Saving the handcart companies

I am still reading [2 PM] just finished Devil's Gate. We're on the later 1856 companies: their butchers' bill goes to the hundreds, which Roberts compares to the infamous Donner Party's forty-two. The question becomes: how could the deaths have been averted.

Roberts figures that Brigham Young sacrificed these mortals upon Mammon's altar. Much money had been wasted over the 1850s on schemes for heavy industry, most hilariously a steamship for the Great Salt Lake. This was a decade and a territory for the agricultural / pastoral sciences, not mechanical. Although I must disagree that the lackluster iron-foundries were misguided: the Utah Territory did need her own metallurgy, and if the first ventures in this direction weren't, er, panning out then they would so in future. And coal would have helped.

I believe that as Young was planting villages up and down the western Wasatch, a stout crew of young men - builders, doctors, herders - could have installed forts over east in Wyoming. Laramie was American but I think the Sweetwater could have been better settled. Some of those earlier wagon-trains could have settled there and added to their ranks. There was already a "Fort Seminoe" outside Devil's Gate with a cove across the Sweetwater, and a couple privately-run bridges, set up (provisionally) by Frenchmen over 1850-2. Young could have taken those to follow up his taking of Fort Bridger. Roberts notes on Utah's side of Devil's Gate, Rock Springs, a respectable town today; also Granger and Lander, to which roll one might add Farson. Casper admittedly sits to the Devil's east.

To seed these colonies, Brigham Young already had many settlers owing him money for the journey. These could have been jubilee'd on condition they homestead the Sweetwater, with oxen. Likewise the Florence winter-quarters needed to be made more permanent and supplied with oxen.

So why didn't Young do that? One frightening possibility is that Young didn't want the potential ratline out of his caliphate.