The Willie & Martin Handcart Companies — 1856, Mormon Trail

Summary

In the summer of 1856, two emigrant companies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints set out for Utah not behind oxen but pulling their own belongings in two-wheeled handcarts — a cheaper way to gather the poor of Britain and Scandinavia to Zion. The fourth and fifth handcart companies of that season, led by James G. Willie and Edward Martin, left the Iowa City outfitting grounds far too late, delayed by the wait to build hundreds of carts from green, unseasoned lumber. By the time they pushed west from Florence, Nebraska Territory, in late August, it was already perilously late, and a continent of plains and mountains still lay between them and the Salt Lake Valley.

They were caught on the high plains of present-day central Wyoming by the first heavy snows of an early, brutal winter. Rations, calculated for an earlier and faster trip, ran out. The cold settled into people already worn down by hundreds of miles of pulling, and they began to die — of exposure, of exhaustion, of starvation — at a rate unmatched in the overland migration except by the Donner Party. When word of their plight reached Brigham Young in Salt Lake City during the church's October general conference, he halted the proceedings and called for an immediate rescue, and relief wagons turned east into the storms to find them.

Of roughly 1,075 emigrants who set out from Iowa City in the two companies, more than 200 died — a modern accounting places about 67 deaths in the Willie company (a rate near 14 percent) and 135 to 150 in the Martin company (about 25 percent). It was the deadliest single episode of the handcart experiment and is often called the worst non-military disaster on the western emigrant trails.

The places where they suffered — Rocky Ridge, where the Willie company climbed through a night blizzard, and Martin's Cove on the Sweetwater, where the Martin company sheltered for days — became sacred ground in Latter-day Saint memory. The story is remembered soberly within that tradition as an account of faith, endurance, and rescue, and by historians as a hard lesson in how a small chain of organizational failures, compounded by weather, could turn an ordinary migration into a mass grave.

Timeline

The Departure

The handcart plan was Brigham Young's answer to a hard arithmetic. The church's Perpetual Emigrating Fund could not afford to buy wagons and oxen for every poor convert in Europe who wanted to reach Utah, and so in 1856 the leadership turned to the handcart — a light wooden cart that a family could load with a few hundred pounds and pull by hand across thirteen hundred miles. Most of the emigrants were British, Welsh, and Scandinavian converts, many of them mill workers and townspeople with little experience of the frontier, who had sailed to America and ridden the rails and riverboats to the staging grounds at Iowa City.

Three handcart companies that left earlier in the season reached Utah safely, and the experiment looked sound. But the Willie company (the fourth) and the Martin company (the fifth) were held up at Iowa City waiting for carts to be built, and the green wood split and shrank as it dried, so that axles and wheels failed repeatedly on the road across Iowa. By the time the two companies regrouped at Florence, Nebraska Territory, in mid-to-late August, the season was dangerously advanced. The Willie company numbered roughly 500 souls with about 120 handcarts and a few supply wagons; the Martin company, larger, numbered around 575, traveling near the Hodgetts and Hunt wagon trains.

At Florence the question was put plainly: go on now, or winter over on the Missouri. In a meeting on August 13, 1856, the experienced returning missionary Levi Savage argued forcefully against pushing into the mountains so late, warning that travelers so old, so young, and so weak could not safely cross the Rockies in winter. By one account he told them that some of the strong might get through in case of bad weather, but that the bones of the weak and the old would strew the way. He was overruled by leaders confident that God and good weather would see them through. Savage, having lost the argument, pledged to go with them anyway and to suffer and, if need be, die with them — and within days the carts rolled west, the Willie company leaving Florence on August 17.

The Route

The route was the established Mormon Trail: up the north side of the Platte, past Chimney Rock and Scotts Bluff to Fort Laramie, then along the Sweetwater toward South Pass and the Continental Divide. In good conditions, with an early start, it was a hard but survivable road that thousands had walked. The handcart companies, though, were already behind the calendar, and every delay compounded the danger as autumn closed in over the high country. At Fort Laramie the resupply they had counted on was not to be had, and the Martin company cut its baggage allowance to as little as ten pounds a person and reduced daily rations.

Disaster gnawed at them in stages. A stampede scattered and lost much of the Willie company's cattle, depriving them of draft animals and of meat. Provisions ran short, and rations were cut and cut again until grown men pulling carts all day were living on a few ounces of flour. The weakest began to die along the trail well before the snow came, buried in shallow graves beside the ruts. The constant labor of pulling, the thin food, and the dropping temperatures wore the companies down so that by the time they neared the Rockies they had almost nothing left in reserve.

