Lyndia Carter, a trails historian who is writing a book about the Martin company, said traditional accounts of that company's tragic events "often collapse six weeks" of starvation, hypothermia and death "into five days and four nights at Martin's Cove. That's only part of a much bigger picture," she said.

Much of the tragedy for the Martin company — which was weeks behind the Willie company and not traveling with them — began at Fort Laramie, far east of Martin's Cove, and greatly intensified through the last crossing of the North Platte River at a place called Red Buttes, above Bessemer Bend.

According to journal accounts from initial rescue party members, the emigrants stayed at Bessemer Bend for a few days, where the suffering and death was protracted, before being pushed forward toward Devil's Gate near Martin's Cove.

"It's enough to say that much of what has been attributed the last 80 years to happening at Martin's Cove really happened before" the emigrants arrived there, she said. "The misunderstanding is understandable," because both Martin's Cove and Bessemer Bend were intensely cold and there were many deaths at both places."

"The parallels are striking," she said, adding "the error is not acceptable, nor does it have to be permanent."

Within the past several years, the LDS Church purchased thousands of acres adjacent to Martin's Cove — which is on BLM land leased to the church. The church property includes a complex of buildings including a visitors center, staging ground for handcart treks into the cove, chapel, museum and a reconstruction of the fort where emigrants sought shelter before being moved to the cove.

Scores of retired LDS couples staff the complex, telling stories about what occurred there and assisting the thousands who visit each summer to participate in handcart treks along trails into and around the cove.

"We don't have to perpetuate what was the basis of so much that is believed about Martin's Cove. The scholarship was poor that collapses all the events into those few days," she said, adding, "the majority of deaths (among the company) occurred before or after the days at Martin's Cove."

Richard Jensen, senior historian for the LDS Family and Church History Department, commended the research "of these two painstaking researchers." He said their "intensive examination of primary sources, combined with actual topography and on-site observations," offer a perspective "that for one reason or another may not have been done so thoroughly before."

He lauded Long for his research on Willow Creek and "the critical contribution he is making in his work," adding it's a place where "we probably ought to have a commemorative marker. There are 15 burials attributed to Rock Creek. Gary has revised this in a compelling way.

"I think we need to take seriously that we're three miles off, and something needs to happen with this."

Carter's paper "took great pains to drag us through more than six weeks of hell," Jensen said. "I'm not sure how well we do in coping with that." He said many "have wanted to see more analysis and explanation" of what happened where with the Martin company. "I trust it will be in her book. . . . It does cry out for some analysis."

As for the Martin company death toll, different figures have been presented by researchers during the conference, Jensen said. "It would be nice to somehow be able to come to a meeting of the minds on this."

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E-mail: carrie@desnews.com