Oh my God.
if the title of this post means nothing to you, you absolutely must go Google up some information. I knew nothing of the handcart companies until I watched a stirring documentary this evening on PBS about the Sweetwater Rescue (maybe you did too). Now I simply have to read more, and soon, about the the Oregon Trail and the pre-Civil War settlement of the West. For those of you who didn’t see the show, my paltry understanding of the events of the fall of 1856, greatly oversimplified and condensed, are more or less as follows:
Brigham Young and his followers had already established Salt Lake City and encouraged Mormons to come and build new lives. Members of the Church of the Latter Day Saints in England and Scotland, many of them quite poor, wanted desperately to emigrate to what they called Zion. Some of the faithful had waited almost 20 years for the chance to come.Young had established a fund to loan money to immigrants willing to make the dangerous journey, but the costs of supplying families with wagons and teams of oxen rapidly depleted the church’s resources. Young decided that instead of providing wagons, the church would give the immigrants less expensive handcarts so that more of them could come. This also meant that they would have to walk across the West!
It was all very highly organized. The first group of about 1,200 immigrants traveled to America by boat and then by train, all the way to Iowa City, Iowa, less than a hundred miles west of the Mississipi River. The handcarts weren’t ready, however, and departure was delayed Iowa carpenter and wheelwrights labored to assemble them. As a consequence, the two main handcart companies (organized traveling groups), as they were called, didn’t get started until late that summer. It took them four weeks to walk across Iowa. When they got to Nebraska, they knew it was risky to push on across the plains that late in the year, but most decided to continue anyway.
At this point in the program, I was already reeling from the fact of these poor souls from England coming all the way to the United States and planning to walk to Salt Lake City pulling heavy wooden carts! I still can’t get over it. Each person was limited to just a few pounds of personal possessions. Men, women, and children had to pull the handcarts up and down hills, across rivers, over the bumps and through the mud, all by themselves, then camp out every night in big canvas tents they’d brought along. Their courage was astonishing. Watching this, I was unexpectedly moved to tears.
I know that route quite well. I’ve seen how the land rises as you go west across Nebraska and into Wyoming. Even today, seen through the windshield of a speeding car, it still takes my breath away. I wish more Americans had the opportunity to experience the awesomeness of the continent we live on. It’s beyond incredible, yet some who fly over it from coast to coast deride the landscape down below and the bumpkins they think live there. What a tragedy for them.
But back to the narrative:
Winter came a month early to the northern plains in 1856, and you can guess what happened. The story is utterly gripping. Imagine people from Liverpool finding themselves in the middle of the incredible vastness of the West at over a mile high in altitude, in 1856, facing deep snow and estimated windchill temperatures as low as 70 degrees below zero, with wet clothes from fording rivers, running out of food, having no way to keep warm, and having no choice but to keep on going…
Brigham Young got word somehow that there were 1,200 Mormons struggling across the plains that October and immediately (on the same day) set a rescue operation in motion. Teams of men and horses with wagons loaded down with food and blankets headed east to meet the starving handcart companies. it took weeks of grueling travel. Hundreds of people died, rescuers included. By the time the last stragglers arrived in Salt Lake City with nothing but the clothes on their backs in early December of that year, they had to walk through waist-deep snow and fight their way through 20-foot drifts before descending into the valley.
Why does this affect me so strongly, besides the empathy factor? Maybe because I know the land, and because my wife and I literally gave up “everything” in Maryland to come out to the West: her job, my tools, our house, friends, community, all we’d worked to build for ourselves for 25 long years. Yet what we’ve been through is nothing at all compared to what those others had to bear. What a joke we moderns are, what arrogant, blind, pathetic fools.
Those people fucking WALKED across America… Wives, husbands, and children died and had to be left lying in the snow, because the ground was frozen too hard to dig their graves, and there was no way for those they left behind to know what had become of them.
