The Annals of Iowa Volume 65, Numbers 2 & 3

The Annals of Volume 65, Numbers 2 & 3 Iowa Spring/Summer 2006 SPECIAL COMMEMORATIVE ISSUE: MORMON HANDCART TREK A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF HISTORY In This Issue FIVE HISTORIANS of the Mormon experience treat the details of the Mormon handcart trek of 1856–1857. William G. Hartley provides an overview of the experience, setting it in the context of the overall overland trail migration from the 1840s to the late 1860s. Don H. Smith discusses the leadership, planning, and management of the 1856 handcart migration. He argues that those aspects of the plan were executed with care and skill and that the disasters that befell the last two companies of 1856 were due to factors beyond the leaders’ control. Fred E. Woods, often using the voices of the emigrants themselves, narrates the experiences of those emigrants as they made their way by ship from Liverpool to the United States and then by rail to Iowa City. Lyndia Carter picks up the story from there, following three of the handcart companies—the Willie, Haven and Martin companies—across Iowa as they were tested to see if they were up to the challenge of crossing the Plains all the way to the Salt Lake Valley. Finally, Steven F. Faux carefully maps the route the handcart migrants followed across Iowa. Front Cover In the early 1900s the Daughters of Utah Handcart Pioneers commissioned a statue to memorialize the handcart trek. Sculpted by Torleif Knaphus, the 3-foot-high bronze monument, unveiled in 1926, was displayed for years in Salt Lake City’s Temple Square Information Bureau. Then, for the Mormon Pioneer Sesquicentennial in 1947, LDS church leaders commissioned Knaphus to create a heroic-size copy. Cast in bronze in New York, it has been displayed prominently ever since near the Tabernacle in Temple Square in Salt Lake City. The well- known and widely replicated image has come to symbolize for many the heroism of the handcart emigrants whose experience is commemorated in this special issue of the Annals of Iowa. Editorial Consultants Rebecca Conard, Middle Tennessee State R. David Edmunds, University of Texas University at Dallas Kathleen Neils Conzen, University of H. Roger Grant, Clemson University Chicago William C. Pratt, University of Nebraska William Cronon, University of Wisconsin– at Omaha Madison Glenda Riley, Ball State University Robert R. Dykstra, State University of Malcolm J. Rohrbough, University of Iowa New York at Albany Dorothy Schwieder, Iowa State University The Annals of Third Series, Vol. 65, Nos. 2, 3 Spring/Summer 2006 Iowa Marvin Bergman, editor Contents 101 The Place of Mormon Handcart Companies in America’s Westward Migration Story William G. Hartley 124 Leadership, Planning, and Management of the 1856 Mormon Handcart Emigration Don H. Smith 162 Iowa City Bound: Mormon Migration by Sail and Rail, 1856–1857 Fred E. Woods 190 Handcarts across Iowa: Trial Runs for the Willie, Haven, and Martin Handcart Companies Lyndia McDowell Carter 226 Faint Footsteps of 1856–1857 Retraced: The Location of the Iowa Mormon Handcart Route Steven F. Faux A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF HISTORY FOUNDED IN 1863 Copyright 2006 by the State Historical Society of Iowa ISSN 0003-4827 Book Reviews and Notices 252 IAN TYRRELL, Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–1970, by Rebecca Conard 254 JOHN W. REPS, John Caspar Wild: Painter and Printmaker of Nineteenth-Century Urban America, by Charles K. Piehl 256 JOAN L. SEVERA, My Likeness Taken: Daguerreian Portraits in America, 1840–1860, by Shirley Teresa Wajda 257 MARK A. LAUSE, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community, by Nellie W. Kremenak 259 J. BLAINE HUDSON, Encyclopedia of the Underground Railroad JAMES PATRICK MORGANS, John Todd and the Underground Railroad: Biography of an Iowa Abolitionist by Galin Berrier 262 MICHAEL L. TATE, Indians and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails, by John P. Bowes 264 JONI L. KINSEY, Thomas Moran’s West: Chromolithography, High Art, and Popular Taste, by Carol Clark 265 Edward Watts, An American Colony: Regionalism and the Roots of Midwestern Culture, by Zachary Michael Jack 267 JOHANNES B. WIST, The Rise of Jonas Olsen: A Norwegian Immigrant’s Saga, by J. R. Christianson 268 THOMAS A. KRAINZ, Delivering Aid: Implementing Progressive Era Welfare in the American West, by Joan Gittens 270 CARL R. WEINBERG, Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion: Southwestern Illinois Coal Miners and World War I, by Bill R. Douglas 272 D. W. MEINIG, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 4, Global America, 1915–2000, by David Blanke 274 JAMES K. CONANT, Wisconsin Politics and Government: America’s Laboratory of Democracy, by John D. Buenker 276 New on the Shelves Editor’s Perspective IN JUNE 2006, several hundred people gathered in Iowa City and Coralville to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Mormon Handcart Treks of 1856 and 1857. In those two years seven handcart companies outfitted and left from a camp outside