Elder Joseph A. Young and br. Abel Garr arrived, from the three immigrating companies yet due, at 4 a.m. on the morning of the 13th inst. Elder Young reported the condition of the immigration to be very favorable, considering the lateness of the season, and that abundant relief would reach them soon after he left Fort Bridger.
One wonders whether this absurdly rose-tinted glimpse of the impending disaster reflected Young’s true belief, or simply mouthed the upbeat party line with which the News consistently wrote about the handcart emigration.
As well as flour, the relief wagons carried some five hundred articles of clothing. Robert Burton’s list of these items includes 157 pairs of socks and stockings, 102 pairs of boots and shoes, one hundred coats and jackets, and even, bizarrely, twenty-seven handkerchiefs and fourteen neckties. This itemization meant, however, that only about one out of every two of the suffering Saints received any apparel at all. Those who did were eternally grateful for the gifts. Patience Loader remembered decades later “anice warm quilted hood which was very warm and comfortable I also got apar of Slippers as I was nearly bearfoot.”
At the November 3 council, Grant and the other leaders made another momentous decision. If Grant’s assessment that “not over one-third of br. Martin’s company is able to walk” was not an exaggeration, it was obvious that most could no longer pull their handcarts. Thus the handcarts had to be abandoned. But there was not nearly enough room in the wagons to carry the ill and the lame. At first, Grant pondered the notion of caching at Devil’s Gate every single personal belonging that was not vital to survival, to be recovered the following spring.
The cache plan evolved into something far more dramatic, as revealed in the tragicomic telling of Daniel Jones, the mountain man turned Mormon scout:
Steve Taylor, Al Huntington and I were together when the question, “Why doesn’t Captain Grant leave all the goods here with some one to watch them, and move on?” was asked. We agreed to make this proposal to him. It was near the time appointed for the meeting. As soon as we were together, Capt. Grant asked if anyone had thought of a plan. We presented ours. Capt. Grant replied, “I have thought of this, but there are no provisions to leave and it would be asking too much of anyone to stay here and starve for the sake of these goods; besides, where is there a man who would stay if called upon.” I answered, “Any of us would.” I had no idea I would be selected, as it was acknowledged I was the best cook in camp and Capt. Grant had often spoken as though he could not spare me.
With that noble but foolish slip of the tongue, Jones realized he had volunteered to winter over at Devil’s Gate and guard the goods. The unloading of carts and wagons took three days. At the end of that task, sub-captain Robert Burton informed Jones that he had demanded seventeen men from the (relatively healthy) Hunt and Hodgetts teams to winter over as well. Burton asked Jones to round out the party by choosing two others from the rescue mission. He chose Thomas Alexander and Ben Hampton, though in his memoir, after Burton urges him to make his choice, saying “You are acquainted with the boys and whoever you want will stay,” Jones confesses that “I had a great mind to tell him that I wanted Captains Grant and Burton.” As Jones amplified his dismay, “There was not money enough on earth to have hired me to stay. I had left home for only a few days and was not prepared to remain so long away.”
The goods to be guarded through the winter were deposited in the ruins of Fort Seminoe, which the twenty “volunteers” now occupied. Meanwhile, the stormy weather failed to relent, and the temperature plunged. On November 4, the thermometer registered minus 6 degrees Fahrenheit.
It was obvious to Grant that in this weather the exhausted Saints could not move on. The solution he arrived at was born of desperation. About two and a half miles to the west of the fort, the low granite ridge bordering the valley on the north bent like a horseshoe, forming a semicircular cove. That cove offered the best shelter anywhere nearby, with the added advantage that the slopes of the ridge grew thick with pines and junipers—potential firewood.
To get the company to what has become known as Martin’s Cove, however, required crossing the Sweetwater. Compared to the Platte, this tributary was but a stream: at Devil’s Gate, it ran only two to three feet deep but thirty to forty yards wide. Now it was flowing thick with cakes of ice. For the played-out Saints, the ford seemed more than they could bear.
