The Year of Decision 1846
BY BERNARD DE VOTO
CHAPTERS XXXIII-XL
TO THE PROMISED LAND
In the foregoing chapters, Mr. DeVoto has told of the westward push in that Year of Manifest Destiny, 1846. The mountain men opened up the trails and found the passes over the Sierra. In great wagon trains people of all conditions — including the wealthy Donner party — were rolling across the prairie. Westward went writers like Parkman the historian, soldiers like Frémont and General Stephen W. Kearny. The immigration was moving into Oregon, which had already been settled along the northern boundary. The Bear Flag revolt had declared California independent. New Mexico had been occupied by Colonel Doniphan’s volunteers from Missouri, and in the center of this western stream moved a body of religious refugees — the Mormons.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints had been founded in New York State on the visions, “revelations,” and scriptures of Joseph Smith, Jr. From the beginning the Mormons had proved unable to get along peaceably with their neighbors. The Church moved to Ohio and, after much friction, to Jackson County, Missouri, on the far frontier. As Missouri filled up, friction again developed. The Saints took refuge in Illinois, where they established the city of Nauvoo and for some years enjoyed peace and prosperity. Then trouble began again.
There were many reasons why the Mormons could not get along with the rough democracy of the frontier. Their political solidarity, which was always bartered for privilege, offended everyone, even those who bought it. Their landholding and financial practices were economic weapons; so were their coöperative business enterprises. The Mormons’ belief in the immediate coming of God, and their certainty — as God’s chosen people — that they would “inherit” the earth, gave them a smugness which frequently became arrogance and could sometimes be used to justify the conversion of property. Finally, the teaching and practice of polygamy violently transgressed frontier mores.
Turbulence increased, and in 1844 a mob lynched Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. Illinois collapsed into anarchy. It seemed likely that the Church would disintegrate or that the Mormons would be exterminated by the mob. They were saved by the genius of Brigham Young, who succeeded Smith as head of the Church.
After more violence, Young obtained a kind of treaty with the Illinois officials who were trying to hold the mob in check. Its terms were bitter and brutal, but they were the best the Mormons could hope for. The mob would hold its hand, and in the summer of ‘46 the Mormons would go west. But the mob broke its promise and forced them out in midwinter.
Throughout 1845 the Mormons made frantic preparations to emigrate, selling their property at a ruinous loss, assembling supplies, manufacturing “wagons, building up herds of horses and cattle, making a minute study of the trails, calling on all Christendom for help.
They were going west — out of the jurisdiction of the United States. Few had any way of knowing whether they were going to California, Oregon, Texas, Vancouver I land, or even to the Sandwich Islands. Young and his immediate counselors knew that the eventual destination was somewhere in the Great Basin. But even they knew no more.
Our story opens in February, 1846 —
THE YEAR OF DECISION 1846
by BERNARD DEVOTO
33
ABOUT fifty miles north of Quincy, Illinois, a point of land thrusts out into the Mississippi. It looks across the cocoa-colored water to Lee County, Iowa, twelve miles above Keokuk. It is about a hundred miles west-northwest of Springfield on the Sangamon. On this peninsula, marshy at the riverside but rising to high bluffs with prairie land beyond them, there had been built in 1839 the city of the Lord God Jehovah, King of Kings. It was called Nauvoo anti its name, we are instructed, meant “Beautiful Place.” Now in February, 1846, it was fallen — that great city.
Acres of ice floated in the river and a wind out of the north tossed the makeshift ferries about, that first day, February 4. The ferries were jammed with men, women, children, horses, oxen, cows, swine, chickens, feather beds, Boston rockers, a miscellany of families and goods hastily brought together in the fear of death. The boats dumped them on the Iowa shore and turned back for other identical freights — American refugees fleeing a city under threat from an enemy. They landed, hitched up such equipage as they had, and moved out on the frozen prairie. Nine miles inland they reached a timbered stretch, on Sugar Creek, and here they pitched a camp. The timber made a windbreak; they chinked it with such wagons and carts as they had been able to cross; some tents went up; those who had neither wagon nor tent hurried to raise huts of bed quilts, logs, bark, or brush. Men felled trees to make great fires, the logs sizzling as the hard snow-crust melted. Winter night came up beyond the grove. Supper was whatever they had brought with them, cooked in pans held out to the fires.
BERNARD DEVOTO grew up in Ogden, Utah, at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains, surrounded, as he says, “by Mormon pioneers and other veterans of the West, miners, bullwhackers, cowboys, desert runners, prospectors, Indian fighters.” The story of the frontier, he took in through his pores. He camped and fished in the mountains, worked on a ranch through which ran ruts of the California Trail, and wrote his first piece about the Diggers while he was still in high school. He began his systematic study of the Southwest after the Armistice, and from that time to this the Oregon Trail, the Mormon migration, the annexation of Texas, the Donner party, and the deeds of the mountain men were the exploits which his mind worked on year after year.
Afterward they sang hymns, prayed, and listened to instruction from the elders. They stayed by the fires while they could, then huddled under stiff blankets in the tents or on the snow. Many women, most of the children, were sick — undermined by months of terrorism, by farewells and the bitter crossing, by the unknown. There was need to bring more than one screaming child out from the blankets, to warm him and show him familiar faces at the fires which the men kept going all night. There was more urgent need for the fires: that night on Sugar Creek nine babies were born, their squalling a muted note against the winter wind.
The ferries ran all day when weather permitted. Gales tossed them about, terrified oxen kicked holes in them, unskillful piloting swamped them. Hosea Stout, crossing his family, saw a boat go under, felt that the Destroyer brooded over the land, and “remembered the revelation which Said the Lord had cursed the watters in the Last Days and Said in my heart it was verily true.” Then on February 13 the river froze clear to Iowa and families could begin crossing on the ice. Some eight hundred such families were on Sugar Creek when Brigham Young, President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, crossed on February 15. Five years before, the word of the Lord to the Prophet Joseph had told Israel to build a city here and name it Zarahemla, in commemoration of the great city which Israel’s precursors, the Nephites, fresh from Jerusalem, had built in Central America ages ago. Trouble and strife had kept Israel from obeying the commandment, however, and this was just a camp on a frozen creek, the first station on a journey west. They did what they could, plastered the bark huts with mud, thickened the brush walls, made some ineffective attempts at sanitation. The temperature fell to twenty below, moderated long enough for great snows to bury the huts, went down again. Lean-tos and cabins went up, some shelter could be had for the dying, and the camp grew along the creek as people kept coming from Nauvoo. Lee County was settled, if only thinly, and many brethren went out to look for work, splitting rails or chopping firewood mostly, to be paid in grain. However destitute, these were Israel’s richest and they did not too greatly suffer for food, though sometimes many fed on no more than a gruel of corn meal, sometimes there was envy when a brother whose heart had hardened tapped a crate of hams and bacons for his private use, sometimes a newborn child must turn crying from a dry breast.
Newcomers kept arriving. The Twelve met in council; the bishops anointed the sick and made assignments for the common labor; by night there were prayer meetings and hymn festivals. By night also there were dances to the music of Captain Pitts’s brass band, which had been converted as a group in England to praise Israel’s God. Blacksmith shops were set up; the wagons and the stock were being readied for the journey. In Brother Markham’s buggy, an old-fashioned foot-warmer under her blankets, Eliza Snow, who had been secretly married to the martyred prophet Joseph and was soon to be a wife of the prophet Brigham, wrote her poetry.
They renamed Sugar Creek the Brook Kedron. Hosea Stout gathered the Temple guards into a new organization and cleared a parade ground for them in the snow. As colonel of this regiment he raised a white flag above his tent. “But it refused to wave in the air notwithstanding there was a light breeze, which seemed to say that it would not proclaim peace in the United States when there was nought but oppression and tyranny towards the people of God by rulers of this government and the Saints fleeing from her borders to the wilderness for safety and refuge from her iron yoke.”
