The cost of salvation

Sunset, July, 1998 by Peter Fish

At the parking lot's edge, handcarts gleam in the sun. Dozens of handcarts, with enormous wheels and thick maple frames. Two costumed teenagers lift a cart and set it down, complaining of the weight. They giggle.

"As tragic as it was," Elder Jackson tells me, "the real story at Martin's Cove was the triumph of the human spirit."

That is where we are: Martin's Cove, Wyoming. For Jackson and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Martin's Cove and its handcarts represent a calvary, a place of trial whose lessons are infinite and enduring.

As you might expect, Martin's Cove lies on the Mormon Trail. By the time it entered into legend, in 1856, thousands of Latter-day Saints had passed it on their way to the promised land of the Salt Lake Valley. But Brigham Young feared that sponsoring large organized wagon trains was bankrupting the church. He devised an alternative plan. Emigrants would walk west, carrying their belongings in handcarts. As it worked out, the ranks of these handcart pioneers included a high percentage of women and children and the elderly. Many of them were new to America - impoverished refugees from industrial Scotland and England and Wales. "Nearly all of them had never built a fire," Jackson tells me, "never cooked on an open flame."

A vulnerable population pushing their belongings 1,300 miles across a wilderness utterly foreign to them: the handcart pioneers depended enormously on luck. That luck held for three of the groups, called companies, leaving for Utah in the summer of 1856. For two - the Martin and Willie companies - it did not.

A couple of years ago, the church purchased the section of the Wyoming ranch - the Sun Ranch - that contained Martin's Cove. Last year it opened the land to visitors. Inside the old ranch house, maps and displays and diary excerpts explain how the 576 members of the Martin Company and the 500 of the Willie left Iowa late in summer - later than advisable. They were blessed with clement weather well into September. But by the time they reached central Wyoming, it was October and an early winter caught them in its teeth. "We don't know how long the blizzards were," says the Mormon sister who is showing me through the exhibits, "but they lasted a long time." Wolves pursued them. Handcarts fell apart in the snow. Tents would not stand in the freezing wind, could not be pitched on ground turned to ice. The Willie Company halted in drifts a bit east of South Pass. The Martin Company sought refuge in the cove that now bears its name.

In both places, people began to die. Women woke to find their husbands open-eyed but motionless beside them, boys searched for their fathers and found them frozen in the snow. "The aged and the worn-out seemed in an hour or two to relinquish all their desire for life, passing away like an infant in slumber," pioneer Josiah Rogerson recalled. Of Martin's Cove, John Kirkman recorded, "The ravine was like an overcrowded tomb, no mortal pen could describe the suffering." By the time rescue parties arrived from Salt Lake City, 200 people had died. Many of them were wrapped in blankets and left on the plains, it being impossible to dig graves in the frozen ground.

I am shivering when I walk outside, though the day is now so hot and humid you could wring it like a sponge. People are stacking coolers on the handcarts. When the church opened the ranch, it decided to give visitors the opportunity to honor the handcart pioneers by wheeling replica carts along the trail to the cove. Mormon youth groups are encouraged to make the journey in 19th-century costume. "You'd be surprised how many people want to push the carts," Jackson tells me.

For myself, I decide not to push a 150-pound handcart on an 80 [degrees] day. But I follow a sturdier family. "It's a good example for the kids to experience." the mother says. "We have it too easy." An older man tells me that Martin's Cove reveals the importance of determination. "It's like Louis L'Amour said. When a man is in the right, he's hard to stop."

I wonder about that and also wonder why Martin's Cove - one of the greatest tragedies in the history of the westward movement - is so little known outside the church. "We had a man come in here, a historian," the sister at the ranch told me. "He said, 'I've never heard of this. Why isn't it in the history books? It's our history too.'"

As it happens I grew up in Utah, a gentile among Mormons, and I have a theory. Most modern Americans are not used to considering suffering as exalting. We see it instead as cause for complaint and litigation. That is not the message of Martin's Cove. It is true that, in the aftermath, blame was cast, even against Brigham Young himself. But blame was soon subsumed into rejoicing. "Was I sorry that I chose to come by handcart?" pioneer Francis Webster said. "No. Neither then nor one moment of my life since. The price we paid to be 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." Or as one Mormon publication inveighed, "Do you think Salvation costs too much? If so, it is not worth having."