He suggested the site as a resource for those who plan to make the handcart trek, as well as those interested in handcart history. The project began in March after a mutual friend told Welch about Lyman's book, suggesting that BYU Studies may want to publish it. Welch saw an opportunity to create a virtual history project as well as a new title for publication.

"I believe that this kind of day-by-day interaction is an essential way for people to experience history. Too often modern readers rely on historians to boil everything down and kind of tell you in sound bites what the story was all about. After you've lived with the day-by-day experience of these people, you come to appreciate the faith, the sacrifice, the joys, the struggles.

"It's like not just walking a few miles in their moccasins, but really feeing like you can link arms with them in this whole experience. To me, it's a model of how people can get back into historical events in a way that opens up understanding in a personal, human way."

Welch would like to expand the reach of history in the future by doing a Web site on Brigham Young's daily life and activities. "We have thousands of letters that he wrote and every one of them is dated. We have something like 1,075 transcripts of talks he gave, and only about a third of them are in the Journal of Discourses." If such a project come about, "I think people would stop seeing him as a stereotype and begin to appreciate the amazing contributions that he made to the lives of the Saints, to American, and to the world."

The current Web site should help users understand the entire context of the handcart experience, rather than the two weeks of tragedy that most associate with it, he said. "I have an ancestor who came in 1857, arriving with a handcart company in September. The record of that whole trip is excitement about coming to Zion.

"Most of the handcart experiences were successful, and most of the companies came through without a hitch."

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E-mail: carrie@desnews.com