In the east, Elder Priddy Meeks learned that Exodus had begun, and came hurrying home to Nauvoo. He had to pass through Carthage, the seething stronghold of the anti-Mormons. Men shouting obscene oaths surrounded him, took his horse, swore to carve his heart out, and on no charge flung him into Carthage jail. It was a small jail: he had to look at a dark stain on the floor, the unavenged blood of Prophet Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. A sheriff sympathized with him, procured a doubtful bond, and got him out of town on a borrowed horse. At Nauvoo, Brother McCleary had been building a wagon for him on shares, but Brother Meeks now had to trade his interest in it for a barrel of flour. He still had a small, one-horse wagon in good shape; he swapped it for a larger one in execrable shape. To this he hitched a pair of “three-yearold, unbroke bullocks” and was able to borrow a yoke of oxen to drive ahead of them till they were gentled.
Elder Meeks was a man of property. He owned an interest in Brother McCleary’s wagon shop, which he bade McCleary sell to anyone who would help the less fortunate cross the river. He owned the horse which had been stolen from him at Carthage; he assigned it to Lawyer Edmunds, who was defending him. He owned a small flock of sheep; there was no time to sell them and no one to buy them, so he just let them stray. He owned a house and lot; houses and lots in Nauvoo were selling for whatever a buyer cared to offer, and no one was interested in his. He left it there, with furniture and books which any anti-Mormon, in a thrifty mood, could cart away. His disintegrating wagon packed with as much as it could carry, he and his family crossed the river. He thought that twenty dollars would repair it enough to travel to the Missouri, if not the Rocky Mountains whither, he knew vaguely, Israel was to travel. They were safe on the Iowa shore — safe at least from mobbers. He did not know what might lie ahead, except that the Lord had said to Joseph the Seer, “Thou mayest go up also unto the goodly land, to possess thine inheritance.” Maybe he remembered the goodly land that had been Israel’s inheritance in Missouri and now Illinois. But, turning his back on the river, Elder Meeks laid the gad to his unbroken bullocks. They moved off toward Sugar Creek, the rachitic wagon groaning. The road sloped upward and they came to a small hill. He looked back to the ferry landing, across the water, to the roofs of Nauvoo, to the edifice that dominated the city, the temple reared to the Lord God Jehovah.
And send ye swift messengers [the Lord had commanded Joseph], yea, chosen messengers, and say unto them: Come ye, with all your gold, and your silver, and your precious stones, and with all your antiquities; and with all who have knowledge of antiquities, that willcome,may come, and bring the box tree, and the fir tree, and the pine tree, together with all the precious trees of the earth;
And with iron, with copper, and with brass, and with zinc, and with all your precious things of the earth, and build a house to my name, for the Most High to dwell therein.
Israel had begun a house for the Most High and had gone on building and furnishing it with antiquities after the murder of the Prophet, during the tumult of the Burnings, and up to now. It was still unfinished, but for some months it had been acceptable unto the Lord, and the priesthood had been conferring the endowments in it — to Elder Meeks and as many more as there was time for. So he looked back at God’s house. His marriage ceremony had been repeated there in the new and everlasting covenant, and there he had been baptized many times, as proxy for ancestors who had lived during the darker centuries when the priesthood was withdrawn from the earth. The tabernacle of the mysteries, built to His holy name on the high hill, Israel’s morning star and a beacon to the peoples of the earth. God had promised that it would endure, but Israel had learned in suffering that His ways were mysterious altogether, and Elder Meeks’s heart darkened. He looked once more at his home and the altar of his pieties, then went on westward, toward Sugar Creek.
34
The ridgepole of Sister Green’s tent broke under the weight of snow, and she and the children were half-buried. All their clothes got wet. All the clothes of all the children were wet all the time; fingers, toes, cheeks were discolored with frostbite; children were lethargic, cried easily, played little in the wind, gave out at their chores. There was so little to eat! Sister Green was pregnant, but the family could apportion her a daily ration of less than half as much bread and milk as she needed. There were, however, enough wild onions for them all, chipped from the frozen soil.
The Saints kept arriving from Nauvoo. Tents, wagons, huts spread over the discolored snow. Great portions of the grove had been felled, Sugar Creek was overcrowded, some of the fainthearted were trying to return to Nauvoo, and clearly it was time for the Mormons to go. Orson Pratt’s thermometer did not fall below zero for several days. So Young organized his people as the Camp of Israel and set “captains of tens and “captains of fifties” over them. Elder Markham took a hundred pioneers to prepare the road. “Colonel” Hosea Stout commanded a guard of a hundred riflemen, and “Colonel” John Scott with two more fifties watched over the artillery, which was -mostly homemade and had been hidden under lumber piles in Nauvoo. And on March 1 the first detachment started west, between two and three thousand of them, about five hundred wagons of all kinds, in all conditions of repair. The first day they made five miles. Day by day behind them other detachments left Sugar Creek and others arrived there from Nauvoo to follow after, till by late spring about fifteen thousand Saints were on the march.
They were a full two months ahead of the time when, as the mountain men and the Santa Fe traders knew, it was safe for caravans to cross the prairies. Apart from sudden whirlwinds of sleet out of the north the snows were over now, but the rains had come. Rain nearly every day for about eight weeks — a chill, monotonous downpour that soaked everything and brought out mildew in the center of packed crates. It saturated the prairies; after saturation, it turned them into a universal shallow lake. Through that slough the horses and oxen, gaunt after the winter, had to haul the unwieldy wagons, frequently with men and women helping at the wheels.
Six miles was a big day, one mile a not uncommon one. Prairie creeks that would be five feet wide in July were now five rods wide, bottomless, swift, and impassable. Reaching one, a fifty — or a whole caravan — would have to camp beside it till it should subside or a ford be found, which might be two weeks. If there were no timber, then there might be no fires for two weeks, no cooked food, no dry clothes or bedding except as the sun might come out for an hour or two. No brush, either, to spread a bed on or to build a hut for an obstetrical ward. The historian Tullidge has a tableau: blankets stretched to poles and roofed over with bark, a woman in labor within, and intent sisters holding tin pans to catch the rain that leaks through the bark.
Supplies were scanty, though this first group was better off than any that followed it. They were feeding the stock on cottonwood bark, when they could get it, and they themselves were living on what they had amassed in Nauvoo. Hunters ranged the prairies for deer, turkeys, grouse, but the season was too early. Terror, winter, rain, and malnutrition now assessed their tax, and the Saints sickened. Frostbitten feet became gangrenous, knees and shoulders stiffened with rheumatism, last autumn’s agues were renewed. William Clayton’s legs pained him so that he could hardly walk; he tried to restore their function by jumping and wrestling, but made himself sicker and had to go to bed. Heber C. Kimball, one of the Apostles, caught a fever and took to the swaying wagon, where a sick wife and two sick children, one of them only a few days old, were alternately shaking and burning; an older child could work a little but was too weak to carry a two-quart pail.
Sister Ann Richards’s husband, who had already served live missions in the United States, was called to a mission in England. He had to leave his family a few miles from Sugar Creek and go “ without purse or scrip ” to bear his testimony overseas. This was Franklin D. Richards, a nephew of Apostle Willard Richards who had been with the Prophet Joseph when he was killed in Carthage jail. A brother of Franklin’s had been killed by the Missourians at the Hawn’s Mill massacre, and another one would die on the march of the Mormon Battalion. He had married Sister Ann four years before, had been sealed to her in the Temple in the everlasting covenant just this January, and a week later had taken Sister Elizabeth McFate as his second wife. Sister Ann had her two-year-old daughter, Wealthy Lovisa, with her in the wagon —and Sister Ann was big with another child and her hour was near. There was no suitable food for her or Wealthy Lovisa. Many days they could not have a fire, either because night overtook them in the open prairie or because, if they get one started, the rain put it out. But sometimes they managed to keep one going, and then Sister Ann could brew a pinch of tea from the pound which a neighbor had given her before she left Nauvoo. The Word of Wisdom forbade it, but she could warm her body and cheer her mind with it, and “ through sickness and great suffering [it] was about all the sustenance I had for some time.”