Iowa City in an area now part of Coralville. Some 200–300 of those who participated in the commemorative events spent a day listening to scholarly papers treating the events in some detail. Five of the papers from that symposium are gathered in this special issue of the Annals of Iowa. In the articles that follow, William G. Hartley provides an overview of the experience, setting it in the context of the overall overland trail migration from the 1840s to the late 1860s. Don H. Smith discusses the leadership, planning, and management of the 1856 handcart migration. He argues that those aspects of the plan were executed with care and skill and that the disasters that befell the last two companies of 1856 were due to factors beyond the leaders’ control. Fred E. Woods, often using the voices of the emigrants themselves, narrates the experiences of those emigrants as they made their way by ship from Liverpool to the United States and then by rail to Iowa City. Lyndia Carter picks up the story from there, following three of the handcart companies—the Willie, Haven and Martin companies—across Iowa as they were tested to see if they were up to the challenge of crossing the Plains all the way to the Salt Lake Valley. Finally, Steven F. Faux carefully maps the route the handcart migrants followed across Iowa. Editing this issue has been a rewarding experience, but, as with most issues, it has presented special challenges. A set of words used repeatedly throughout the articles requires clarifi- cation. I am grateful to author Fred Woods for a clear statement of usage of the terms migrants, emigrants, and immigrants and their derivatives. With his permission, I have borrowed freely from his statement to try to clarify the distinctions among those terms. According to Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, “Emi- grate and immigrate make a case in which English has two words where it could easily have made do with only one. The two words have the same essential meaning—to ‘leave one country to live in another’—and differ only in emphasis or point of view: emigrate stressing leaving, and immigrate stressing enter- ing.” To further complicate matters, emigrate is used once the immigrant has arrived in the new country and begins to move to the West. In the case of Mormon immigration, sometimes for- eign immigrants were joined by Mormons who gathered from America’s East Coast or merged with other LDS companies at frontier outfitting posts. Such Mormons would properly be termed emigrants. In this issue, the authors use immigrate/immigration/immigrant and emigrate/emigration/emigrant to reflect the situation in which they are used. In addition, the more generic terms migration or migrant are sometimes used for variety. Whether the subjects are known as migrants, emigrants, or immigrants, the authors’ attention to the details of their experiences enhances our understanding and appreciation of the pio- neering adventure. In the 1970s the University of Iowa and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) partnered to preserve the campsite outside Iowa City and to restore adjoining prairie. Their joint effort recognized that the handcart trek was a significant part of the heritage not only of the church but of Iowa and the nation as well. In opening remarks at the sesquicentennial symposium, Willard L. “Sandy” Boyd, who was president of the University of Iowa when the campsite preservation effort was launched, reflected, “At this campsite the cross-continental railroad once ended. Here the dense, tall, prairie grasses greeted the [Mormon] converts. At this place those believers built the handcarts they pulled and pushed over more than 1,000 miles of prairies, mountains, and streams to create a new state. That arduous trek exceeds our modern comprehension. The physical and spiritual strength of those Mormon converts ex- emplifies the commitment and faith that builds civilization.” —Marvin Bergman, editor The Place of Mormon Handcart Companies in America’s Westward Migration Story WILLIAM G. HARTLEY DURING THE SUMMER AND FALL OF 1856, personnel at Fort Laramie witnessed a strange phenomenon: five separate companies of men, women, and children pulling and pushing simple two-wheeled carts westward. One year later, two more dusty handcart brigades passed by, another one in 1859, and a final two in 1860. In the history of overland trails migration to the American West, handcarts are an anomaly. Of about 350,000 trail emigrants to Oregon and California and 70,000 to Utah, nearly all traveled in wagon companies. In total, only about 3,000 pioneers went west in ten handcart companies during a five-year period, 1856–1860.1 Among the first five brigades in 1856 were the ill-fated Willie and Martin companies, whose terrible sufferings in blizzards in present-day Wyoming have bestowed on handcart pioneers more public awareness than their small numbers justify and have made handcarts the symbol of all Mormon Trail travel even though handcart emigrants constituted less than 5 percent 1.

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