Suddenly I couldn’t take any more. “Yes,” I interrupted, “but who was to blame?”
That stopped her cold. Sister Willie’s eyes seemed to bulge with incomprehension. “Blame?” she repeated.
“After all,” I went on, “more than two hundred people died.”
“But they came to know God. And not one of them ever left the church.”
I fled without signing the guest register.
A few miles farther west, I turned off Highway 287, which here abandons the Sweetwater as it vectors north toward Lander. I headed down the old dirt road to Atlantic City, a gold rush town near South Pass. I had no desire to pull a handcart over Rocky Ridge, but I wanted to hike part of it. Thirty-one miles down the lonely road, I came to a corral and parking lot. Here the Saints who undertake only the one-day handcart pull over Rocky Ridge (as opposed to the two-day trek from the Sixth Crossing) begin their journeys with carts trucked in on trailers.
A four-wheel-drive road follows the path the Willie Saints struggled to ascend on October 23, but the Bureau of Land Management has wisely prohibited motor vehicle travel along it. At the starting point, a monument erected in 1992 identifies the place as the “Willie Rescue Site.” “This monument,” the plaque reads, “is constructed to the memory of those courageous pioneers of the Willie Handcart Company and the brave men who rescued them.” Yet the plaque also names nineteen Saints who died in the vicinity.
That August morning, there was no one else on the trail. The heat was cut by a twenty-five-mile-an-hour wind right in my face—the wind that seems perpetual in western Wyoming. The views were spectacular: to the northwest, I saw the Wind River Range (where I had often climbed) stretching like a blue crest across the sky; on my left, to the south, I could glimpse the impassable Sweetwater gorge that forced the emigrants up onto the swales of Rocky Ridge. What a barren place! Scarcely a bush protruded from the stony soil, and there was not a tree in sight.
Stretching ahead of me, the trail looked gentle enough, but as I hiked it, I climbed grade after grade inclined at 15 to 20 percent—tough enough in a Jeep, I thought, and agony with a laden handcart. One false summit after another added discouragement to the tedious ascent, and I stepped over countless sharp-edged bedrock shelves, the ridges that had broken many a handcart wheel or axle. Every mile, a simple concrete pillar stood beside the trail, engraved on either side: “Oregon Trail, Mormon Trail.” Here and there, beside the modern two-wheel track of the road, I saw vestiges of narrow ruts in the tundralike ground cover—the remnants of the wagon and handcart trail of the 1840s to 1860s.
With only my daypack, Rocky Ridge was an easy hike, but it nonetheless brought home to me the ordeal of the Willie Saints. This would have been the steepest, roughest, most dangerous stretch since Iowa City. In a snowstorm, with men, women, and children on the verge of death, pulling handcarts up this grade seemed unthinkable.
After several miles of trudging up the track, I turned around. On the way back to my car, my only companions were antelope, flitting along in groups of three and five.
Later that day, I made my way by back roads to Rock Creek Hollow, where the Willie Company struggled into Grant’s camp after dark on October 23, 1856. As mentioned, trail historians argue over whether the rendezvous took place here, or two miles farther west, on Willow Creek. Once again, the true location of the camp seemed to me not terribly important. I had pictured the meeting place as a sheltered refuge, guarded perhaps by a grove of cottonwoods, nestled beneath cliffs that would block the piercing wind. Rock Creek Hollow was nothing so auspicious. A thick stand of willows offered the only shelter, and the “cliff” I had pictured was only a thirty-foot-high bank of gravel and shale—on the east side of the tributary stream, moreover, where it would have done nothing to block the west wind.
To my surprise, the monument here, identifying the fifteen who died that night and the next morning, had been erected way back in 1933. And for once the motto adorning it avoided pieties about faith and heroism, as it stated with admirable plainness, “In memory of those members of the Willie Handcart Co. whose journey started too late and ended too early.”
