The Handcart Companies, Faith on Foot

Between eighteen fifty-six and eighteen sixty, nearly three thousand Latter-day Saint converts crossed the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains pushing handcarts. They were mostly British and Scandinavian immigrants, factory workers and farm laborers and domestic servants who had heard the Gospel preached in Liverpool or Copenhagen and had sold nearly everything they owned to pay for a ship ticket to New York. From New York they rode the rails to Iowa City, where they received their handcarts: a hundred pounds of gear per adult, loaded onto a wooden frame with two wheels, to be pushed or pulled for more than thirteen hundred miles.

Most of the handcart companies reached Utah without catastrophe. The first, led by Edmund Ellsworth, arrived in Salt Lake City in September of eighteen fifty-six to cheering crowds and a brass band. Their success encouraged the Church leadership to send two more companies that same year, later in the season than was wise. The Willie Company and the Martin Company were caught by mid-October blizzards near the Sweetwater and North Platte Rivers in present-day Wyoming. Hundreds died of cold and starvation before rescue teams sent by Brigham Young reached them.

The losses were severe, estimates suggest at least two hundred thirteen dead from the two late companies combined, though some historians count higher. Brigham Young organized the rescue personally, calling from the pulpit for every available wagon and driver. Teams rode east through snow to bring the survivors in. Many who survived did not blame the Church or the journey. Some of them, in old age, said those were the best years of their lives.

The handcart era ended after eighteen sixty, replaced by wagon trains and eventually the railroad. But the handcart became an enduring emblem of pioneer sacrifice, one of the most specific and humanly particular stories in the larger saga of westward migration.