The Willie & Martin Handcart Companies — 1856, Mormon Trail

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.