Twenty days out from Sugar Creek her term was full. The wagons stopped and a midwife was summoned, a Gentile whom the Saints had heard about. The hag demanded a fee in advance; Sister Ann had no money; a woolen bedspread would do, and “I might as well take it, for you’ll never live to need it.” Little Isaac was born, and he died at once. The priesthood anointed the small body and buried it; the wagons got started again. Little Wealthy Lovisa had been sick when they left Sugar Creek, and week by week her strength failed. Presently she was altogether listless on a roll of blankets in the wagon, and could not. be induced to eat. Once, however, they passed a prairie farm, and Wealthy revived enough to ask for some potato soup. Her grandmother went to the house, but the farm wife had heard the stories. “I wouldn’t sell or give one of you Mormons a potato to save your life,” she said, and set the dog on the grandmother. Wealthy lived till they got to the Missouri River, and then died. Brigham told Sister Ann, “It shall be said of you that you have come up through much tribulation.”
The emigration had begun too soon, was insufficiently prepared and inadequately financed. A family had what equipment it could get; and no matter how much the Saints might help one another, there were the most serious inequalities. The wealthiest among them might have three or four wagons and a sizable herd of cattle. Even such as these suffered severely, and Apostles Pratt, Kimball, and Richards had to see their families weakening with a never-satiated hunger. But also a family might have only one wagon and no cattle, or merely a light cart, perhaps merely a buggy. Many a Saint trundled his entire possessions westward in a wheelbarrow — a sack of meal or flour, a roll of blankets, a change of clothing for the children.
Moreover, this was the migration not of certain individuals coming together in a temporary organization while they crossed the plains, but of an entire people. The Camp of Israel was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, past, present, and to come. The Mormons carried with them not only their goods but also their church and social institutions—the hierarchy, the various priesthoods, the rituals and sacraments, the coöperative associations, the United Order, the mission system. An Oregon train had no social fabric to preserve, and when it reached the Willamette its members had crossed the country once and for all. No other train had any relation to it; the country closed in behind with no marks except the litter of the nightly camp. But Israel had to maintain its nervous system and could support its venture in the West only by constant accessions. It had to be a continuing emigration.
So, for the sake of many who could go no further, of those still in Nauvoo, and of the as yet unconverted all over the world, facilities of some permanence had to be provided. The problem had to be solved at once; Brigham solved it. His little eyes lacked the gift Joseph’s had, of piercing the heavens and beholding the glories there, but it is exceedingly unlikely that Joseph could ever have got his people beyond Sugar Creek.
At Richardson’s Point, fifty-five miles from Nauvoo, they built a permanent camp, which would always have a garrison. Companies coming in from the east would find wood, supplies, blacksmi thing tools, experienced help — and the priesthood making sure that they “accepted counsel,” obeyed, kept discipline, and lived their religion. Another one was established further on, at a crossing of the Chariton River, and here the first crops were sowed. The first companies planted crops, a permanent personnel cultivated them, later arrivals would harvest them. All these plantations except those on the Missouri made crops in ‘46. Even before Brigham led his people to the mountains in ‘47, they were making the land in part support them as they traveled.
The prairies dried out. Clothing and bedding were dry at last, but now there were other plagues. The prairie mosquitoes settled in solid layers on men and oxen. The prairie rattlesnakes terrified everyone and killed many cattle. If there was now purchase for the wheels, there was not yet fodder for the oxen, which grew still weaker on a diet of buds and twigs. The hunters could not get game enough; they were hundreds of miles east of the buffalo that the other movers could count on. Each permanent camp was a hospital, its garrison composed of those who were too weak, too sick, or too poor to go farther.
But this was the Church of Christ. They were escaping from their oppressors, Moses had led them out of the land of Egypt, they were going to establish Zion and build up the Kingdom.
35
Captain Pitts’s brass band was a great solace — and a help with the Gentiles. One day, after traveling eight miles, it split 130 rails before dark and traded them to a farmer for corn, then gave a concert in the evening. Throughout the settlements it played wherever Gentiles would gather and for any fee — a pail of honey, eight bushels of corn, seven dollars in one place where the parsons opposed it, twenty-five dollars and meals for everyone at another place, and once for ten dollars and ten cents contributed to it by a village of awed, admiring Indians. Still more helpfully, it played for the Saints — Israel’s hymns, the current balladry, quadrilles and minuets and hoedowns. For Israel danced every night. The wagons made their rough park; the fires blazed up and supper was prepared; then the band got out the instruments, and by firelight and after prayer the pudgy, rubicund Prophet clapped his hands and sashayed up to some favored sister, while Israel formed sets under the stars.
There were glee clubs, quartets, and choirs. Parties freckle all the journals, at night when the wagons halt in the rain, in the huts of the permanent camps, and in “boweries” or arbors when there is a few days’ pause. News came from the other divisions, from Nauvoo, from the European missions. The “teachers” called their groups together to study the everlasting mysteries, praise Joseph, and curse his murderers. The priesthood quorums met for their rituals. And the vigilant mothers in Israel extemporized their schoolrooms; many a Mormon child learned his alphabet to the turning wheels and practiced it in a hornbook at night, scrawling the misspelled word ten times over before he was permitted to crawl into the blankets.
They were prodigious, the mothers in Israel. They trudged through mud or dust or, a sick child on their knees, drove teams when father had been drafted to build a bridge or cut grass. They sewed, knitted, patched, spliced, while the wagon bumped and swayed. They spun and wove, and even made the dyes to color the homespun. They learned to let the wagon’s jolting churn a pail of cream to butter. They learned to identify edible prairie roots and make them palatable. They learned to extemporize a household economy in wagons and to maintain family order on the march. And if by night father left them after a patriarchal prayer, to visit another wagon or go back ten miles on the trail to where another, younger wife prayerfully awaited him, why that also was their portion and they learned to live their religion.
And the brethren also were performing prodigies. They found time to make nails, burn charcoal, shape oxbows, and manufacture harness and even wagons as they traveled. At farms and little settlements they would hire out for any job at any wage. Some Gentiles were friendly, some suspicious, some hostile. Some had to be overawed by a show of pistols; but the Lord moved others to pity and contributions. Sometimes the brethren held instruction for them, expounding the holy mysteries. . . . And always there were the endless harangues and reorganizing that Israel had found essential. A brother might prove false in that he outbid another brother for oxen or refused the use of a team which a Seventy wanted to borrow. Then Brigham or some minor prophet opened the floodgates of exhortation. Much refreshed, this particular division of the Camp of Israel accepted counsel and got going again.
And Brigham and his staff were learning to manage an emigration while doing their other jobs. The journal of William Clayton, who was clerk of the Camp, shows the headquarters at work. An immense bookkeeping, a constant dispatch and arrival of couriers, an almost nightly convocation of the counselors, the Prophet’s fingers on the controls of an organization that stretched from the Missouri River all the way eastward across America and halfway across Europe. The largest mission, the one in the British Isles, was reorganized while the Camp crossed Iowa. Treaties and arrangements with local officials had to be made. Nearly half in the Camp were sick; they must be ministered to somehow, medicine and care must be got for them, they must be buried when they died. Supplies dwindled; they must be replaced somehow, bought, bartered for, worked for, begged, freighted endless miles going and coming. Weak, shoddy, and ill-built equipment was giving out; it must be restored or replaced somehow, more wagons brought up, more stock, more tools, bedding, ammunition.
And Satan was hard at work. While Israel plodded westward, the recreant William Smith was rousing the Gentile wolf-pack and the Strang heresy was winning the eastern stakes. Strang had cozened away important leaders and was filling the land with abuses, as a heresiarch’s demonic energy carried him raging through the undefended sheepfolds. Even in the Camp itself there was apostasy. Just as February ended and the migration began, Apostle John E. Page had to be disfellowshipped for obstructing counsel; a small group followed him to Strang’s kingdom at Voree, Wisconsin. Halfway across Iowa, another apostate group split off and headed toward Texas, where another Apostle, Lyman Wight, had set up his community. If two Apostles, why not another one? Israel had not shaped into an obedient instrument; the Saints were not welded together.
