1856 in Cheyenne country will never be sorted out, but both the Willie and Martin Companies became intimately involved with Babbitt’s death.
Babbitt had been a leading member of the LDS church as early as the Nauvoo days. When the Saints abandoned that Illinois stronghold to set out for Zion, Babbitt was one of three trustees left behind to try to sell off the land and buildings, including the grandiose new temple. In 1851, he himself emigrated to Salt Lake City as the captain of a 150-wagon-strong team. Even before that, in 1849, Brigham Young had appointed Babbitt as delegate to Congress, during the first of the church’s several fruitless efforts to win statehood for Deseret. In Utah, Babbitt became one of the first mail carriers, in which service he got to know the Mormon Trail as well as or better than any other Saint.
Babbitt, however, was evidently as flamboyant and reckless as he was talented. In 1851, he was disfellowshiped from the church, under the official charge of “profanity and intemperance in the streets of Kanesville, and for corrupting the morals of the people.” Despite that disgrace, Young later reinstated the man, finding him so useful that in 1852 Babbitt began to serve as secretary for the Utah Territory, making many trips to Washington, D.C., where, according to one historian, he further “incurred Young’s displeasure by carousing around the nation’s capital with the abandon of a French sailor.”
In the summer of 1856, after one such visit to Washington, Babbitt outfitted a wagon in Florence with such luxuries as books, stationery, and a carpet for the Salt Lake statehouse, then sent it west with four men to drive the ox team, and a certain Mrs. Wilson and her child as passengers. Babbitt’s plan was to set off in a lightweight wagon and catch up with the rest of his entourage somewhere along the trail. A rumor had it that the secretary carried with him $20,000 in cash.
The heavier wagon, loaded with goods, left Florence before the Willie party. On August 29, the Willie’s Saints camped with Indians whom one pioneer, James Cantwell, identified as Pawnees (they may have been Omahas). According to Cantwell, “They informed us that the Cheyennes had killed 4 men and a child and taken a woman prisoner. Her name was Wilson but she was never heard from afterwards.”
The next day, the Willie Company came upon the graves of the four teamsters, whom (according to Cantwell) the Pawnees had buried “so shallow that the wolves were digging them up.” (The child may have been kidnapped along with his mother, rather than killed.) Another diarist recorded, “Passed the graves of Babbitt’s teamsters—our men covered up the graves with soil as considerable stench arose from the dead.”
According to Cantwell, “On the 31st Almon Babbit overtook us. He was carrying the mail and had a man with him as guard by the name of Sutherland. when he was [saw] what the Cheyennes had done he was wild with rage, and swore he would kill the first Cheyenne he was [saw].” Despite warnings from the Willie Company, Babbitt set off ahead of the handcart train with only Thomas Sutherland as his companion.
Here the plot thickens. Arriving at Fort Kearny, Babbitt allegedly purchased additional supplies to replace the goods he had lost to the Cheyennes. At the fort, however, he met a party of Mormons also bound for Salt Lake, under the command of Abraham O. Smoot. Theirs was largely a freight mission, as they hauled tons of goods that Young had ordered to be delivered to the territory. One of the men in Smoot’s party was Orrin Porter Rockwell.
Rockwell, of course, had already earned his reputation as perhaps the fiercest and most fearless of all the Danites, Brigham’s secret police. Now a very strange transaction took place. According to an affidavit later sworn by Rockwell, Babbitt hired Rockwell to carry his goods to Salt Lake, since he was determined to push on as fast as he could in his light wagon. The affidavit claimed a staggering total of 5,643 pounds of supplies, including “thirty-three cases of books.” For the hauling, Rockwell was to be paid 14 cents a pound. Indeed, Rockwell eventually collected exactly $790.02 from Babbitt’s estate.
Where did all those goods come from? Had the Cheyennes killed the teamsters and kidnapped Mrs. Wilson and her child, only to leave all the booty on the plains? Granted, thirty-three cases of books
would have been of little value to the Indians, but in the wagon there must have been other goods that they would have coveted. (When the Martin Company came upon the site of the Cheyenne attack on September 23, they found only the burnt remains of Babbitt’s heavy lead wagon.)
Harold Schindler, Rockwell’s sympathetic biographer, insists that both the Kearny soldiers and the Smoot party begged Babbitt not to push on virtually alone. Schindler admits that “no satisfactory explanation has ever come to light regarding Babbitt’s seemingly unreasonable haste to reach Utah.” Nonetheless, Babbitt set out on September 6 in his light wagon, with only Sutherland and another shotgun guard to accompany him.
When Babbitt’s small party failed to show up at Fort Laramie, it was generally assumed that Cheyennes had murdered them as well. Enter, at this point, another emigrant with a keen eye for fishy details. Caleb Green had been hired by Smoot as clerk and assistant commissary for his freight-heavy wagon train. After five months in Salt Lake, Green would grow disenchanted, apostatize, and flee the territory. The diary he kept during the 1856 expedition, though never published, is a fascinating document. Soon after Babbitt’s hasty departure from Fort Kearny, Green noted,
Rockwell + Smoot left camp at night and returned in the morn. the next day. Smoot left the road with some other men and brought a waggon out of the thicket which skirts the Platte at this point we suspected that it was Babbetts as it was very similar.
The suspicions about Rockwell and Smoot were not confined to Green and the one or two other skeptics in the Smoot party. When Rockwell arrived in Fort Laramie hauling more than two tons of Babbitt’s goods, several of the residents of the trading post wondered whether “the Mormon Destroying Angel had notched another victim, an accusation which eventually would reach Washington.” Caleb Green’s diary adds that the scouts at Fort Laramie insisted that the only Indians then at war with whites were two hundred miles away, on the Arkansas River.
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