It is possible that Cheyennes were guilty of the murders and kidnapping of Babbitt’s advance party, as well as of the killing of Babbitt and his two guards. It may be that the first attack was perpetrated by Indians, while Rockwell orchestrated the assassination of Babbitt and his guards, then stole their goods. And it is conceivable that all the murders and depredations were carried out by Rockwell and a fellow Danite or two in the Smoot party. In the darkest scenario, Rockwell would have wiped out Babbitt’s party, and then helped himself not only to the $790.02 in freight-hauling charges, but to whatever cash (whether the rumored $20,000 or far less) the secretary was carrying on his person.
In 1862, Brigham Young cast a possibly unintentional light on this murky episode when he spoke in anger to a federally appointed justice of the Utah Supreme Court. If government officers, the Prophet threatened, “undertake to interfere in affairs that do not concern them, I will not be far off. There was Almon W. Babbitt. He undertook to quarrel with me, but soon afterwards was killed by Indians. He lived like a fool, and died like a fool” (emphasis in original).
Until very recently, historians of the handcart emigration have ignored the Abraham Smoot expedition sharing the Mormon Trail in 1856. Only in 2006 did the iconoclastic historian Will Bagley ferret out details of the freight-hauling enterprise that have important and possibly sinister relevance for the catastrophe in Wyoming.
THE WILLIE COMPANY arrived at Fort Laramie on October 1. To the shock of the emigrants, the “provisions, bedding, etc.” promised by Franklin Richards were nowhere to be seen. Levi Savage recorded his disappointment in a single bitter sentence: “B[r]other Richards has no cattle provided for us here, & no other provisions made.”
The Fort Laramie of 1856 stood not on the site of present-day Laramie, Wyoming, but eighty miles to the northeast, on a bench a mile south of the North Platte River, just east of today’s town of Guernsey. It was not a military establishment, but a trading post, whose hazy origins dated from fur trappers’ cabins built in the 1830s. At the fort, there was a very limited amount of food available for sale, but at exorbitant prices: 20 cents a pound for flour, in contrast with the 3 to 3½ cents per pound that the company had paid in Iowa City. In any event, nearly all the Saints were too poor to purchase much of anything. Levi Savage wrote in his diary that he sold his $20 watch for $11, with which in turn he bought a $6 pair of boots and unspecified other articles.
In the end, Captain Willie was able to buy four hundred pounds of “hard bread”—i.e., soda crackers. One pound of crackers per man, woman, and child in the company amounted to but a feeble boost in provisions. By now, Willie had calculated that the flour supply remaining in the wagons would last only another eighteen days. Salt Lake City was still 509 miles away.
For the first time, Willie realized that drastic measures were called for. He called a meeting of the whole company, at which he offered the estimate that at their present rate of travel, the party would run out of food 350 miles short of Salt Lake. As John Chislett remembered the meeting, “It was resolved to reduce our allowance from one pound [of flour] to three-quarters of a pound per day, and at the same time to make every effort in our power to travel faster.”
The failure of the Fort Laramie resupply has never been adequately explained. Historians struggle to come up with an explanation less damning than sheer negligent indifference on the part of the team of high-ranking missionaries speeding toward Salt Lake City.
Meanwhile the Martin Company, still lagging about a hundred miles behind their brethren in the Willie party, also decided to reduce their rations. In a diary entry on October 3, the anxiety leaks from Samuel Openshaw’s pen: “We continued our journey as quick as we possibly could. The cold increasing upon us. It is severe nights and mornings. Our provisions are running out very fast so that our rations are reduced to 12 ounces of flour per day.”
On October 4, the Willie Company camped thirty-one miles west of Fort Laramie. The official journal laconically recorded: “Benjamin Culley, aged 61, from Sprowston, Norfolk, England, died; also George Ingra, aged 68, from Bassingbourne, Cambridgeshire, England died; also Daniel Gadd, aged 2, from Orwell, Cambridgeshire, England, died. A cow was killed in the afternoon.”
