Most handcart treks successful, BYU historian says

IOWA CITY, Iowa — A century and a half after the first Mormon handcart company began its westward trek on June 9, 1856, historians and Latter-day Saints gathered in Iowa City Friday to discuss the pioneer journeys and analyze why two handcart groups met tragedy on the trail to Salt Lake City.

Overland travel by handcart was encouraged by then-LDS Church President Brigham Young for poor immigrants from Great Britain, who had no money left to purchase ox teams for the trip west after crossing the Atlantic and taking the railroad to Iowa.

William Hartley, professor of history at Brigham Young University and a trail historian, said the well-known tragedy that befell the Willie and Martin handcart companies has created an unfortunate misperception that the trail was plagued by heartbreak. In truth, for most it was not overly hard, he said. In all, 10 handcart companies made the journey across the plains.

For most, "it was long and boring and sometimes uncomfortable," he said, "but it was a successful journey that many enjoyed and wanted to make. Most who gathered to Zion did so happily."

Hartley noted the majority of the 3,000 LDS emigrants who traveled by handcart from 1856 to 1860 made it safely to Utah. They represent only about 5 percent of Mormon pioneers. Yet their stories of endurance, faith, courage and suffering "have made them the symbol of Mormon Trail travel."

Hundreds of emigrants in the Willie and Martin companies died of exhaustion, exposure and hunger on the plains of Wyoming in October 1856 after a late-summer start prompted warnings from Iowa residents along the trail that they were undertaking the journey too late in the season, historian Lyndia Carter said.

Though a few became too ill to move on and several elected to leave the Willie and Martin companies before they left Iowa, the vast majority were determined to press on, she said.

In what he called "a break with professorial protocol," BYU religion professor Fred Woods said historians who look at the handcart migration — particularly the Willie and Martin companies — without an understanding of the emigrants' deep religious conviction can't adequately assess the factors that eventually led to death for some.

He said no one was better at organizing overland migration than Brigham Young, who was directing church officials in Britain and relying on apostles John Taylor and Franklin D. Richards to help the emigrants make it safely to Utah. Recently, Carter and other historians said they believe top church officials failed in their leadership and were negligent in getting the Willie and Martin companies started to Utah so late in the season.