A far more grandiose granite monument a hundred yards to the south commemorated the visits between 1992 and 1997 of the church’s First Presidency—Prophet Gordon Hinckley and leading Apostles Thomas Monson and James Faust. Under the boldly capitalized injunction “REMEMBER” were graved the dates of their several visits, followed by a citation from the Book of Mormon, Helaman 10:4–5. The text in question has the Lord blessing Nephi for his good deeds—Nephi being the leader of the true Saints whose followers were wiped out by the Lamanites (ancestors of today’s Native Americans, cursed with dark skin for their perfidy). Verse 5 begins, “And now, because thou hast done this with such unwearyingness, behold, I will bless thee forever; and I will make thee mighty in word and in deed, in faith and in works.”
Not far from this granite memorial, a crude fence made of boards and cables enclosed a scattering of anonymous graves, marked not with headstones but with piles of shale. I was left to wonder whether those were the actual graves of the fifteen Willie Saints who had died here, or the graves of later pioneers, or merely symbolic mounds evoking a tragic place. Whichever the truth, I found those mounds more moving than all the monuments, plaques, signboards, and museum captions whose earnest legends I had read between the visitors’ center and Rock Creek Hollow.
I SUPPOSE THE sentimentalization of the handcart disaster should have come as no surprise to me. All cultures mythologize their pasts. No episode in American history was more brutal or tragic than the Civil War, but do the reenactors who dress up in blue and gray uniforms and shoot each other with blanks as they re-create Bull Run or Antietam honor the terrible losses of life in those battles, or trivialize them? Do the armchair generals who argue into the night about Stonewall Jackson’s flanking maneuver against Joseph Hooker at Chancellorsville treat the men who lived and died there as anything more real than toy soldiers?
The courage and perseverance of most of the handcart Saints are beyond question. Some of them, as well as some of the rescuers, emerged from the ordeal as genuine heroes. What seems to have been lost in the mythmaking is the fact that those Saints were also victims—and not of some domino topple of impersonal causes, but of colossal mismanagement and negligence on the part of LDS leaders.
For a people as devout as the Mormons, the question of why the handcart disaster happened takes on a deep teleological significance. On my first visit to the Handcart Visitors’ Center, a docent named Elder Merrill, standing outside the museum, raised the question in its simplest form. “Some people get upset when they come here,” Elder Merrill told me. “Why did the Father in heaven let them [the handcart pioneers] do that?”
But Merrill’s answer, like that of most of his colleagues, was far too pat for me to swallow. The handcart Saints had died, he insisted, to turn the trail into “sacred ground” (on my three visits, I heard and read that phrase ad nauseam). They had died in order to inspire today’s Saints to improve their lives. Particularly youths, according to Elder Merrill: “Kids come here leading troubled lives. Some aren’t even in the church. They go home and get baptized. They say it changed their lives forever.”
Historian Lyndia Carter, who regularly speaks to school groups about the handcart tragedy, was more skeptical. “That kind of reenactment is delusionary history,” she told me. “It gives you no sense of what day after day of cold and short rations really meant. The kids get into doing it, but it’s just fun and games for them. At most, a rite of passage. The school groups I talk to aren’t very interested in history.”
The struggle to make sense of the tragedy is natural and human. For believers, it is the profound dilemma wrestled with by such pop psychologists as Harold S. Kushner in When Bad Things Happen to Good People and by such deep thinkers as C. S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain (or, for that matter, by John Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost to “justify the ways of God to man”). But
the simplistic formula of Sister Willie at the Sixth Crossing visitors’ center—“They came to know God”—cannot satisfy any but the most credulous.
To be sure, many of the Saints who survived the Willie and Martin catastrophe later uttered that very formula. All their tribulations and losses, many testified, were worth it, to be able to come to Zion and to know that God had saved them via a miraculous rescue effort. For Mormons seeking to justify the disaster, the locus classicus is a short article written by William R. Palmer (the Harold Kushner of his day, at least within the LDS church) in The Instructor in May 1944. Under the rubric “Pioneers of Southern Utah,” it purports to relate the very words spoken in a Sunday school class many years before by Francis Webster, a survivor of the Martin Company, twenty-five years old at the time of the emigration.
Palmer’s reminiscence is perforce suspect, for Webster had died in 1906, thirty-eight years before Palmer’s piece appeared in The Instructor. Moreover, the only memoir in Webster’s own hand that has survived is a four-sentence résumé of the ordeal, whose sole vivid line is the following: “I had the diarrhea all the way from Ioway City to Florance so bad that I have sat down on the road and been administered to by the Elders and got up and pulled my hand cart with renewed vigor.”
In Palmer’s 1944 telling, he was sitting in an adult Sunday school class in Cedar City with about fifty other men and women. The discussion was about the handcart expeditions of 1856. “Some sharp criticism of the Church and its leaders was being indulged in,” Palmer related.
An old man in the corner sat silent and listened as long as he could stand it then he arose and said things that few of those who heard him will ever forget. His face was white with emotion, but he spoke slowly, deliberately, but with great earnestness and sincerity.
He said in substance, “I ask you to stop this criticism for you are discussing a matter you know nothing about.”
The old man, Francis Webster, then revealed that he had been a survivor of the very debacle that the church group was analyzing.
“Mistake to send the handcart company out so late in the season? Yes…. But did you ever hear a survivor of that company utter a word of criticism? Not one of that company ever apostatized or left the Church because everyone of us came through with the absolute knowledge that God lives for we became acquainted with him in our extremities.
“I have pulled my handcart when I was so weak and weary from illness and lack of food that I could hardly put one foot ahead of the other. I have looked ahead and seen a patch of sand or a hill slope and said I can go only that far and there I must give up for I cannot pull my load through it. I have gone on to that sand and when I reached it, the cart began pushing me. I have looked back many times to see who was pushing my cart but my eyes saw no one. I knew then that the angels of God were there.
“Was I sorry that I chose to come by handcart? No. Neither then nor one moment of my life since. The price we paid to become acquainted with God was a privilege to pay and I am thankful that I was privileged to come to Zion in the Martin Handcart Company.”
I had not been surprised to find this canonic affirmation inscribed on a wall of the handcart museum, where it was attributed not to Palmer’s reminiscence but directly to Francis Webster. According to Palmer, “When he sat down there was not a dry eye in the room. We were a subdued and chastened lot.” As for Palmer himself, Webster’s testimony “made me tingle to the roots of my hair.”
The oft-repeated claim that no veteran of the Willie and Martin Companies ever apostatized is easily refuted, starting with such prominent sub-captains as John Chislett and John Ahmanson, and extending to such “ordinary” Saints as Elizabeth Sermon. Because of the spotty record, the actual number of survivors who left the church is impossible to calculate. According to Lyndia Carter, substantial numbers in the Hunt and Hodgett wagon companies—especially women—later apostatized. “Records show that they went back East or to England,” says Carter. “And there were the dropouts in Iowa City and Florence. In general, among all the Saints who came to Utah in the pioneer years, about one-third ended up leaving the church. And Brigham liked to say that only one-third [of the pioneers] were worth keeping. Another third weren’t worth the salt, and a further third just left Utah.”
Whether or not Palmer’s vignette of the old man speaking up in the Sunday school classroom is a fairy tale, it strikes me as both puzzling and yet inevitable that so many of the handcart survivors, in their memoirs and reminiscences, expressed conclusions not unlike those that Palmer puts so eloquently in Webster’s mouth—that the journey was worth it; that God’s providence saw the survivors through; and that their subsequent lives were enriched by the ordeal. When evil works its harm in the world—when “bad things happen to good people”—there is an insatiable need, especially among the devout, to find some metaphysical and moral explanation for that harm. It is simply a human propensity that the victims of tragedy grasp at what to the skeptic seem trite and overliteral “lessons.”
To my agnostic sensibility, the mechanism at work here is brilliantly elucidated in Robert Frost’s late, dark poem, “The Draft Horse.” That seemingly simple verse of five quatrains is at once blatantly allegorical and characteristically sly, inviting, as Frost so often does, the very sort of misinterpretation it is his aim to puncture. In “The Draft Horse” a couple rides through “a pitch-dark limitless grove” with a sputtering lantern, in too frail a buggy, drawn by too heavy a horse. Suddenly a man—otherwise unidentified and unexplained—comes out of the trees and stabs the horse in the side. The beast collapses, dead; the man apparently disappears.
The fifth stanza is set up by the fourth, the one that few readers pay close attention to:
The most unquestioning pair
That ever accepted fate
And the least disposed to ascribe
Any more than we had to to hate,
We assumed that the man himself
Or someone he had to obey
Wanted us to get down
And walk the rest of the way.
To me, most of the handcart Saints were like that “unquestioning pair,” unwilling to attribute their own ordeal to the failings of church leaders. (The questioners, like John Ahmanson, could not accept Young’s answer and so left the church.) The evil done to the handcart pilgrims must have some purpose: God must want them to learn something infinitely valuable from their sufferings. Frost’s couple grasp at the homiletic answer—self-reliance, getting down and walking the rest of the way. But Frost himself (if I read the poem correctly) does not buy that moral: the calamity in the forest is ultimately senseless, and there is no lesson to be learned from it, except that evil is abroad in the world.
So, in a century and a half, the greatest disaster in westward migration history was transformed from a campaign so terrible that no one wanted to talk or write about it into the Mormon Mayflower. In the last decade and a half, the retrospective gilding of tragedy with moral uplift has reached its frenzied zenith.
That transformation goes beyond such shrines as the Handcart Visitors’ Center. Within the past few years, a pair of documentary films have grappled with the handcart story. In Their Footsteps of Faith: The Story of the Willie and Martin Handcarts invites the viewer to step back into “a time when faith and endurance were needed to survive.” Brigham Young is absolved of all responsibility for the disaster; as one expert asserts, “They planned on three handcart companies. Brigham Young did not know about the other two.” A voice-over elaborates, “Organizers in Salt Lake City assumed [the Willie and Martin Companies] would spend the winter in the East.”
The film reckons the toll of dead in the Martin Company alone as 156, but reassures us that the survivors “almost all remained in Salt Lake, stronger in faith, with proven courage, and dedicated to the church lifestyle.” In Their Footsteps of Faith ends with an omniscient voice-over: “But whether they lived or died, they left a legacy of teamwork, self-sacrifice, and devotion, a legacy just as valid today
as it was in 1856.”
Sweetwater Rescue: The Willie and Martin Handcart Story is a little more balanced. The film makes the standard effort to paint Brigham Young as the hero of the rescue effort, quoting LDS archivist Mel Bashore to the effect that the Prophet’s intervention was the single most significant factor in the survival of the Saints who made it through to Zion, historian Howard Christy as claiming that Young’s “fury” started the massive rescue effort, and that “The timing of the rescue is stunning.”
But the film also quotes Lyndia Carter’s demurral. Of the Martin Company’s starting out too late from Florence, Carter says, “In my opinion, they were doomed from the beginning.” And rather than absolve the Prophet, Carter asserts, “Brigham Young was aware that there were probably a lot of people coming. He had been informed by Daniel Spencer, who was the superintending agent at Iowa City, that he had sent off three groups, and that two more were expected.”
Sweetwater Rescue, however, reverts to platitudes: “In a word, it was heroic.” “The trail was consecrated in blood.” And the film ends with John Jaques’s famous exoneration, “I blame nobody.”
Andrew Olsen’s comprehensive and well-researched The Price We Paid: The Extraordinary Story of the Willie and Martin Handcart Pioneers (2006) is the best book yet written about the exodus. Yet Olsen, too, shies away from blame: for him, Brigham Young is a paragon of conscience and good judgment. Olsen’s concluding chapter strives mightily to turn catastrophe into heroic pageant. The chapter’s sectional subtitles give Olsen’s game away: “A Story of Countless Miracles,” “After Much Tribulations Come the Blessings,” and “A Trail of Tears, a Trail of Hope.” Olsen’s final paragraph dwells only on the positive: “But the experiences of the Willie and Martin handcart pioneers show that faith and hope will triumph over the worst days on the trail. Faith and hope kept these Saints stepping forward when their strength was gone.”
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