Pioneer Handcart Trek
June 23 -25, 2016 ~ Wolf Creek State Park
Springfield Illinois Stake
Pioneer Stories
Stories submitted by the Giraud-Carrier family
Levi Savage
“Ascended Rocky Ridge. It was a severe day. The wind blew awful hard and cold. The ascent was some five miles long in places, steep, and covered with deep snow. We became weary and sat down to rest, and some became chilled and commenced to freeze. I returned to camp and found men, women and children, sitting and shivering with cold, around their small fires. Two teams started to bring up the rear, just before daylight, with dying and some dead. It was certainly heartrending to hear children crying for their mothers, and mothers crying for their children.”
Levi Savage, Journal. Typescript, Utah State University, Logan, Utah.
Patience Loader Rozsa Archer
Patience Loader, a member of the Martin handcart company, recorded this description of an English family in her company in late October:
“I remember well poor Brother Blair. He was a fine, tall man, had been one of Queen Victoria’s life guards in London. He had a wife and four children. He made a cover for his cart and but his four children on the cart. He pulled his cart alone, his wife helped by pushing behind. The poor man was so weak and worn down that he fell several times that day but still he kept his dear little children on the cart all day. This man had so much love for his wife and children that instead of eating his morsel of food himself he would give it to his children. Poor man, he pulled the cart as long as he could, then he died and his wife and children had to do the best they could without his help. The children got frozen. Some parts of their bodies were all sores, but they got to Salt Lake City alive.”
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The James and Amy Loader family wored in New York for several months before making their way to Iowa. When asked to joined the Edward Martin handcart company, Patience expressed some concern:
“This was a terrible great surprise to us all. At first we felt we never could undertake to pull a handcart from Iowa to Salt Lake City and my poor mother in delicate health. She had not walked a mile for years and we girls had never been used to outdoor work. I think I felt the worst out of all the family. I could not see it right at all to want us to do such a humiliating thing. To be … harnessed up like cattle and pull a handcart loaded up with our bedding, cooking utensils, and our food and clothing, and have to go through different towns to be looked at and made fund of as I knew we would be. It was very hurtful to my feelings; yes, I will say to my pride.”
But like so many others, they went anyway, leaving Iowa on July 28, 1856, and then Florence, Nebraska on August 27th.
“Diary of Patience Loader Rosa [Rozsa] Archer.” Typescript, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.
Mary Soar Taylor
Mary Soar Taylor, age thirty-one, was a widow when she came across the plains with her two sons, William Henry, twelve, and Jesse Soar Taylor, ten, in the Martin handcart company. Mary remembered their arrival in the Salk Lake Valley:
“Many had their limbs badly frozen[,] myself and William among the number…. I could not stand on my feet for three months after I arrived.”
In Mary’s letter to her posterity, she bore her testimony: “I know it is the work of God and I hope and trust that any of my posterity that may come in possession of this may be strengthened in their faith by it and be worthy of such parentage for truly we suffered much for the truth’s sake but the reward of the faithful is sure.”
In Kate B. Carter, “Happenings in the Valley,” Our Pioneer Heritage, 20 vols. Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1960, 3:247-49
Sarah Ann Franks
This incident most likely took place in Martin’s Cove:
“Sarah [Ann Franks, member of the Martin handcart company] became so weak and ill with chills and fever that she was taken into one of the wagons. Her sweetheart [George Padley] also became very ill from hunger and exposure and developed pneumonia and died. Sarah took her long-fringed shawl from her almost freezing body and had the brethren wrap her sweet-hear’s body in it. She couldn’t bear to think of his being buried with nothing to protect him from shoveled dirt and ravages of the weather. It as been said that the weather was so severe that his body was hung from a tree for others, who followed, to bury. [This also spared his body from being ravaged by wolves.] Sarah was too ill to even raise her head and witness the arrival of the relief wagons, which were greeted with joy and thanksgiving…. The sick were made comfortable in the wagons and were sent on ahead of the main company to the Salt Lake Valley.”
“Descendants of Thomas Mackay – Utah Pioneer, Vol. 1, Wives and Children.” Published by Thomas Mackay Family Organization, Murray, Utah, 1964.