All this tried Brigham’s genius and dismayed his counselors. Moreover, the news from Nauvoo grew ominous: the mob was more demanding and seemed likely to close in for the kill. Also rumors about the Missourians to the southward grew urgent. They were said to be raising armies and posses, determined to seize this chance to wreak the extermination they had been refused eight years ago. There were repeated alarms; the guards were always turning up some fancied spy or outpost; there was always some new plot on foot.
It made a sufficient test of leadership, organization, and public control, not to mention prophecy. But there was a still greater anxiety, the finances. At the sacrifice of their property the Mormons had raised all the money they could. The eastern and European stakes had sent all the money they could raise. Missionaries and special couriers went about the land gleaning their petty pence, stripping the faithful still further, calling on all Gentile agencies that could be moved to contribute. The sum was short of what Israel must have in order to reach the mountains. Brigham held fast to his intention of getting an advance party to Zion in this summer of ‘46. But it became increasingly clearer to him that he could not get the main body of the Church farther than the Missouri River this year. There was before his mind the possibility that he might not get them beyond it in ‘47 or even in ‘48.
Well, he would get them to the Missouri. Richardson’s Point, the Chariton, Garden Grove, Mount Pisgah, and at last Council Bluffs. The pioneer company reached the river on June 14, the last refugees from Nauvoo on November 27. Through eight months, continuously across more than four hundred miles, moved between fifteen and twenty thousand people uprooted and seeking a new land. Thousands of wagons, tens of thousands of oxen, horses, mules, milch cattle, beef cattle, neat cattle, sheep, goats. Chickens, geese, turkeys, guinea fowl, ducks, pigeons, parrots, love birds, canaries. Seedlings with their roots bound in sacking, slips from the shrubbery back home, seeds for the harvest to come, the disassembled machinery of flour mills and sawmills, a college, the mysteries of heaven, the keys to eternity, the Dispensation of the Fullness of Time. Through sleet and rain, through drouth and prairie summer, halfstarved and half-sick, dispossessed, believing, and faithful unto the last, Israel traveled the unknown, toward the land of Canaan, in God’s faith and for His glory and under the shadow of His outstretched hand, to build Zion and inherit the earth.
Before they got to the Missouri a pattern began to take shape. On June 28, Clayton, who was traveling in the rear of the headquarters, noted in his journal that some United States Army officers had come up the trail from the east and gone on ahead to find Brigham at Mount Pisgah, eight miles farther on. The officer — for there was only one — had roused terror and rebellion all along the emigration, for the Saints supposed that the army had been ordered to head them off, perhaps to massacre them. But the truth was far different. Mr. Polk’s war had caught up with the Mormons and they were going to be solicited, ever so courteously, to take a patriotic part in it.
36
Polk had realized the importance of this large body of migrants on the right flank of his armies. The Mormons had no reason to love the United States, and they were a far larger, far more united and homogeneous group than any American settlement in the West. They might easily jeopardize Polk’s war, and they could be a very serious problem after the peace. So he had moved to reattach their severed loyalties, authorizing General Kearny to enlist five hundred of them in his army to share the military conquest of the West. It was one of Kearny’s captains who had caught up with Church headquarters, and he offered to enlist a battalion, with full pay and commutations.
On his part, Brigham Young understood the opportunity offered him. The outbreak of war had made it certain that the country to which Israel was fleeing would become American, that there was no escape from the jurisdiction of the United States. It would therefore be wise to join the conquest, for thus the Mormons would ensure a favorable attitude toward themselves and their claims when they should reach the new country. They would be not only the original settlers but military veterans as well, of demonstrated loyalty, with an honorable record. Furthermore, though Young and the Twelve had been violently denouncing the government, they had also been doing their utmost to get it to subsidize their emigration. (In fact, though the wily Polk had made up his mind to offer the enlistment, the arrival of a Mormon emissary pleading for government aid allowed him to make the offer as a benevolent answer to a desperate plea. Even before that, Elder Samuel Brannan, who was now taking a shipload of Eastern Saints to California by sea, had tried to get a direct subsidy.) This, then, was an extremely favorable development. The Mormons would be patriots, and the desperate question of money would be solved. Five hundred Mormons would be transported west without cost to themselves or the Church. Help would be extended to many of their families. And their pay and commutation, amounting to well over sixty thousand dollars in all, would finance the Exodus. Already several of the Mormon camps had been vouchsafed a miracle of quails and now, Brigham instantly understood, here was manna.
He commanded the faithful to enlist. The Saints obediently endeavored to love the government but, after years of hating it, the readjustment took time. “I confess I was glad to learn of war against the United States,” Hosea Stout’s journal says, and other journals say the same thing more venomously, “and was in hopes that it might never end untill they were entirely destroyed for they had driven us into the wilderness & now was laughing at our calamities.” Furthermore, families already strained with fatigue, disease, and malnutrition, and on the eve of the unknown passage of the desert, were not eager to send fathers or sons on a military expedition far away. Brigham set up a flag, announced that the new commandment was really Gospel, hurried recruiting agents to the other camps — and got only a handful of volunteers. He lost patience. If the young men did not come forward, he announced, he would draft old men, and if he could not get enough of them he would fill up the ranks with women. Grace was given his flock, and the Mormon Battalion was formed, five companies, a little over five hundred men. A good many wives started with them, some entire family organizations, a number of grandfathers, and a flock of children. The Battalion was an excellent organization for the service asked of it, but so many cripples, invalids, and old men had to be weeded out of it at Santa Fe that it was reduced nearly a third.
This is the Mormon Battalion which, under Philip St. George Cooke, took the trail to Santa Fe and on to California, following Kearny’s earlier march. Its strenuous but wholly unmilitary adventures are a separate story, which cannot be told here. It helped in the pacification of California, and portions of it stayed so long there that several members were working for James Marshall when he found gold in the millrace he was building for Sutter.
Its enlistment solved the vital problem. The Mormons were now in a position to finance the next step, the passage to the Great Basin. But also the withdrawal of so many men made it certain that that step could not be taken in ‘46. The Church would have to go into camp till spring.
(It should be noted that there was a small party of Mormons far up on the Niobrara River, originally sent there to seek out a route west. A larger group, from Mississippi mainly, started west independently of the main body and actually got to Fort Laramie before learning that the march to Zion had been postponed. On the advice of mountain men, they moved south to the site of Pueblo, Colorado, and spent the winter there. They were joined by the wives and “Sick Detachment” of the Mormon Battalion, who had been sent back from Santa Fe.)
Though he decided to delay the passage of the mountains till ‘47, Young still hoped to send an advance party on in the late summer or early fall of ‘46. The plan had to be abandoned because the Saints objected to separating more men from their families and because to detach many of the leaders would have risked dissension, anxiety, and apostasy.
And in September of ‘46 terrorism broke out again at Nauvoo, where the sick and the very poor still lingered, fewer than a thousand of them all told. The mob later excused its action on the ground that the Mormons might once more have swung an election. The excuse has certain defects: the election was over before the mob rose, It is possible for history to explain the earlier mobbings of the Nauvoo Mormons: there was reason for them, they grew out of things past, they were probably inevitable. But this one has an even simpler explanation: the mobbers were just swine. It had become fun (and safe) to torture Mormons, so they had fun.
The swine rode and lynched nearer the city and grew in daring. Finally, with various small pieces of artillery, they attacked it. There were some twenty-five hundred of them, tough, loudmouthed gunmen, and discretion led them to maintain the battle at fairly long range. It lasted several days, and a number were killed on both sides. An armistice was arranged, on the Mormons’ promise to forget the compact made with them ten months ago and to get out now, all of them, at once.
