Next on the LOCKDOWN reading list - David Roberts, Devil's Gate. It serves, somewhat self-consciously so, as prequel to Will Bagley's classic Blood of the Prophets. I bought Roberts sometime after May 2009 at one of the [several] Half Price Books down in Houston but I didn't read it. Past-Self did schlep it up here, with Honda for my handcart, so I owe it to him to read it now.
Part of LDS legend - the term is fair - is the handcart migration 1856-on. The LDS church considers a pious hegira, this self-transport of newly-minted Mormons to the Madînat of the Great Salt Lake. Hundreds died en route, clustered late 1856 ("late" means something up here in the Rockies!). As one with a decent head for numbers, I must record this as about twice the number as died at the Mountain Meadows the next year. Roberts is here to conduct the handcarters' autopsy.
Roberts treats the migration as piecemeal, each headed by a leader - like the (gentile) Donner Party. Ellsworth and McArthur led the first two, English and Scottish respectively. These were separate parties but traveled more-or-less beside each other, in a bit of a marathon race. The third party, Bunker's, followed behind and was Welsh. As in, Cymraeg: few there spoke English and of the Welshmen, few could write. Two more followed these. We'll get to them. (Literally: I haven't yet started Chapter Five.)
Roberts is hostile to the adventure and no friend to the LDS. He relies on "Apostate" literature and on Bagley; his takes on Joseph Smith come from Brodie. Brigham Young as of 2008 didn't have a modern biographer worthy of the title (Arrington may be a good man - pdf - but his biography is gawdawful; as for 2012 Turner ... pdf) so Roberts defaults to Werner's 1925 bio of him.
What was going on in the late 1850s was a crisis in Utah. American politicians were making noise about crushing "polygamy" which meant LDS. A whole party was rising, the Republicans, to excommunicate this (with slavery) as a relic of barbarism, which it is. The Republicans were no joke and were good to sweep the North in 1856. President / caliph Brigham Young needed more population and he needed them loyal.
To increase the people, Young called hegira. But although Utah was self-sufficient, Utah had no money out East to hire oxen for the trip. So Young made a cold calculation: handcarts. Schlep it yo' self!
From what I read, this was 60% successful. The first three companies got through. If those were all there were, Roberts would have no book, and we could let the hagiographers take the W. Let's concentrate on that 60% for now (not least because this is where I paused).
Traveling the Great Plains to the Wasatch was hard. There were no roads. The people in between were (1) "Lamanite" tribes and (2) American settlers. The first-nations had no particular quarrel with the Mormons, but also didn't much trust them. The Americans thought of the Mormons as fools. Neither intermediary provided a lot of help to the Mormons, even if they could, which they usually couldn't, being not exactly rich themselves.
Usually carrying freight meant oxen. Ox-carts carry food. Handcarts couldn't carry a lot of that. Young figured this out and shipped out some carts with extra flour, to meet the first two caravans and maybe the third (the third was, as mentioned, poorly documented). As for the handcarts, these were built in the tentcity "Florence" from the local trees. So they were green. You want seasoned wood for a cart like this, if not steel. The handcarts only got worse as the vans kept passing.
Then there was sanitation. Typhus and "mountain fever" came with the lice and ticks. Cholera also followed along. "Diarrhea" and "dysentery" hit the Mormon vans as surely as it hit the Oregon Trail's. And the mhaggrayé weren't Central Asian camel lords; they were working class Britons and Danes. Often women, children, and oldsters and, yes, for nineteenth century workers, over 50 years old is an oldster.
This meant that fatality rates were... high. Even in the first three vans, they were (conservatively) something like 7%. Earlier (oxcart) vans tended more to 4%.
Now: I am not here (yet) to say that the experiment was a failure. 4%, 7%, even 10% fatality is something of a rounding-error for Oregon Trail. Roberts' own first chapter notes a sixty-odd death toll in one trip at sea before that ship even landed at New York. And Young had good reason to bulk up his empire. This "experiment" got the job done... 60% with the low(ish)-level fatalities.
I am here, for now, to suggest that the first three handcart-vans' best-scenario 7% fatalities are still very high and that more could have been done in advance, not just the emergency supply of rations sent out. Lowering those earlier rates would assuredly have taught some lessons, at least; to lower the rates for the later vans.
MEANWHILE 11/8: September 1856, to assure loyalty, Young sparked a "Reformation" to burn over the Utahns, like he'd seen in New England and New York back in his (and Smith's) youth. By this point the Willie and Martin companies, and Hodgett and Hunt, were already somewhere in Nebraska Territory. Roberts associates the Reformation with the disaster; this might not be fair, since the disaster was in gestation already.
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