That same night the Martin Company pitched its camp two miles west of the prominent landmark of Scottsbluff, some twenty miles east of what is today the Nebraska-Wyoming border. Jesse Haven’s diary recorded the death of Thomas Tennant at 1:30 in the afternoon. Among the Martin Company Saints, he was one of the most beloved. Certainly no single emigrant did more to advance the cause of the handcart enterprise of 1856. Unlike the vast majority of the Saints, Tennant was a rich Englishman, but he was so stirred by the news of the “divine” handcart plan that he chose to pull his own carriage rather than gather to Zion in a lavishly appointed wagon. And before leaving England, he accepted Young’s offer to buy a house in Salt Lake City for $25,000, the whole sum of which went to the Perpetual Emigration Fund, thereby enabling scores of paupers to join the exodus.
On that same day, October 4, Franklin Richards’s speedy caravan of light wagons drawn by mules rolled into Salt Lake City. What Richards told Brigham Young would shock Zion to the core.
CHAPTER SIX
ROCKY RIDGE
The message that Franklin Richards delivered to the Prophet that October day was that, among the Willie and Martin handcart companies and the Hunt and Hodgetts wagon trains, there were some 1,300 Saints still scattered along the Mormon Trail. At the time, and ever after, Young insisted that he had no knowledge even of the existence of the hundreds of emigrants who had crossed the Atlantic on the Thornton and Horizon, and who had proceeded to Iowa City to begin their long, arduous trek to Zion. We know that the Prophet’s protestation is untrue, however, because of the existence of the June 11 letter from William Woodward to Heber Kimball announcing the imminent arrival in Iowa of the Thornton Saints, with the note on the back indicating its receipt in Young’s office on July 30.
Nonetheless, historians have blithely accepted the Prophet’s convenient fabrication. For example, as Andrew Olsen writes in The Price We Paid, on receiving the news from Richards on October 4, “Brigham Young was stunned.”
The Prophet did react to the message forcefully and with alacrity. The very next day, he convened a meeting in the bowery attended by many of the Salt Lake Saints. Young himself spoke first. After a stern preamble warning mothers in the audience to shush their babies and the whole congregation to refrain from whispering and “shuffling of the feet” (in the day before microphones, orators at such large gatherings had virtually to shout to be heard in the back rows), the Prophet announced the “text” for the day. “On the 5th day of October, 1856,” he proclaimed, “many of our brethren and sisters are on the plains with hand-carts, and probably many are now 700 miles from this place.” (The Martin Company at that moment was actually 560 miles east of Salt Lake City.)
“That is my religion,” Young continued; “that is the dictation of the Holy Ghost that I possess, it is to save the people. We must bring them in from the plains.” Ever the pragmatist, he proceeded at once to specify the logistics of the rescue expedition he was prepared to launch. The Salt Lake Saints must furnish “60 good mule teams and 12 or 15 wagons”; also “12 tons of flour and 40 good teamsters.” Young wanted “good horses and mules” to pull the wagons, not oxen. The former carpenter went on to itemize the gear each wagon team required: “harness, whipple-trees, neck-yokes, stretchers, lead chains, &c.”
The Prophet thundered on: “Go and bring in those people now on the plains, and attend strictly to those things which we call temporal…otherwise your faith will be in vain; the preaching you have heard will be in vain to you, and you will sink to hell, unless you attend to the things we tell you.”
After Young finished, Daniel Spencer, one of the returning missionaries in Richards’s entourage, rose to speak. Despite the looming catastrophe, Spencer felt the need to voice his unswerving confidence in the handcart p
lan. “Many thought it impossible,” he asserted, “but the faith that the people had in the works of President Young caused them to come forward, and we now feel convinced that it is the best way of emigrating the Saints to this city.” Spencer’s exhortations for rescue volunteers were expressed in a softer tone than Young’s commands: “Well, now, we feel for those brethren and sisters that are still upon the plains, for we have been with them in the old countries and seen their faith and diligence, and now we feel to plead with you to assist them…. You must recollect this is a great work which they are performing, and they have done this to honor our Prophet and to carry out his designs.”
Yet as to what had gone wrong, Spencer could only express bafflement—or perhaps he kept his finger-pointing in his pocket. “The emigration is late, quite late,” he told the congregation, “but it is useless for me to undertake to explain why it is so.”