The mobbers whooped into the city and began to amuse themselves with the terrified. They stole what they wanted, broke what was breakable, converted the Temple floors into latrines, yelled at children, and flourished guns at women. It was their pleasure to beat up some Saints and to baptize others in parodies of the sacred ordinances. They had an enjoyable time, and the Saints hauled their sick into the brush to escape lynching, gathered what possessions they could, pleaded unavailingly for time and mercy, and got out. Some died of fright, others of shock and injury, others still in premature childbirth.
Some six hundred and forty of them huddled on the Iowa shore, in the marshes, with the rains coming and chills-and-fever season at hand. They built brush shelters, made tents of sheets and wagon covers. The brethren at Garden Grove, Mount Pisgah, and Winter Quarters hurried to send what help they could — it was little enough. In the course of ten weeks they were all moved out to various way stations on the trail, where they fared a little better. There was never enough food, never enough shelter, and never any comfort at all. They ate what they had brought with them, what they could find, what they could buy or beg in the vicinity, what the succoring wagons could haul to them. Ague, typhoid, dysentery, pneumonia ravaged them. But, of course, beyond them in the sunset somewhere was Israel’s inheritance.
In the Mormon memory this swampy pesthole is known as “The Poor Camp,” and no wonder. And it is the sheer bad health of Winter Quarters and the other camps that most impresses one who reads the journals of the Saints. (They themselves called the Missouri bottoms “Misery Bottoms.”) They were now paying in full for a year of terrorism and a summer and fall of forced migration. It amounted to another tax assessed by the mobbers, and today, all the way across Iowa, you can find little clusters of graves, the winter’s fatalities where groups of Saints had settled down. Winter Quarters was not only the largest but the richest and healthiest of the camps, and in Winter Quarters burial parties were always at work. The old wives exhausted their brews of prairie simples, the priesthood laid their hands on the afflicted and spoke the holy incantations. Even the indestructible John D. Lee sickened. His third wife, Louisa, lay and embraced him for two hours. (She caught the infection.) Neither herbs nor a saleratus bath restored him. Finally he called on his father by spiritual adoption, Brigham Young. The Prophet came and “laid on my breast a cane built from one of the branches of the Tree of Life that stood in the garden of the Temple.” Then Apostle Woodruff rebuked the sickness and promised Lee that his earthly usefulness would continue and that “Heavenly visions of Eternity ” would be opened to him. The disease withdrew, but there was no physician to heal the physicians, and both Young and Woodruff were sick repeatedly.
37
Winter Quarters, Perrigrine Sessions remarked with satisfaction, was “surrounded by the Lamanites on all sides and over one hundred miles from the cursed Gentiles.” The Lamanites were of the Omaha tribe, an unmilitary but thievish race who constantly stole the cattle of their Nephite brethren and kept running to them for help against the Sioux, Oto, and Potawatomi. Working out an Indian policy for use hereafter, Young tried every method from flogging to overfeeding, but no method got results. Yet the Omaha have a uniqueness in history: they were a people who could endure more “counsel,” harangues, and sermonizing than the Mormons.
Young had chosen to build his city on Omaha land several miles down-river from the first crossing. The site, today a suburb of the city of Omaha, was selected on the stated ground that it was favorable for defense by John Scott’s homemade three-pounders. For terror of mobs and government lingered on, there were repeated rumors of impending destruction, and the U. S. Dragoons were always coming in force to arrest the Twelve. Little outpost groups were as much as twelve miles in the interior, and there were small settlements north and south as well as across the river in Iowa. But the principal group, about 3500, was at Winter Quarters and built there a town of nearly a thousand rude structures.
Nothing else in American history — not the ephemeral towns of real-estate booms nor the hardier ones of mining rushes — is like Winter Quarters. An entire people had uprooted itself and, on the way to the mountains, paused here and put down roots. The endless church government went on. Not only the other camps had to be managed from Winter Quarters but all the missions too, in the United States and overseas. Supplies had to be kept moving; hundreds of teams were out all the time, freighting grain, flour, beef, pork, hardware, dry goods. Brigham invested most of the Battalion’s first pay in foodstuffs which he sold to the Saints through his own firm. The money belonged to Battalion families in fact, though theory consecrated it to the Church. There was much grumbling, and Brigham finally yielded to it, at least in part, but he turned an honest profit on the deal.
Well, Peletiah Brown had proved to be a profane swearer when he hired out to William Clayton, Zion’s clerk. So no one was surprised when, on complaint of Apostle Woodruff, it appeared that he and Daniel Barnum and Jack Clothier had been out for fifteen successive nights with some of the girls, committing the crime of “adultery or having carnal communication. ” In the mores of a polygamous society there is no greater crime. The boys expected either death or castration when Colonel Hosea Stout and Marshal Eldredge came for them. But the Marshal let them off with a sound flogging.
And the Word of Wisdom, which forbade strong drink, was disregarded to the extent of the available supply. Brigham’s own freighting company imported whiskey which was sold over the counter in Brigham’s own store. With that sanction, those who could buy or make it used liquor. Hosea Stout’s guards and rangers needed solace, for they had to patrol the town in all weathers and were always riding out to scout imaginary enemies. One night three Apostles came to reason with the police, who had protested when their pay was cut. Hosea found the best solvent, and Orson Hyde, Parley Pratt, and John Taylor, holy men all, took a grateful turn at the jug. Parley would know how to find protection from now on, he said, and Hosea spoke wisdom: “Parley, do you not know that some things in this kingdom are only spiritually discerned?” Eventually Brigham (though he made a regional wine from some wild grapes) had to denounce the traffic. But it kept on and, as they started west, the Lord Himself had to reprove His Saints for drunkenness.
There was a lot of denunciation at Winter Quarters. The Saints were afraid of the mob behind them and the wilderness ahead. They were sick and underfed. Their hovels were uncomfortable. They could not love the outbreaks of communism that levied on their goods for the poor. They hankered for more celestial fireworks than Brigham had time or willingness to give them. They but incompletely developed the holy docility that he desired for them. “It is the policy and intention to put down any spirit in the Camp of Israel that would seek to establish independence,” Norton Jacob wrote, and loyally added, “I say Amen.” Tirelessly pursuing transgression, Brigham scolded, fumed, denounced, derided, threatened, and rebuked. This people must find righteousness or they would be swept from the earth. Covetousness and insubordination must end or they would “all be destroyed by the Lamanites as were the Nephites of old.” He summoned them to reform. He would bring them to grace by his own hand. And he warned them that when they started into the desert the “law of God in every particular would take full effect and that would cut the matter short, even as short as the man who went to cut a dog’s tail off and by mistake he cut it close behind the cars.” It was due notice, and something of a revival answered it, the Saints hurrying to confess and be rebaptized in the icy Missouri for the remission of sins.
38
Over and above sickness, supply, doctrine, the administration of a fiscal and spiritual kingdom, and the refreshment of the weary — above all these was one paramount objective. Brigham was preparing the final Exodus. All through the summer and fall of ‘46 and the succeeding winter the Prophet and his best minds examined its problems. Everyone who came down the river or eastward over the prairies was drained of his information. There were a good many of them, from Father DeSmet, the great missionary who had spent a lifetime in the mountains, to casual strays from trading posts upriver. The Apostles learned what they could, made a census of Israel’s resources, worked out minute calculations of what had to be done. The first fruits of this preparation — all that the faithful need know — were issued to a meeting of the Twelve at Heber Kimball’s cabin on the afternoon of January 14.
This is the only formal revelation that Brigham Young ever issued, though of course he spoke by inspiration all his life long, as occasion might require. It is called “The Word and Will of the Lord,” and it is a plan for the move west. The Lord did not require of the Saints more than they could accomplish. They were to maintain the organization of companies, hundreds, fifties, and tens, which had served them so far. Each company was to determine how many of its members could afford the journey this year and was to prepare all the vehicles and supplies it could. It was to take its share of the poor and those whose providers were with the Battalion. It was to build houses and provide supplies for those who could not cross this year. Five Apostles and Erastus Snow, who was soon to become an Apostle, were named to head various companies. The Saints were instructed to grow in virtue, stop drinking, pay back what they had borrowed from neighbors, maintain their “testimony,” and humble themselves. God repeated the long, long history of their blessings and tribulations — and of their enemies, who would destroy them if their faith should fail. And, putting aside the pen, the Deity closed, “So no more at present.” Brigham, the Lion of the Lord, could be trusted to attend to the rest.
As he starts west from Winter Quarters, we may remember that the Lion of the Lord was one of the nineteenth century’s great men. The modern Church has lavished on Joseph Smith’s birthplace at Sharon, Vermont, all the resources of pious commemoration. At Whitingham, sixty miles away, there is neither landscaping nor missionary service to do reverence to the man who saved the Mormon Church, brought the kingdom in, and gave the Great Basin to the United States. There is only, on a bare hillside, above the waters of Whitingham Dam, a barbedwire inclosure round an apple tree and a marker of native marble about the size and appearance of a gravestone. “ Brigham Young,” the inscription reads. “Born on this spot. 1801, A man of much courage and superb equipment.”
Nothing, Henry Thoreau wrote at Walden Pond, nothing is effected but by one man. Brigham Young saved his church when Joseph was lynched, brought it to Missouri, took it to Great Salt Lake, gave it safety, wealth, and power. The State of Utah is his monument — or, if you like, the lives of hundreds of thousands. He was not a large man in stature, this seeking Methodist who found his fulfillment in the chaos of Joseph Smith’s vision. In January, 1846, he was five months short of forty-six, smoothshaven, his eyes small but steady and severe, his body beginning to thicken. He grew fatter as the years passed, and raised a benignant “wreath ” beard that set the style for patriarchs in Utah. He was a carpenter and glazier, a mechanic, a man who worked with his hands — and with his hands built the greater part of his own white cottage in Salt Lake City, just such a Yankee farmhouse as one might see in Vermont.
The pioneer party was almost ready to set out, but the timorous in Israel were shrinking back. Hearts that had been staunch so far began to falter, and half-dugouts in the Omaha bluffs, now sodden with the spring run-off, seemed preferable to the trail and the unknown mountains whither the Twelve were to journey. Panic showed itself, and for a while Brigham ordered the ferries to take no one to the Iowa shore who could not show a passport from the priesthood. In the Iowa camps the fear was stronger. They were composed mostly of those who had to stop there because they could go no farther. Weak, sick, impoverished, scared of what was to come, a great many refused to set out again. Some had private revelations, illiterate copies of semiliterate originals, with God telling the head of a family that the Twelve had departed from the true faith, and then neighbors gathering by night and finding after prayer that this new light was true. Others simply fell away, returning to the Westminster Confession or just letting religion slide while they made a new beginning in the prairies. For years there was a state-wide belt across Iowa of tiny schismatic sects and mere apostates. Their descendants are there still.
Apostasy remained a sharp, an incurable anxiety. Israel’s notorious tendency to grow muddleheaded when the wise were absent might prove fatal now. Brigham spent the entire afternoon of March 26 admonishing the assembled Saints. After he had started west, he said, “men would rise up and complain that the Twelve were not right and they themselves were the ones to lead and govern the people, and that he knew who it was, and plainly pointed out some who were now trying to raise up a party to themselves.” The most sedulous dispatch of couriers between the pioneers and the Church could not relieve this fear, and on the way west Brigham’s nightly meditation dwelt on the sheepfold, the wolves, and the silly sheep. He did not lose the fear till, leaving the pioneers beside Great Salt Lake, he hurried back over the trail and met Israel coming on.
Then they were off. Between April 7 and April 15 those who were to compose the pioneer party left Winter Quarters for the rendezvous at the Elkhorn River. They were to have made up the twelve times twelve chosen men of the Apocalypse, but the true Scriptural formation was impaired when one of them proved too feeble for the trip. None of the sisters in Israel was to have made the trip, but a wife of Lorenzo Young’s was at last accepted in order to restore her health after the malaria of “ Misery Bottoms.” She took two children with her and, one exception having been made, Brigham permitted himself to take a wife and granted the same privilege to Heber Kimball, the Second in Israel. So the party which left the Elkhorn on April 16, 1847, numbered 143 men, three women, and two children. They had seventy-three wagons, ninety-three horses, fifty-two mules, nineteen cows, seventeen dogs, and some chickens. A stringent selection had been made, and most of the party were from the upper ranks of the priesthood: eight Apostles, eighteen high priests, and eighty Seventies.
The Mormons, numbering something more than 1800 all told, were less well equipped than most of the Gentile parties — they were migrating on a frayed shoestring — but they made the passage in less time and with less hardship. Naturally, to move an eighth of the Church west in one summer was a more difficult enterprise than to take over the same trail any other party we have studied. That so remarkable a job was done so well depended on three things: the shorter distance they traveled, the preparation that had been made after searching study, and the authority of God’s vicar, Brigham Young.
After the pioneers reached the Platte (beyond the Loupe Fork) they traveled up the north bank, thus establishing what is called “the Mormon Trail.” It was not a new trail, and in fact they repeatedly met parties coming down it from the west, but the usual trail was up the south bank. The Saints took their new course for two reasons: grass would be more plentiful north of the river, and they need not mingle with the Gentile emigration. They remained in deadly fear of persecution (as they still do in 1942) and preserved their illusion that innumerable mobbers, politicians, and especially Pukes were after them. There is not the slightest evidence that, by the summer of ‘47, anyone anywhere in the prairies or the far West intended them any harm whatever — but it was good sense to avoid the opportunities of friction.
These pioneers were preparing the way for the main body of the Church. So they made careful observations and recorded all the data they assembled. When the Apostle Parley Pratt was sent to the English mission late in the preceding summer, money for scientific instruments had been given him. They arrived in time and were turned over to Parley’s brother, the Apostle Orson Pratt. Orson was the besteducated of the Saints and one of the principal intelligences, a remarkable man who had been the faculty of the putative Nauvoo University as he was to be the faculty of the University of Deseret (which did not get far beyond the paper stage). He determined the latitude and longitude of the camp whenever observation was possible, and examined the terrain for all conceivable information, He soon found that his observations were more precise than those of Frémont, whose map they were using. Therefore, in collaboration with Willard Richards and William Clayton, two other trained minds, he proposed to make a new map. Eventually the data they assembled were digested by Clayton in The Latter-Day Saints Emigrant’s Guide. Published the next year, it was the most accurate study of the trail before Stansbury’s.
At the very beginning they met Papin, the bourgeois of Fort Laramie, making his annual trip to St. Louis with robes and furs. They met others coming down the trail and pumped them all dry of information. They met a few Sioux and had an occasional Indian scare, though, as Norton Jacob said, “the Lord had turned the Indians aside.” They lost an occasional horse. Last year’s drouth was not repeated this year, and they understood that the Lord was going before them. After time and powder had been wasted, Brigham restricted the hunting privilege to the Twelve and a group of expert marksmen. They traveled by the Way and Will of the Lord and the counsel of Brigham Young: strict herd guard, strict corral, strict night guard, advance party, outriders.
But they began to enjoy themselves too much. Too many practical jokes, too many mock trials, too much (womanless) dancing, and too much frivolity of cards, dominoes, and checkers. A Puritanism which was not typical of him and probably originated in his anxiety about the sheepfold at Winter Quarters suddenly afflicted the Lion of the Lord. Opposite Scott’s Bluff he halted the train and gave them what-for. “My text will be the way I feel, as I do not feel like going any farther with all this company of men and with the spirit that now prevails in this camp.” Expert vituperation loosed like thunder in the desert blew them into virtue, and we get the first hint of Brigham’s realization that, hemmed in by the wilderness, there could be persuasions more pointed than oratory. If anyone shall attempt to introduce anything that is unlawful, secretly, to carry their purpose into operation without permission, I swear they shall not return home.”
He ordered them to renew their covenants. Separating into their priestly orders, they donned their priestly robes and went off into the hills for penitence and prayer. When they got back again a more seemly spirit prevailed.
On June 1 they camped opposite Fort Laramie, and two Saints who had brought up their families from Pueblo crossed the river to greet them. Their party numbered nine men, five women, and three children, with six wagons, richly outfitted, and a large herd. They reported four deaths and two births at Pueblo and said that the rest of their party and the Battalion’s sick detachment were impatient to finish the pilgrimage. Brigham dispatched Apostle Lyman and three men to Pueblo to bring them in. They were the second Mormon train to reach the valley.
The Twelve got more information the next morning when they crossed over to Fort Laramie. Bordeau received them amiably in the room that had wrought on the imagination of Parkman, rented them his boat to cross their outfits, and told them all he knew about the conditions ahead of them. The blacksmiths set to work reconditioning the wagons. Other Gentile parties came in — from the west, from Santa Fe, and from the east. The year’s emigration had caught up with them. The Saints were astonished, for the Gentiles, even the Pukes, showed no hostility whatever. Must be some diabolical plot.
Here they began to make money from their enemies — it has remained their principal mundane pleasure. At the Crossing of the Platte, near Casper, they occupied both fords, usurping one with what amounted to force. The rains (they were miracle) had swollen the river, and the fords had to be ferried. Gentile wagons were jammed up there, and the Saints made a good thing of ferrying them — for cash or, what was better, foodstuffs at Independence prices. So good a thing that they set up forges and did blacksmithing for the enemy as well and resolved to remain in business here. Brigham detached a party to run the ferries till the Church should come up. He gave it the proper sacerdotal organization, invoked the Lord’s blessing, set the Lord’s schedule of fees, and started the pioneers west again.
On June 26 Orson Pratt and several others, a few miles in advance, crossed the divide in South Pass and camped at Pacific Spring. When their fire blazed up, a party that had camped not far away paid a visit. At the head of them was Black Harris, fresh from Oregon on his way to meet the emigration and get his summer’s employment. He had some Oregon newspapers and a copy of the California Star which, they were amazed to learn, Brother Samuel Brannan had founded at San Francisco, “beside the far Pacific sea.” This also proved that the Lord was taking care of them. Harris stayed in camp the next day, when the rest of the pioneers came up, trading furs and telling Young all he knew about the Great Basin. They were getting close to Zion now, wherever Zion might prove to be, and they questioned him exhaustively. Great Salt Lake Valley, he thought, was not too good, chiefly because there was little timber. Bear River Valley was little better. His judgment was that Cache Valley would be best. But “we feel that we shall know best,” William Clayton wrote, “by going ourselves, for the reports of travelers are so contradictory it is impossible to know which is the truth without going to see.”
39
On Monday, June 28, they came down out of the corridor of South Pass and presently reached the fork where Sublette’s or Greenwood’s Cut-off left the rutted, iron-hard trail. On July 19, a year before, two trains traveling together had halted here for the last good-bye and Jessy Thornton had written in his diary that Tamsen Donner was “gloomy and dispirited” when her husband’s wagons kept on down the California fork. The Mormons now took that same fork and some hours later made a nooning at the Little Sandy. Drab sagebrush, no timber, and the merciless Wyoming sun. After their rest they took the wagons across the little stream with a loss of two tar buckets. A mile farther on Apostle George A. Smith came riding back to the main party with a weatherworn gentleman whom he had met coming up the trail. They camped at once and held a “Council” with the Apostle’s find. Drums should have rolled and trumpets sounded, or the supernatural stage management of this millennial creed should have provided signs from on high, for the Mormons had now met the master of these regions, their final authority. Apostle Smith had brought in Old Gabe, Jim Bridger.
Old Gabe was one of the greatest of the great mountain men, already a legend then and still a legend in our day. While the fires blazed up and the sun sank behind the nondescript hills west of the Little Sandy, Old Gabe told these forerunners of Israel about the land they were to inherit. His memory was the map no one had had in the White House of President Polk or the Council House of President Young. Through his stripped speech ran thousands of miles with the wind and sun on them. His was the continental mind, like the mind of his messmate Jim Clyman, telling the Donners at Fort Bernard not to take the Hastings Cut-off. The pilgrims of eternity were children come a little way into the kingdom of Old Gabe. As a monarch he instructed them. (And had his pay, some years later, when they burned him out.)
They were bewildered, and why not? His monologue made marches of a thousand miles, the names of innumerable deserts, gulches, peaks, and rivers jeweling it. They report him differently, but all who report him at all say that he spoke favorably of Great Salt Lake Valley. Much of what he said was unintelligible to greenhorns, but all the information recorded is exact. Jim spoke as one having authority. He went on talking, sketching in the entire map from the Grand Canyon to the Snake, from the Little Sandy to the far Pacific sea, and all its minerals, trees, shrubs, roots, rainfall, vistas, local gods, “He said it was his paradise,” Wilford Woodruff wrote. It was. His talk moved on to the resident Indians — Paiute, the Diggers. The Saints need not be afraid of them, could “drive the whole of them in twenty-four hours.” But Jim, a formally adopted Shoshoni brave, would not kill the Diggers; his counsel was to make slaves of them. Finally, “Supper had been provided for Mr. Bridger and his men and the latter having eaten, the council was dismissed, Mr. Bridger going with President Young to supper, the remainder retiring to their wagons, conversing over the subject touched upon.”
Observe that final, private conversation between Old Gabe and the Lion of the Lord. The hours of Bridger’s exposition had cleared the obstructions from the channel of inspiration. Now, while Jim sat with Brigham in the patriarchal white-top and a candle burned in a bucket there, unquestionably the heavens opened. Whatever they talked about, Jim Bridger became the oracle of revelation, and when the time came Brigham would be able to speak the Lord’s will and say, “This is the place.”
At the camp on Green River mountain fever broke out. The Saints swelled, ached, and burned. Brigham sent back a party of five under Phineas Young to meet the oncoming Church with notes, statistics, counsel, and rebuke. The next day was July 4 and there was another reunion. Twelve outriders from the Battalion sick detachment, coming up from Pueblo, rode into the camp, to loud hosannas, almost exactly a year after Brigham had set up the flag and ordered them to volunteer.
On the way to Fort Bridger Apostle Woodruff’s eye kindled, for some little white-water brooks must surely have trout in them. He got out the rod he had brought all the way from Liverpool, attached a fly (he thought it likely that he was the first to use one in these parts), and sure enough there were trout. The pioneers camped within a mile or two of the fort on May 7. There was a congregation of mountain men and Indians there, so that the Saints got more intimate details about the route of revelation. The trace of the Hastings Cut-off led west from here, a mere wagon track. As they heard more of its story, the myth grew. The Donners were now from the abhorred Clay County, “a mob company that threatened to drive out the Mormons who were in California, and started with that spirit in their hearts. But it seemed as though they were ripe for judgment.” Woodruff thought that he remembered baptizing Mrs. Murphy in Tennessee. She had apostatized and joined the mob, he decided, and in God’s loving-kindness had been punished by being killed and eaten.
Nevertheless, God had used the mobbers and apostates to prepare a way for His chosen, who took the trail they had made. Taking it, they struck the Bear River on July 10, the first part of Zion which they knew by name. Here they met Miles Goodyear, who was driving a herd of California horses toward the emigration. He had just traveled the whole stretch of the Hastings Cut-off — had passed the cabins at Donner Lake, crossed the Salt Desert, and followed the Donner trail through the Wasatch. Moreover, he was the sole proprietor of Zion, having built a cabin and corral and put in crops on the Weber River, some miles above its mouth. Once more they interviewed a veteran mountain man. This one had real estate to sell but he did not sell it now (he did a few months later), for Porter Rockwell rode back with him to examine the direct route to Goodyear’s holdings. This was the Weber Canyon route down which Hastings had taken the Harlan-Young wagon train. Porter needed only a glance at those chasms: the Saints would not go that way. He reported and Orson Pratt was ordered out with an advance party “to find Mr. Reid’s route across the mountains.” Mr. Reid, of course, was James Frazier Reed of the Donner party.
Mountain fever now afflicted Brigham, who was so sick that, stopping beside the trail, the priesthood had to minister to him. From here on the pioneers traveled in three divisions. While some of the priesthood, in their Temple robes, went up into the high place to pray for the sick, forty-two men with twenty-three wagons, under Orson Pratt and Stephen Markham, led the advance. Pratt rode a few miles into Weber Canyon, determined that Porter Rockwell’s judgment had been sound, and set his men to work improving the Donner road. He could understand what his predecessors had endured. In spite of their three weeks of agonizing labor in brush, along mountainsides, and down the beds of creeks, “we found the road almost impassable and requiring much labor.” He had his party supply the labor. They hacked the brush away, pried boulders out, leveled, graded, felled trees. He kept riding ahead to reconnoiter and sent his data back to those who were following. Through most of this scouting his companion was John Brown, of the Mississippi Saints, and after a Sabbath rest on July 18 it was these two who caught the first glimpse of the promised land. On July 19 from the ridge beyond Big Mountain, which had thrown the Donners into their first panic, they “could see an extensive level prairie some few miles distant, which we thought must be near the Lake.”
But it was Erastus Snow, from the second group, who was with Pratt on July 21. (“Now the time was the time of the first-ripe grapes.”) That day they followed the Donner road up Little Mountain and “looked out on the full extent of the valley where the broad waters of the Great Salt Lake glistened in the sunbeams.” Seeing that land, Pratt says, “we could not refrain from a shout of joy which almost involuntarily escaped from our lips.” They made their way downhill to Emigration Canyon, down that winding, gentle gulch, and out at last to Zion. Young had sent instructions (unquestionably from the revelation unto Jim Bridger) for them to turn north for a few miles after reaching the valley. This brought them to the twinned creek where ground would first be broken. They rode carefully, examining the soil, thinking of dam sites and crops to come, noting an ominous profusion of black crickets. That night all the wagons except those which lingered with the sick Prophet camped in Canaan. The next day, July 23, they sent a report to Brigham and moved the whole camp to the divided creek. “Here we called the camp together,” Pratt says, “and it fell to my lot to offer up prayer and thanksgiving in behalf of our company, all of whom had been preserved from the Missouri River to this point; and, after dedicating ourselves and the land unto the Lord and imploring His blessings upon our labors, we appointed various committees to attend to different branches of business, preparatory to putting in crops, and in about two hours after our arrival we began to plow, and the same afternoon built a dam to irrigate the soil, which at the spot where we were ploughing was exceedingly dry.”
There had lately been some showers in the Wasatch, but they could not have greatly freshened the valley. In late July it is always a dry land weary with summer. When the Apostle Orson came over the ridge of Big Mountain he was in a zone where the ground whitened with frost at daybreak and the silver undersides of aspen had the first gilt tinge of winter. But he came down past the benches of the prehistoric lake to a plain of sage and stunted oakbrush smelling of dust under a brazen sun. Dust lay on the oak leaves, dust made a flour to the tops of their boots, the tar-and-turpentine stench of sage was in their nostrils, and the sky whitened with heat. They saw the valley as men coming from a far country to the promised land. It was the women whose hearts sank at sight of desolation — the empty plain, the line of the Wasatch stretching south with perhaps a few patches of snow left still like outcrops of chalk just below the ridge, to the south the more desolate Oquirrhs canting westward toward the end of the lake, and then those bright, amazing waters with peaks rising from them and the sun striking a white fire from them and from the whiter sand. Well enough for the Apostle Orson to fall on his knees and dedicate the land unto the Lord and give thanks. But to the women it was a stark and hideous land. The years of persecution and the long moving ended here — but in a desert. The ground crawled with crickets, a rattler slid into the sage, well out of rifle range a coyote loped and sat and stared and panted off into emptiness. A hard, resistant folk had found a hard, resistant land, and they would grow to fit one another.
40
The day they venerate is the next day, July 24. At five in the afternoon the favor of God was manifested by a shower of rain, but the end of a long journey had come earlier than that. On the twenty-third they had planted grain and parsnips; today they were planting potatoes and bringing water to them from City Creek, on the site of the Temple of the Lord. At two o’clock, accompanied by some white-top wagons that had had much trouble getting over Little Mountain, — wagons held together by the expedients of the trail, wagons groaning and squealing with dry axles and shrunken hubs, their tires held on by wedges and rawhide, — the carriage of Wilford Woodruff came up to the camp at City Creek and, half-reclining in it, the convalescent prophet Brigham Young looked out at the site of Zion in the land of Canaan, toward the River Jordan flowing into the Dead Sea.
In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are underwritten, ye loyall subjects of our dread soveraigne Lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britaine, Franc, and Ireland king, defender of ye faith, etc. Haveing undertaken for if glorie of God and advancemente of ye Christian faith . . .
No, that was a different covenant. The Apostle Wilford Woodruff: “Thoughts of pleasant meditation ran in rapid succession through our minds at the anticipation that not many years hence the House of God would be established in the mountains and exalted above the hills, while the valleys would be converted into orchards, vineyards, fields, etc., planted with cities, and the standard of Zion be unfurled unto which the nations would gather.”
The Prophet had less to say. What he wrote was an entry that gave the distance traveled, recorded the potatoes, and mentioned the shower. What he said from the carriage was that “we were on the spot where the city was to be built. He knew it as the place he had seen in vision. Said we might explore the mountains over and over again and each time return to this place as the best.”
It was enough to say. But, though his mind focused sharply on those potatoes and the lifegiving water that was flowing over them; though it was already ranging out to the mountains and valleys all about and on to the Pacific and back to Winter Quarters, nevertheless Brigham Young must have permitted himself a moment or two to taste and savor such triumph as few have known in all our history. The thingwas done! Fayette, Kirtland, Jackson County, Clay County, Nauvoo, the frozen Mississippi, Sugar Creek, Pisgah, Winter Quarters —and now Zion. Seventeen years, the angel and the golden plates, the Prophet murdered, hundreds of Mormons dying in the passion of battle or the salt frenzy of flight or shaken by ague or starving at slackened breasts or just going down into the dark after too much strain at Misery Bottoms. He had saved his church, he had brought his people out of bondage, and the gates of hell had not prevailed against them. Danger was over, the kingdom would now come in. He would drive a stake of Zion in the desert soil. Nothing could stop him. God’s people had reached their land.
He was not a man to spend much time in the unprofitable business of prophecy or cursing — in anything unprofitable. Be sure that he did not long indulge himself with triumph but began to correct mistakes and urge the Saints to greater effort. In a few days, more ground had been broken, explorers had been sent out, arrangements had been made to facilitate the coming of those who were on the trail.
A city had been plotted, a site for the Temple had been chosen, a company was ready to leave for California, and another one was ready to go back to Winter Quarters. The Prophet was already at work making his empire, his part of the American empire. It was named Deseret, a word which, we are told, means “land of the honey bee.” You will not find it on maps. But it is there still, an empire within the domestic empire, the commonwealth that Israel built, the life and function of the Latter-Day Saints, a society of their own and like no other. Deseret began in July, 1847, and has gone on up to now, and Deseret is seen to be, as this narrative takes leave of it, what happens when Brook Farm comes into hands fit to build Brook Farm.
If a people had found their land, a land had found its people, a hard, fanatical people forcing a dead land to bring forth life. Deseret was not the deep soil of the Willamette Valley with great forests and abundant rain. It was not the eternal summer of the golden shore. It was a land poisoned with alkali and dead for want of water, a land which could be made to live only by the incessant labor of a people shaped to a fit instrument by suffering, faith, and the domination of a prophet who spoke with the authority of Almighty God. A mad prophet’s visions turned by an American genius into the seed of life, in the memory of suffering and the expectation of eternal glory, while the angels hovered overhead and portents came in the sky.
(The End)