All in all, 10 handcart companies made the trek between 1856 and 1860. The ones who came later knew enough to heed the warning of the changing seasons. Meanwhile, between 1999 and now, my wife and I drove cars, used credit cards, paid moving companies to haul thousands of pounds of useless crap, have never been cold or hungry, whine about having no health insurance, and even in the darkest moments of despair have had nothing more to worry about than the emotions raging in our fragile little hearts. It’s enough to make a person puke with shame, that’s what it is.
In our own adventure, I’ve feared a lot of things, but mostly messing up and getting so twisted that I drive away the one I love. It’s damn near happened more than once, and given my weaknesses, the possibility is always there. Even if it did though, I’d still be here, not riding in a freezing wagon looking at the bloody stumps where my frozen feet used to be…
There’s a lot more to this life than I have any notion of. More serious inner work is called for, that’s for damn sure.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Ahh John, my cynicism has no bounds! I wholeheartedly agree with your emotions for the terrible suffering our countrymen underwent! I also agree with you about the beautiful vastness of our great country.
However, I must remind you that suffering in the name of religion is a time honored tradition of humanity. The priests of all religions have caused more suffering than any other circumstance.
Your decision to move to a beautiful environment did not appear to be motivated by any gurus.
There’s something all too simplistic about this analysis, IMHO, and I do think you’re kinda missing the point by focusing on organized religion. The Mormon immigrants were looking for a better life, just like I was, and I doubt very much that they were trudging through the snow high on thoughts of Brigham Young or blissed out on the Mormon church. These weren’t stupid, starry-eyed fools. They were astoundingly physically and emotionally courageous people looking to better their circumstances.
As for me, I wasn’t looking for a “beautiful environment.” The beauty of Maryland’s Eastern Shore is beyond dispute, and there was more wildlife around our country home than I’ve ever seen in one spot here in the high desert. (Life needs water, obviously.) No, I thought I came because I wanted to live where Nature dominates man, and not the other way around. True enough and very relevant, but not deep enough at all.
As I’ve learned, the REAL reason I came was because of an inner drive toward wholeness. I had to blow up my old life and jump into the volcano in order to grow, to expose my weaknesses, to finally examine the source of my unexamined pain and integrate the scattered, forgotten parts of my own psyche. (Believe it or not…
In the process I’ve learned that security is a myth and that physical existence counts for nothing in comparison to the expansive grandeur of our souls. Yes, I have, and no, this has not a goddamned thing to do with any organized religion. It’s Basic Humanity 101.
And while it’s beautiful here, it’s a terrible kind of beauty that burns the flesh right off your bones. Very helpful, actually, if you’re as crazy as I am, scary as hell if you’re halfway well-adjusted.
My, my. You seem to have re-awakened my favorite theme.
Thank you for your comments, as always.
All zealots are stupid, starry-eyed fools. You are not. Notwithstanding your misgivings, I think you made a very good move.
Yes, I am very simplistic. Simple is good. I have spent a lot of time in Ogden. I have been an altar boy in a small town in the 40′s. I have read the Koran twice. All religion causes hurt and anguish.
To think that Mormons pulled hand carts across the country is courageous and not zealousness is naive. Those people could have gotten a better life in Maryland. Someone told them to take that walk and leave their children buried in a snowbank in Wyoming for the glory of God.
Well, I think it’s the difference between living as a serf, as they would have had to do in the East, and possibly owning land and obtaining wealth, as the Mormon community has done in the West.
The Mormons were breeders, remember – they needed a lot of room to breed. People coming in and breeding en masse is not something many communities even then would welcome.
And yes, they were delusional on their religion. The entire purpose of religion is to make people behave in a delusional way. Once you get beyond all your delusions, you can’t be influenced by it anymore.
That search for wholeness is what drives most people to religion. There are many, many paths to wholeness though. Realizing that wholeness doesn’t come from your stuff, your position in life, or even who you are with at any time is a huge, huge step, one most people never make. Good on you for looking for it, John – the quest is worthwhile, and if you find it, it gets even better.