William Woodward
“A number of years after the handcart trek, William Woodward was at a general conference in Salt Lake. He met a woman who had been one of his Hundred [in the Willie company]. She reminded him of some good rawhide shoes which were owned by one of the men in the party. William did remember them, and she then asked if he ever wondered what had happened to them. [Evidently they turned up missing one day.] The woman told William that she had taken them one night and made soup with them.”
Told by Cecil Woodward, William’s son, as printed in History of William Woodward, 1833-1908, typescript in possession of Daina Zollinger, River Heights, Utah.
Ann Jewell Rowley
Ann Jewell Rowley was a widow when she crossed the plains with the Willie handcart company. Her husband, William, had died in 1848. Ann related her story:
“I was left a widow with 7 children under 12 years of age and the step children of William’s first marriage. I was very grateful for the gospel of Jesus Christ and the comfort it gave me. I knew that our parting was only temporary and that viewed from the eternities, this was but a fleeting moment. I also knew that no matter how fleeting a moment it was, I had to make the best of it. I had a very real job to do. The children had to be fed and clothed, but the big task and the one I must accomplish, is to get us all to Zion. I must be among the people of my faith and I must get the Temple work done for us. Each person that could earn money at all, was required to work.”
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“There came a time, when there seemed to be no food at all. Some of the men left to hunt buffalo. Night was coming and there was no food for the evening meal. I asked God’s help as I always did. I got on my knees, remembered two hard sea biscuits that were still in my trunk. They had been left over from the sea voyage, they were not large, and they were so hard, they couldn’t be broken. Surely , that was not enough to feed 8 people, but 5 loaves and 2 fishes were not enough to feed 5000 people either, but through a miracle, Jesus had done it. So, with God’s help, nothing is impossible. I found the biscuits and put them in a dutch oven and covered them with water and asked for God’s blessing, then I put the lid on the pan and set it on the coals. When I took off the lid a little later, I found the pan filled with food. I kneeled with my family and thanked God for his goodness. That night my family had sufficient food. The men returned with buffalo meat, and what wasn’t eaten right away by the Saints, was dried into jerky.”
Autobiography of Ann Jewell Rowley, in James Albert Jones, Some Early Pioneers of Huntington, Utah and Surrounding Area, 1980, 241-47
Archibald McPhail
Archibald McPhail was the leader of his tent and was put in charge of several single women. After they made the difficult journey over Rocky Ridge and into Rock Creek, Archibald noticed that one of his single sisters was missing, and he went back to look for her. He found her sitting on the other side of Strawberry Creek.
“He pleaded with her to come on, but she refused, saying she was going to stay there and die. There was nothing to do but cross the stream and get her. He picked her up and as they crossed the stream the ice broke and he was soaked with icy water to the waist.
“By the time he reached camp his clothes were frozen to him and he was taking heavy chills. The air was cold and wet and the men were so weak and hungry they could not go in search of dry wood to make a fire. Without anything warm to eat or drink, he was placed in a cold bed with the covering of a handcart pitched over him for a tent. There was a strong wind blowing which blew it over three times, and they stopped trying to keep it up. He was in high fever, and [his daughter] Henrietta sat by his bed brushing the snow from his face as he lay dying.”
Life Sketch of Henrietta McPhail Eckersell,” by Mary Darley Harper. Typescript, Riverton Wyoming Stake Handcart Library.
Elizabeth Jackson
“We camped out with nothing but the vault of Heaven for a roof, and the stars for companions. The snow lay several inches deep upon the ground. The night was bitterly cold. I sat down on a rock with one child in my lap and one on each side of me. In that condition I remained until morning.
“…It will be readily perceived that under such adverse circumstances I had become despondent. I was six or seven thousand miles from my native land in wild, rocky mountain country, in a destitute condition, the ground covered with snow, the waters covered with ice, and I with three fatherless children with scarcely nothing to protect them from the merciless storms.
“When I retired to bed that night being the 27th of Oct., I had a stunning revelation. In my dream my husband stood by me and said – ‘Cheer up, Elizabeth, deliverance is at hand.”
The next day, October 28, the express team of rescuers from the Salt Lake Valley found them.
Elizabeth Kingsford, Leaves from the life of Elizabeth Horrocks Jackson Kingsford. Ogden, Utah, 1908