The crossing took the better part of the day of November 4. The records of the Saints abound in horrors and heroism attending that passage. And for the last time, to get their gear and what was left of their food to the cove, the emigrants had to pull their handcarts.
John Jaques later recalled a vignette of near hopelessness:
In that rear part of the company two men were pulling one of the handcarts, assisted by two or three women, for the women pulled as well as the men all the way, so long as the handcarts lasted. When the cart arrived at the bank of the river, one of these men, who was much worn down, asked, in a plaintive tone, “Have we got to go across there?” On being answered yes, he was so much affected that he was completely overcome. That was the last straw. His fortitude and manhood gave way. He exclaimed, “O dear? I can’t go through that,” and burst into tears. His wife, who was by his side, had the stouter heart of the two at that juncture, and she said soothingly, “Don’t cry, Jimmy. I’ll pull the handcart for you.”
In the end, one of the “boys from the valley” among the rescuers carried the women across the Sweetwater on his back. He tried to carry Jimmy, too, but slipped and fell, dunking both men in the icy current.
Meanwhile, the stronger man was left to try to pull the cart across the stream singlehanded. Jaques:
He rolled up his pants as high as he could, pulled off his stockings and boots which he had happened to receive at Greasewood Creek, put on a pair of old shoes he carried with him, and all alone went into the river with naked legs and with his cart laden with pots and kettles. It was easy enough to go into the river, but not so easy to pull across it and get out again…. When in the water the narrow felloes of the cart wheels cut into the soft bottom of the river bed and he soon got stalled. Two of the “boys” in the water went to his help, and one soon exclaimed “D—n it, you don’t pull an ounce!” So hard was the tugging at the cart that it required the utmost combined strength of the three to take the vehicle through safe to dry land. While in the river the sharp cakes of floating ice below the surface of the water struck against the bare shins of the emigrant inflicting wounds which never healed until he arrived at Salt Lake and the dark scars of which he bears to this day.
Jaques’s sister-in-law Patience Loader had her own story of the crossing.
There was quite a nomber of the breathren from the valley standing in readyness to help us across the stream of water with our cart I was feeling somewhat bad that morning and when I saw this Stream of water we had to go through I fealt weak and I could not Keep my tears back I fealt ashamed to let those breathren see me sheding tears I pulled my old bonnet over my face as thay should not See my tears.
Several “boys from the valley” helped Patience and her sisters trundle the family cart across the Sweetwater. Later, she could not accurately remember their names, but she wrote, “Those poor breathren was in the water nearly all day we wanted to thank them but thay would not listen.” One of the men, whom Patience identifies as “Br Kimble” [Kimball], “Staid so long in the water that he had to be taken out and packed to camp and he was along time before he recoverd as he was child through and in after life he was allways afflicted with rhumetism.”
Out of the undoubted courage of the “boys from the valley” during this crossing of the Sweetwater grew one of the most persistent myths of the whole Mormon migration to Utah. It was crystallized by Solomon Kimball in 1914, in a church publication called Improvement Era:
After [the company] had given up in despair, after all hopes had vanished, after every apparent avenue of escape seemed closed, three eighteen-year-old boys belonging to the
relief party came to the rescue, and to the astonishment of all who saw, carried nearly every member of the illfated handcart company across the snowbound stream. The strain was so terrible, and the exposure so great, that in later years all the boys died from the effects of it. When President Brigham Young heard of this heroic act, he wept like a child, and later declared publicly, “that act alone will ensure C. Allen Huntington, George W. Grant [the captain’s son] and David P. Kimball an everlasting salvation in the Celestial Kingdom of God, worlds without end.”
Since Solomon Kimball was David Kimball’s younger brother, this account might have met with a certain skepticism, but instead the story was passed down from one Mormon generation to the next, like an exemplum from a medieval saint’s life. Kimball’s text is quoted verbatim as the truth, for instance, in Hafen and Hafen’s Handcarts to Zion.
