The Willie & Martin Rescue — 1856, Pulled from the Wyoming Snow

Summary

In the autumn of 1856 two companies of Mormon emigrants pulling their belongings in handcarts — the Willie company and, behind it, the Martin company — were caught by early winter storms on the high plains of central Wyoming, hundreds of miles short of the Salt Lake Valley. Late departures and worn-out carts had left roughly a thousand people strung out across the trail as the temperature crashed and the snow came, and they began to die of cold and starvation. More than two hundred would not survive. This entry follows the rescue itself; the companies' long journey from Iowa is told on our sister site, Wagon Wheel Diaries.

The rescue began with a single fast rider. On October 4, 1856, the returning church official Franklin D. Richards reached Salt Lake City and told Brigham Young that hundreds of emigrants were still out on the plains with winter closing in. The next day, at the church's October general conference, Young set aside the planned program and ordered an immediate relief, telling the congregation in stark terms: 'Go and bring in those people now on the Plains, and attend strictly to those things which we call temporal, or temporal duties, otherwise your faith will be in vain.' Within days, wagons loaded with flour, blankets, and clothing rolled east under Captain George D. Grant, the first of a stream of relief teams driving into the storm.

On October 19, 1856, the rescuers found the Willie company first, snowbound and starving on the Sweetwater near South Pass. The relief wagons got food to them, but the company still had to cross Rocky Ridge in a blizzard — a single march of some fifteen miles in deep snow and brutal wind that killed roughly thirteen people, the worst stretch of the disaster for the Willie company. Scouts pressed on east and on October 28 found the Martin company, far worse off, stalled near Red Buttes at the last crossing of the North Platte. They were later guided into a sheltered hollow on the Sweetwater, Martin's Cove, to wait out the storm while wagons shuttled them west in stages.

It took weeks to bring everyone in. The rescuers carried the weakest in the wagons, walked the rest, buried the dead where they fell, and drove the survivors back across the mountains in relays as fresh relief teams came out from the valley to meet them. The Willie company straggled into Salt Lake in early November and the Martin company near the end of the month. Of the two companies, roughly a third died — about sixty-seven of the Willie company and well over a hundred of the Martin company — in what remains the deadliest single episode of the overland Mormon migration, and one of its most enduring stories of rescue.

Timeline

The Setup

The disaster that made the rescue necessary grew out of a bold and underfunded plan. To move poor European converts to Utah cheaply, church leaders had promoted the handcart system: emigrants would walk the trail pulling two-wheeled carts loaded with a few hundred pounds of goods, rather than paying for ox teams and wagons. Most of the 1856 handcart companies made it through safely. But the last two — Captain James G. Willie's and Captain Edward Martin's — left the Missouri River dangerously late, delayed by the time it took to build carts for so many people, and the green, overloaded carts began breaking down almost at once.

By the time the two companies were grinding up the Sweetwater valley in October, they were far behind schedule, their flour rations cut, their carts failing, their people worn thin by hundreds of miles of walking. They were exactly where they should not have been when the weather turned. An early, savage cold snap brought snow and plunging temperatures to the high country around South Pass — ground well above 6,000 feet — and the emigrants, in summer-weight clothing and short of food, had no margin to absorb it. People began to weaken and die on the trail, and the companies slowed to a crawl and then nearly stopped.

They did not know help was already being organized. The trigger was Franklin D. Richards, a returning church official who had passed the struggling companies on the trail and raced ahead with a light wagon to raise the alarm. When he reached Salt Lake on October 4, the valley had assumed the season's emigration was finished; the news that perhaps a thousand people were still out east of South Pass, with winter arriving, turned the next day's general conference into a war council.

The Disaster

Brigham Young's response set the tone for everything that followed. Rather than debate, he made the rescue the entire business of the conference, calling for wagons, teams, teamsters, and supplies on the spot and warning that the faith of the congregation would be in vain unless they went out to bring the emigrants in. Men volunteered, and the Relief Society women, by one account, 'stripped off their Peticoats, stockings and everything they could spare, right there in the Tabernacle' to be packed into the wagons. The first relief company of about sixteen wagons and twenty-some young teamsters left Salt Lake City on October 7, 1856, under Captain George D. Grant, driving east into worsening weather with more teams to follow behind.