And then, after Spencer, Franklin Richards addressed the meeting. Of the three speakers, he seemed the least capable of grasping the gravity of the situation. In words that would come to haunt him, he blandly averred, “The Saints that are now upon the plains, about one thousand with hand-carts, feel that it is late in the season, and they expect to get cold fingers and toes. But they have this faith and confidence towards God that he will overrule the storms that may come in the season thereof and turn them away, that their path may be free from suffering more than they can bear. They have confidence to believe that this will be an open fall.”
The response to the rescue appeal on the part of the rank-and-file Saints was extraordinary. Despite the crop failures of the previous year, the faithful readily donated the tons of flour Young had specified. They also offered horses and mules, wagons, and all kinds of warm clothes and bedding. And there was no shortage of volunteers—in the Prophet’s formula, “good young men who know how to drive teams”—to set out almost at once on the return trail. Six of the volunteers, in fact, came from Richards’s party, who spent only a few days in Salt Lake before heading east again.
October 6, the day after the bowery meeting, happened to be the date of the semiannual General Conference of the church. Young seized the occasion to organize the rescue mission even more vigorously. The minutes of the conference reveal a charade of noblesse oblige that opened the proceedings, as the Prophet “called upon those who were willing to go, or send teams, to come to the stand and report; saying that if there were not enough teams, teamsters, &c., volunteered, he would close the conference, and, with br. Kimball, start back to help those companies.
“Pres. Kimball remarked, it is moved and seconded that Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and Jedediah M. Grant go back to help the P. E. Fund Emigrants. Unanimously negatived.” Thus the congregation enacted the charade, voting unanimously against sending the three highest-ranking officials in Zion to hit the rescue trail themselves. (After the pioneer trek to the Great Basin in 1847 and the Prophet’s return journey the next year to gather more Saints from Winter Quarters, Young would go on only two extended trips during the rest of his life—a reconnaissance mission into Idaho in 1857 to ascertain whether the whole Mormon colony might take refuge there, should the U.S. Army invade Utah Territory, and an 1870 tour of Mormon colonies in Arizona and Southern Utah.)
Yet even as the colony awoke to the potential for a catastrophe on the plains, speakers at the General Conference, such as the leaders of the first and third handcart companies, felt the need to reassert their faith in the “divine” plan. According to the minutes,
Elder Edward Bunker sketched the travels of his hand-cart company, and alluded to their having been led by the Lord all the way.
Elder Ellsworth sung, “Hand-carts rolling.”
On October 7, the first rescue wagons lumbered out of Salt Lake City, heading up Emigration Canyon toward Fort Bridger. They were led by George D. Grant, who, after several years of missionary work in England, his return to the United States, and his lightning-quick journey in the Richards party from Florence to Zion, got to spend only three days in Salt Lake City before setting out on what would prove to be a grim and grueling mission of mercy. Before the end of October, not twelve or fifteen wagons, but several score, would be rolling eastward to try to save the handcart Saints.
Some LDS historians and scholars see Young’s prompt and ambitious launching of the rescue effort as the Prophet’s finest hour. Even T. B. H. Stenhouse, that influential and articulate later apostate, gave Young the highest praise for his response to Richards’s message:
When the news reached Brigham Young, as already stated, he did all that man could do to save the remnant and relieve the sufferers. Never in his whole career did he shine so gloriously in the eyes of the people. There was nothing spared that he could contribute or command.
Leonard Arrington, author of Brigham Young: American Moses, manages to avoid altogether any mention of the handcart emigration and disaster, except in one paragraph in an epilogue aimed at fixing Young’s legacy for the posterity of Utah and the church. There Arrington cites the rescue mission as a prime example of the Prophet’s concern for “temporal salvation” as opposed to “spiritual”; i.e., saving people’s lives as well as their souls.
Whether or not the launching of the rescue was Young’s finest hour, to see it simply as a statesman’s bold and prescient answer to a looming crisis is to obscure other vexing and as yet unsolved questions about the chain of events that led to that crisis. Only a few days after the Willie Company reached Fort Laramie to discover that Richards’s party had failed to provide the expected resupply, the company was granted a second promise. According to John Chislett, “About this time Captain Willie received a letter from apostle Richards informing him that we might expect supplies to meet us from the valley by the time we reached South Pass.” How this letter was conveyed to Willie remains unexplained, though sometimes messages were simply tacked to signboards erected along the trail. In any event, this second promise boded a desperately hungry onward march of another 275 miles.