It was not until 2006 that LDS historian Chad M. Orton demonstrated that none of the “boys” in the rescue mission was eighteen years old; that a number of the men, not just the stated three, helped the handcarters across the ford; and that many of the handcart pioneers crossed the Sweetwater unassisted. Most importantly, Orton found the true death dates of Grant, Kimball, and Huntington to be 1872, 1883, and 1896, respectively—sixteen, twenty-seven, and forty years after the supposedly fatal ford. Kimball and Huntington, in fact, outlived Brigham Young.
The Martin, Hodgetts, and Hunt Companies spent five days in Martin’s Cove. Those days marked the nadir of their agonizing journey—indeed, of the whole handcart campaign of 1856. The cold was beyond brutal: on November 6, the thermometer plunged to a new low of minus 11 degrees Fahrenheit. In such conditions, with the Saints as poorly clad as they were, widespread frostbite became inevitable. A still, calm cold would have been bad enough, but several days were windy, and on the worst day the gusts blew down every single tent. Of this reversal, Peter McBride, only six at the time, could much later make an almost funny story:
Later we had a terrible cold spell; the wind drifted so much I knew I would die. The wind blew the tent down. They all crawled out but me. The snow fell on it. I went to sleep and slept warm all night. In the morning I heard someone say, “How many are dead in this tent?” My sister said, “Well, my little brother must be frozen to death in that tent.” So they jerked the tent loose, sent it scurrying over the snow. My hair was frozen to the tent. I picked myself up and came out quite alive, to their surprise.
The vigil in Martin’s Cove was so grim that some of the Saints later remembered it as lasting much longer. Patience Loader thought she and her family had spent nine days snowbound in the cove. Samuel Openshaw, who had managed faithfully to keep a diary from the start of the trip through September 26, added a summary entry after he reached Salt Lake City in which he claimed, “We then went into a canyon where we camped for about three weeks.”
The hundreds of Saints marooned in Martin’s Cove quickly devoured the bulk of the relief party’s flour. On November 5, the daily ration, which had been boosted to a pound a day per adult for about a week, was reduced once more to four ounces, two ounces for the children. Yet on that day James Bleak, one of the few Martin Saints still keeping a diary, could write a remarkable testament to the strength of faith: “Through the blessing of our Father we felt as contented, as when we had 1 lb per head.”
Peter McBride remembered that during part of the vigil in the cove, “We had nothing to eat but some bark from trees.” His thirteen-year-old brother, Heber, would later recall, “Nearly all the children would cry themselves to sleep every night my 2 little Brothers would get the sack that had flour in and turn it wrong side out and suck and lick the flour dust of it.”
Fifty years later, Samuel S. Jones would summon up Martin’s Cove: “I remember the pinched, hungry faces, the stolid absent stare, that foretold the end was near, the wide and shallow open grave, awaiting its numerous consignments.” No one has ever accurately reckoned the death toll during the five-day stay in the cove, although several Saints later testified that thirteen or fourteen died in a single day and night. Most of those fatalities go virtually unnoticed in the collective record of the Martin Company, but here and there, the anguish of personal loss emerges in the later telling of a survivor. Thus Elizabeth Sermon, remembering many years later her last night with her husband:
We went to bed about three o’clock. He put his arm around me and said, “I am done,” and breathed his last. I called Brother John Oley. We sewed him up in a quilt with his clothes on, except his boots, which I put on my feet and wore them into Salt Lake City…. [My husband] was buried in the morning with two more in the grave. I stood like a statue, bewildered, not a tear; The cold chills, even now as I write, creep over my body, for I feel I can still see the wolves waiting for their bodies as they would come down to camp before we left.
As if the loss of her husband were not tribulation enough, Elizabeth’s six-year-old son, Robert, now had severely frostbitten feet. As she would recall, “I had to take a portion of poor Robert’s feet off which pierced my very soul. I had to sever the leaders with a pair of scissors. Little did I think when I bought them in old England that they would be used for such a purpose. Every day some portion was decaying until the poor boy’s feet were all gone.”