The rescuers reached the Willie company first. On October 19 the emigrants were found near the end of their strength on the Sweetwater near South Pass, out of food; the arrival of wagons loaded with flour was, for the starving company, the difference between death and a chance. But food alone could not carry them over the next obstacle. Ahead lay Rocky Ridge, a long, exposed climb toward South Pass, and the company had to make it in the teeth of a blizzard. The crossing became a single terrible march — roughly fifteen miles through deep snow and wind that ran far into the night, with rescuers and emigrants hauling carts and carrying the failing — and by its end about thirteen members of the Willie company were dead, the heaviest loss the company suffered.

The Martin company, strung out a hundred miles or more behind, was in even worse case. While half the relief stayed with the Willie company, three scouts pushed far east ahead of the wagons and on October 28 located the Martin company stalled and dying near Red Buttes, at the last crossing of the North Platte, having nearly given up hope of going on. The scouts brought the first word that rescue was coming, then hurried the wagons forward; meanwhile express riders carried Captain Grant's report back to Salt Lake to bring out still more teams. With relief arriving, the Martin company was eventually moved up the Sweetwater and guided into a sheltered hollow beneath the rocks — Martin's Cove — to take what shelter it could from the storm while the rescuers organized the long haul west.

The Ordeal

What the rescue actually required, day after day, was grim logistics rather than a single dramatic stroke. The relief teams could not simply load a thousand exhausted people and drive home; there were never enough wagons, so the strongest still walked, the carts were abandoned by stages, and the weakest, the sick, and the children rode while teamsters and emigrants alike fought frostbite, exhaustion, and the cold. Wagons shuttled groups forward and came back for more; the dead, often several in a night, were buried hastily in graves hacked into the frozen ground. Fresh relief companies kept rolling out from Salt Lake to meet the survivors and spell the men and animals who had been out the longest.

The most famous moment of the rescue — the carrying of Martin company emigrants across the icy Sweetwater River — has to be told carefully. The traditional account holds that three young rescuers carried nearly the entire company across the freezing stream on their backs and later died from the effort. Careful historical work has shown that version to be exaggerated: many people, rescuers and emigrants, helped at the crossing, more than three were involved, and the claim that the carriers died from it is not supported. What is solid and harrowing enough on its own is that a weakened, freezing company did have to be helped across a cold river in late November, and that rescuers waded into it to do so.

From Martin's Cove and the Sweetwater the survivors were brought west in relays over the next weeks, through more snow and more deaths, the column of wagons and walkers crawling toward South Pass and down the far side. The teamsters who had driven east in October now turned the whole effort around, hauling the living back across the mountains they had just crossed, while the supply line of flour, blankets, and fresh teams from the valley kept the operation alive. It was rescue as endurance — for the rescuers nearly as much as for the rescued.

How They Survived

Rescue & After

The Willie company reached the Salt Lake Valley on November 9, 1856, and the Martin company struggled in near the end of the month, the survivors carried the last miles into a city that turned out to take them in, warm them, and nurse the frostbitten. The cost was staggering: roughly sixty-seven of the Willie company and well over a hundred of the Martin company had died, more than two hundred in all, with survivors carrying amputations and frost injuries for the rest of their lives. It remains the deadliest disaster of the overland Mormon migration.

The blame was argued over for decades. The late start, the decision to send the companies on so close to winter, and the optimism of the planners all came in for criticism, and Brigham Young publicly rebuked those he held responsible even as he organized the rescue. Yet the memory that survived was not the failure but the rescue — the wagons that drove east into the storm, the teamsters who waded the Sweetwater, the valley that emptied its quilts. The handcart story became central to how later generations remembered the migration, retold and, at times, embellished well beyond what the records support.

Martin's Cove and Rocky Ridge are today places of pilgrimage, and historians have worked to separate the documented rescue from the legend grown up around it — trimming the inflated tale of the three boys at the river, for instance, without diminishing the real ordeal. Stripped to the record, it is enough: a thousand people caught by an early winter on the high plains, more than two hundred of them dead, and the rest pulled out of the snow by a rescue mounted in days and sustained for weeks across the mountains of Wyoming.

Lessons

References

• Martin handcart company Wikipedia
• Willie handcart company Wikipedia
• Journey to Martin's Cove: The Mormon Handcart Tragedy of 1856 WyoHistory.org
• Handcart Companies (Church History topic) Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints