The Mormon handcart expeditions were the “most deadly (chapter) in the history of westward migration in the United States,” David Roberts says in “Devil’s Gate.” Nearly 250 of the 900 members of the Martin and Willie handcart companies, which were caught in brutal blizzards in the Wyoming and Utah mountains in the fall of 1856, died, mostly from cold and starvation. That compares to 42 members of the Donner Party who perished in the Sierras.
And yet, the Donner tragedy is so much better known. Few people beyond Western historians and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints know about the handcart expeditions, one of the strangest experiments in Western history.
And many of those who are aware of it see the experience as inspiring, as evidence of profound faith and divine intervention, according to Roberts. Not a single member of the handcart companies apostated, they claim.
The truth, however, is that the planning for the handcarts was bungled through stupidity and arrogance, and the result was a journey of such horror that many who lived through it could never talk about it. And yes, many of the survivors did desert the church.
Prophet and LDS president Brigham Young himself thought up the handcart scheme as an expeditious way to bring impoverished converts to Zion. Young was a brilliant organizer, and there was nothing inherently wrong with the idea.
The LDS converts, many from factory towns in Great Britain and Scandinavia, were too poor to purchase wagons and oxen. So instead, the prophet reasoned, they would pile their belongings onto handcarts and push them across the prairies, arriving hale and hearty in no more than 60 days, less time than it took to travel in a covered wagon.
The reality was that poor planning and irrational decisions, even stinginess, doomed the handcart scheme from the outset. The carts were made of green wood, which means they split and broke as the pioneers pushed them across the prairie and mountains. Most of the converts were not used to the strenuous work required to propel a loaded cart over hundreds of miles. And because Young claimed the handcarts would cross in just two months, he provided for no supply stations along the route. Planning was so poor, in fact, that officials in Salt Lake did not even know how many handcart companies were stranded in the mountains in 1856.
The most devastating decision was to allow the immigrants to leave late in the season. They should have been on the road in May or June. Instead, the ill-fated Willie and Martin companies (two of 10 handcart companies that crossed the plains to Zion between 1856 and 1860) left in August.
One arrogant church official, who castigated anyone who suggested the last two companies wait until spring and who later zipped past them in his light wagon, promised there would be no snow. He declared he’d eat every snowflake the pioneers encountered.
In fact, there was snow, thick and heavy and cold, and it all but buried the two parties of immigrants as they made their way through the mountains. The few wagons accompanying the trains couldn’t handle the sick and feeble, so the infirm were piled on top of their handcarts and pushed by exhausted families. Some crawled along on their knees through the snow because their feet were frozen.
Dozens died, a dozen or more on some nights. Over and over again, the firsthand accounts tell of pioneers waking up in the morning next to frozen bodies.
Many immigrants succumbed from starvation because the organizers had underestimated the amount of food the pioneers would require. The head of one company ordered the immigrants to lighten their loads, thereby depriving them of blankets and clothing that might have saved their lives. Then he ordered the abandoned articles burned, lest their owners return to retrieve them. A number of converts who survived lost limbs to frostbite.
Drawing heavily on diaries and firsthand accounts, Roberts re-creates the story of the Martin and Willie handcart companies in all their agony. He rebuffs many of the stories told by earlier chroniclers, including Wallace Stegner and Ann and Leroy Hafen, as well as the piousness that has crept into the various tellings.
“Devil’s Gate” is the first major account that rips aside the veil of religiosity that has covered the handcart story for 150 years and sanitized the fiasco, turning it into what Roberts calls the “Mormon Mayflower.”
He charges that from the day the survivors of the Willie and Martin companies reached Salt Lake, Mormon officials, beginning with Young, whitewashed the handcart experience. Young and other church officials claimed that the handcarts had reached Salt Lake City in record time and with few casualties.
The tragedy was turned into an act of faith so powerful that faithful LDS re-enactors, many dressed in period costume and impersonating various pioneers, trudge the Mormon Trail today, pushing handcarts (made of hardwood and with steel rims on the wheels). So enmeshed is the handcart saga in LDS history in fact, that descendents of the Martin and Willie companies are considered Mormon royalty.
Historians will applaud Roberts’ research and his courage in writing this book, but it will offend others. Church officials likely will view it as they do Will Bagley’s acclaimed “Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows,” published a few years ago.
That’s because “Devil’s Gate” (the title comes from a treacherous mountain pass where so many died) questions a cherished Mormon story and places blame for the death and suffering directly on the prophet Brigham Young.
Readers will have to decide between the truth and the myth.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist who writes regularly about new regional nonfiction releases.
Devil’s Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy by David Roberts, $26