Why did Franklin Richards make these promises, unless he thought he could fulfill them? Even for a man with his almost blind faith in the power of God to keep the storms away from the late-arriving pilgrims, it would seem heartless in the extreme to dangle imaginary carrots in front of the famished emigrants. Instead, Richards must have believed in the promises. Yet for the rest of his life, as far as we know, the Apostle never publicly explained why the resupplies failed to materialize.
The first three handcart parties, under Captains Ellsworth, McArthur, and Bunker, it will be recalled, had been successfully resupplied by substantial wagon trains heading east out of Salt Lake, carrying hefty loads of flour. Those rendezvous, which undoubtedly saved many lives, took place as far back along the trail as Deer Creek in eastern Wyoming.
Where were the resupply caravans for the Willie and Martin Companies? On the face of it, the apparent absence of such resupply trains might be construed to buttress Young’s claim that he had no idea the Willie and Martin Companies were on the plains.
Here, however, the documentary record gets truly murky. In the Deseret News on October 22, 1856, Franklin Richards and Daniel Spencer published a very cursory account of their rapid jaunt from Florence, which gives a few salient details of the team’s doings between September 13, when it parted from the Willie Company at the North Bluff Fork of the Platte, and October 4, when it arrived in Salt Lake City. In fact, during that ride, the returning missionaries encountered three separate resupply trains headed east along the trail. They seem to have been much smaller outfits than the teams that had so vitally resupplied the first three handcart companies earlier in the summer: one is described as consisting of only three men and “2 wagons of flour for the companies.”
Richards’s party met the first of these resupply teams at Independence Rock, the second fifteen miles east of Pacific Springs, and the third at the Big Sandy crossing west of South Pass. At the times of those encounters, the resupply teams had thus traveled 332, 243, and 19
6 miles, respectively, from Salt Lake. They were weeks ahead of the first rescue team, which would not be launched until October 7. On September 24, when Richards’s party met the first resupply team at Independence Rock, the wagons with their precious flour stood only 244 miles west of the Willie party. Had the handcart company pushed on westward at a rate of only ten miles a day, while the resupply train continued eastward at fifteen miles a day, the two would have closed the gap and met only ten days later. Even a few wagonloads of flour would have meant a life-saving difference for the Willie Company.
The tragic fact, however, is that none of the three resupply teams ever met up with the Willie Saints, let alone with the Martin Company. The reasons for those failures are hard to divine. Richards and Spencer’s account in the Deseret News indicates somewhat cryptically that “Br. Smith returned with us”—John Smith being the leader of the three-man team met at Independence Rock. Did the other two men push on eastward with the flour? As for the second resupply party, whom Richards met near Pacific Springs, the Apostle urged the team (likewise composed of only three men) to “cache their flour and go on to meet Br. Willie.” This was truly puzzling advice: what good would the resuppliers do the Willie Saints without the essential flour? How much faster might they travel after caching it? As far as we know, the cached flour was never reclaimed. On meeting the third resupply party on September 28, Richards and Spencer gave the team leader “the same counsel, to go on with his teams to help br. Willie.”
Tackling this thorny problem, LDS historian Andrew Olsen speculates that the resupply flour might have gone not to the handcart parties, but to the several wagon trains that were weeks or days ahead of the Willie Company—including Abraham Smoot’s freight-hauling caravan. But Olsen also points to the diary of Robert T. Burton, one of the rescuers in the vanguard party under the charge of George Grant. On October 13, just east of Fort Bridger, Burton reported crossing paths with “some teams returning that had been back on the road and got tired of waiting.” “Waiting”—the word itself is disturbing. Instead of pushing on to meet the starving handcart pioneers (for after meeting Richards, the resuppliers would have known that the Willie Company was woefully short on rations), did the feckless men with their wagons full of flour simply camp out and wait for the handcarts to come to them? And then, when the rendezvous did not take place as soon as they expected, did they simply turn around and head back to Salt Lake City?
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