Sacred, secular mix at Martin's Cove

MARTIN'S COVE, Wyo. — Under a cloudless sky, the constant wind endlessly sapping their skin of moisture, a small army of retirees busy themselves on the high plains of Wyoming, preparing for the thousands of handcart "trekkers" that descend on this place each summer.

The men are clad in leather vests, white shirts, bolo ties, dress pants and cowboy boots, and the women in simple skirts or pioneer dresses. All wear the black name tags that designate LDS missionaries worldwide. Today, they help shepherd a group of elementary school students from Casper, who came to pull handcarts and learn about one saga in their state's history.

So both volunteers and visitors come to the place officially known as the Mormon Handcart Historic Site, a complex of buildings that has sprouted on a chunk of sprawling cattle ranch purchased by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a decade ago.

A former barn is now a dining hall, with a log chapel next door, a small humanitarian cabin (for quilt-making), museum and visitors center just steps away.

A carpentry shop and mechanic shop service the handcarts and vehicles used to maintain the area, and a small dispatch cabin facilitates radio communications among volunteers at distant points between the visitors complex and Martin's Cove, a couple of miles away.

A log "trek center" provides a staging venue for the hundreds who arrive each weekday during the summer months, as they prepare for hours or even days on the trails near the cove.

Visitors stay a few hours or days; volunteers, a few months.

Some come to learn tragic tales of pioneering history, some to feel faith, others to hike in solitude.

With sagebrush and a winding stream stretching for miles in every direction and pronghorn antelope oblivious to property lines as they graze, it seems an unlikely setting for a clash between the sacred and the secular.

Yet settlement of a recent lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union challenging proselytizing on federal land has changed the way the church operates here: the way it tells the history of its early pioneers here, how it does so and for whom.

Some observers near and far have taken offense at the motives of the other: Latter-day Saints often feel their church has simply improved the site for all to enjoy, while others see the church's efforts here as an unwarranted mixing of church and state. Still others worry the land — set miles from the nearest town — will be "loved to death," with tens of thousands of handcart "trekkers" each summer endangering native vegetation and wildlife.

Most people here with an opinion will talk about it — but usually not for publication and not without determining individual sympathies for one position or another.