On October 19, 1856, the first heavy snowstorm struck. By the morning of October 20 there was some eighteen inches of snow on the ground and sub-zero temperatures, and the trail vanished beneath it. The Willie company was caught near the last crossing of the Platte; the Martin company, strung out some distance behind, was hit in the same storm and then again as it struggled up the Sweetwater. Both companies — out of food, out of strength, and far from any settlement — came to a halt in the worst possible place. They were now in a race against freezing to death, and they were losing it.

The Crossing

Word of the late companies had reached Salt Lake when returning leaders rode in ahead of them, and during the church's general conference in early October Brigham Young interrupted the meetings to call for an immediate rescue, telling the congregation that their religion that day consisted of going out to bring in the people on the plains. Relief wagons loaded with flour, blankets, and clothing rolled east under Captain George D. Grant and a band of young men, pushing into the same storms that were killing the emigrants. An advance party reached the Willie company first, near the mouth of the Sweetwater country, frozen and starving, on October 21.

The night that followed is the heart of the Willie company's story. With supplies still thin and a brutal climb ahead, the company crossed Rocky Ridge on October 23 in a screaming blizzard — a forced march of some fifteen miles that rose roughly 700 feet over the worst of the ground and took the slowest more than a full day to complete in knee-deep snow and sub-zero wind. That night thirteen emigrants died, and by the time the company left its camp at Rock Creek Hollow, fifteen of its dead were buried together in a single frozen grave, the ground too hard and the people too spent to dig more. In all, about 67 members of the Willie company died.

The Martin company's ordeal was longer and, in raw numbers, even worse. Caught by the storms, they sheltered at last in a cove on the north side of the Sweetwater near Devil's Gate — Martin's Cove — out of the worst of the wind but with little food and no fuel, halted for days as they died one after another; by tradition some fifty-six perished and were buried in the cove's frozen ground. Their crossing of the icy Sweetwater near the cove became one of the most retold episodes of the whole affair, with accounts describing young rescuers carrying weakened emigrants across the frigid river on their backs. The reminiscence of survivor John Chislett of the Willie company is among the most-quoted; he recalled the bewildered grief of watching strong men give out and lie down, and afterward bury their dead day after day. As Brigham Young had feared and Levi Savage had warned, the bones of the late companies did, in places, strew the way; the Martin company's dead are generally placed at 135 to 150.

What Decided It

Arrival & After

The rescue wagons brought the survivors of both companies down out of the mountains over the following weeks, and the last of the Martin company reached the Salt Lake Valley at the end of November 1856, frostbitten and grieving but alive. Many survivors lost fingers, toes, and feet to frostbite, requiring amputations; the dead were counted in the hundreds, and grief touched nearly every surviving family. The valley's settlers took the newcomers into their homes for the winter, and the church absorbed the survivors into its communities.

The disaster forced a reckoning with the handcart plan. Handcart companies continued for a few more years, but never again so late and never again to such cost, and the season's tragedy hardened the church's calendar discipline for emigration. The episode produced no single villain in popular memory: the late departure was the result of crowded circumstances and overconfidence rather than malice, and the rescue became as central to the story as the suffering. Historians have continued to debate where responsibility lay, but the chain of small failures — the delay, the green carts, the overruled warning, the missing resupply, the early snow — is well documented.

For the Latter-day Saints, the Willie and Martin handcart companies became one of the defining narratives of pioneer faith and endurance, retold reverently for generations and memorialized at Rocky Ridge, Rock Creek Hollow, and Martin's Cove. Survivors' reminiscences — including the famous, oft-quoted reflection attributed to one of them, that the cost was great but the price was worth it, for in their extremities they came to know God — shaped how the descendants would remember the dead. For historians of the overland trails, it stands as the starkest example of how a margin of a few weeks could mean the difference between an ordinary crossing and a frozen catastrophe.

Lessons

References

• Willie and Martin handcart companies Wikipedia
• Mormon handcart pioneers Wikipedia
• Journey to Martin's Cove: The Mormon Handcart Tragedy of 1856 WyoHistory.org (Wyoming State Historical Society)
• Rocky Ridge WyoHistory.org (Wyoming State Historical Society)