In the Hunt wagon company, the family of William and Mary Goble suffered excruciating losses. Their daughter, only two years old, had died in Iowa City. As another daughter, thirteen-year-old Mary, would remember later,
While there [in Martin’s Cove], an ox fell on the ice and the brethren killed it and the beef was given out to the camp. My brother James ate a hearty supper and was as well as he ever was when he went to bed. In the morning he was dead.
My feet were frozen and also my brother Edwin and my sister Caroline had their feet frozen. It was nothing but snow.
Caroline would die before the party reached South Pass. Mother Mary, forty-three years old, would persevere until the day the company finally reached Zion, only to die just a few miles short of Salt Lake City.
Patience Loader paints an affecting picture of her mother trying to rally the family in Martin’s Cove. Amy Loader and her daughters had gotten through a terribly cold and windy night, but
Mother called to me come Patience get up and Make us afiar I told her that I did not feel like geting up it was so cold and I was not feeling very well So she ask My sister Tamar to get up and she said She was not well and she could not get up then she sais come Maria you get up and she was feeling bad and said that She could not get up with this Mother sais come girls this will not do I believe I will have to dance to you and try to make you feel better poor dear Mother she started to Sing and dance to us and she slipt down as the snow was frozen and in a moment we was all up to help our dear Mother up for we was afraid she was hurt she laugh and said I thought I could soon make you all jump up if I danced to you then we found that she fell down purposely for she Knew we would all get up to see if she was hurt.
Captain George Grant still expected more relief wagons to arrive any day. When they did not, he began to recognize that the only chance of survival for the three companies would be to rouse them to move on, no matter how exhausted, frostbitten, or ill the majority of the Saints might be. On November 9, he somehow got the emigrants moving again. The agony of that restart goes all but undocumented in the collective record. Robert Burton’s journal says only, “Fine, warm morning. Hand-cart company and Capt. Hodgett’s company moved on at 11 o’clock a.m. Capt. Hunt’s company not yet done ‘catching’ goods.”
Then, toward sunset on the following day, instead of a train of rescue wagons, a single man on horseback rode into view from the west. It was Ephraim Hanks, the scout and canny frontiersman who had heard the voice calling him in the middle of the night as he fished on Utah Lake. One man could hardly make a major difference to the welfare of the nine-hundred-odd refugees, and Hanks’s advent is only tersely mentioned in the several journals that were still being kept. Yet it remains possible that Hanks appeared to the emig
rants as another heaven-sent angel.
For Hanks’s heroic mission has become part of the established folklore of the Martin Company. The story was told most fully by Hanks himself, thirty-five years after the fact, when he was interviewed by church historian Andrew Jensen. In this telling, riding alone through the snow on his horse, leading a second pack horse, Hanks ran into Joseph Young and Abel Garr, who were hurrying toward Salt Lake with the news. Young and Garr told Hanks where he might find the hundreds of Saints straggling along the Sweetwater.
That night Hanks camped alone near South Pass.
As I was preparing to make a bed in the snow with the few articles that my pack animal carried for me, I thought how comfortable a buffalo robe would be on such an occasion, and also how I could relish a little buffalo meat for supper, and before lying down for the night I was instinctively led to ask the Lord to send me a buffalo. Now, I am a firm believer in the efficacy of prayer.
Sure enough, when Hanks looked up, there was a buffalo only fifty yards from camp. Even though “I had certainly not expected so immediate an answer to my prayer,” Hanks leapt up and felled the animal with one rifle shot. He slept that night with a full belly, his bedroll spread on his new buffalo robe.
The next day, near the Ice Slough on the Sweetwater, Hanks shot a second bison, a cow, which he skinned and dressed; then he loaded his pack horse with long strips of meat.
I think the sun was about an hour high in the west when I spied something in the distance that looked like a black streak in the snow. As I got near to it, I perceived it moved; then I was satisfied that this was the long looked for hand-cart company…. I reached the ill-fated train just as the immigrants were camping for the night. The sight that met my gaze as I entered their camp can never be erased from my memory. The starved forms and haggard countenances of the poor sufferers, as they moved about slowly, shivering with cold, to prepare their scanty evening meal was enough to touch the stoutest heart.
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