The Year of Decision 1846, page 62
He ordered them to renew their covenants. Separating into their priestly orders, they donned their priestly robes and went off into the hills for penitence and prayer. When they got back again a more seemly spirit prevailed.
On June 1 they camped opposite Fort Laramie and two Saints who had brought up their families from Pueblo crossed the river to greet them. These were Robert Crow and his son-in-law, that George Therlkill who had been wounded by a grizzly and had rudely questioned Francis Parkman. Their party numbered nine men, five women, and three children, with six wagons, richly outfitted, and a large herd. They reported four deaths and two births at Pueblo and said that the rest of their party and the Battalion’s sick detachment were impatient to finish the pilgrimage. Brigham dispatched Apostle Lyman and three men to Pueblo to bring them in. (They were the second Mormon train to reach the valley.)
Crow and Therlkill, who had been at Fort Laramie for some time, had gathered information from several parties that had come down from South Pass. The Twelve got more information the next morning, when they crossed over to the fort. Bordeau received them amiably in the room that had wrought on the imagination of Parkman, rented them his boat to cross their outfits, and told them all he knew about the conditions ahead of them. He tipped them the by now customary gratuity of hard words about Lillburn Boggs, telling them large and comforting lies about Boggs’s Missourians. The blacksmiths set to work reconditioning the wagons. Other Gentile parties came in, from the west, from Santa Fe, and from the east. The year’s emigration had caught up with them. The Saints were astonished, for the Gentiles, even the Pukes, showed no hostility whatever. Must be some diabolical plot.
Here they began to make money from their enemies — it has remained their principal mundane pleasure. At the Crossing of the Platte, near Casper, they occupied both fords, usurping one with what amounted to force. The rains (they were miracle) had swollen the river and the fords had to be ferried. Gentile wagons were jammed up there and the Saints made a good thing of crossing them — for cash or, what was better, foodstuffs at Independence prices. So good a thing that they set up forges and did blacksmithing for the enemy as well and resolved to remain in business here. Brigham detached a party to run the ferries till the Church should come up. He gave it the proper sacerdotal organization, invoked the Lord’s blessing, set the Lord’s schedule of fees, and started the pioneers west again.
Independence Rock, the Sweetwater River, the first breath-taking vista of the Wind River peaks. Strangely, the Saints were not forced to shoot it out with any of the Gentile trains which they now met every day. (Between Fort Laramie and Fort Bridger they were following the established trail.) Instead there was a sweet, unbelievable neighborliness.
On June 26 Orson Pratt and several others, a few miles in advance, crossed the divide in South Pass and camped at Pacific Spring. When their fire blazed up, a party that had camped not far away paid a visit. At the head of them was Black Harris, fresh from Oregon on his way to meet the emigration and get his summer’s employment. He had some Oregon newspapers and a copy of the California Star which, they were amazed to learn, Brother Samuel Brannan had founded at San Francisco, “beside the far Pacific sea.” This also proved that the Lord was taking care of them. Harris stayed in camp the next day, when the rest of the pioneers came up, trading furs and telling Young all he knew about the Great Basin.4 They were getting close to Zion now, wherever Zion might prove to be, and they questioned him exhaustively. Great Salt Lake Valley, he thought, was not too good, chiefly because there was little timber. Bear River Valley was little better. His judgment was that Cache Valley would be best. But “we feel that we shall know best,” William Clayton wrote, “by going ourselves for the reports of travelers are so contradictory it is impossible to know which is the truth without going to see.”
That was June 27, the day when most of the pioneers crossed the continental divide. Their hearts were angry and aggrieved. For just three years ago today Joseph and Hyrum had been murdered in Carthage jail.
They bought some robes from Harris and went on, leaving him in camp to meet the Gentiles who were not far behind.
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The spectacle, as such, of Exodus is to the eastward of the pioneers with the companies now en route for Winter Quarters and those which were getting ready to leave it. With these eighteen hundred Saints going west is the pageantry which the summer of ’47 has entered in our legends, the Children of Israel moving toward the land of Canaan and a pillar of cloud going on before. They are the miscellany of the Saints, all kinds and conditions, families, herds, miracles, the yearning and the heartbreak, the humor and the dream — the mural of a chosen people crossing the desert.… But the pioneers also had their moment of drama and should be allotted their panel in that mural, on Monday, June 28.
They came down out of the corridor of South Pass and presently they reached the fork where Sublette’s or Greenwood’s Cutoff left the rutted, iron-hard trail. On July 19 a year ago two trains traveling together had halted here for the last good-bye and Jessy Thornton had written in his diary that Tamsen Donner was “gloomy and dispirited” when her husband’s wagons kept on down the California fork. The Mormons now took that same fork and some hours later made a nooning at the Little Sandy. Drab sagebrush, no timber, and the merciless Wyoming sun. After their rest they took the wagons across the little stream with a loss of two tar buckets. A mile farther on Apostle George A. Smith came riding back to the main party with a weather-worn gentleman whom he had met coming up the trail. They camped at once and held a “Council” with the Apostle’s find. Drums should have rolled and trumpets sounded, or the supernatural stage management of this millennial creed should have provided signs from on high, for the Mormons had now met the master of these regions, their final authority. Apostle Smith had brought in Old Gabe, Jim Bridger.
Old Gabe was actually three years younger than the Lion of the Lord but he had grown up with the Great Basin. He was an Ashley man; with Fitzpatrick and Carson, he was at the top of the pyramid. He was one of the greatest of the great mountain men, already a legend then and still a legend in our day. While the fires blazed up and the sun sank behind the nondescript hills west of the Little Sandy, Old Gabe told these forerunners of Israel about the land they were to inherit. His memory was the map no one had had in the White House of President Polk or the Council House of President Young. Through his stripped speech, whose idiom must have caused the Saints some trouble, ran thousands of miles with the wind and sun on them. His was the continental mind, like the mind of his messmate Jim Clyman, telling the Donners at Fort Bernard not to take the Hastings Cutoff. The pilgrims of eternity were children come a little way into the kingdom of Old Gabe. As a monarch he instructed them. (And had his pay, some years later, when they ran him out.)
They were bewildered, and why not? — his monologue made marches of a thousand miles, the names of innumerable deserts, gulches, peaks, and rivers jeweling it. They report him differently but all who report him at all say that he spoke favorably of Great Salt Lake Valley.5 Much of what he said was unintelligible to greenhorns but William Clayton’s journal entry is set down from notes which Clayton was making while Old Gabe talked. All the information recorded in that entry is exact. Run through it today and you will find nothing misrepresented in any particular whatever.6 Jim spoke as one having authority. The only ambiguity is Clayton’s note that “there have been nearly a hundred wagons gone on the Hastings route through Weber’s Fork” — and here Jim was unquestionably talking about ’46, not ’47 (and had the number right). He went on talking, sketching in the entire map from the Grand Canyon to the Snake, from the Little Sandy to the far Pacific sea, and all its minerals, trees, shrubs, roots, rainfall, vistas, local gods. He took them into the big unknown and made it known, compressing into a few hours the whole function of the mountain man. “He said it was his paradise,” Wilford Woodruff wrote. It was. His talk moved on to the resident Indians — Paiute, Diggers. The Saints need not be afraid of them, could “drive the whole of them in twenty-four hours.” But Jim, a formally adopted Shoshoni brave, would not kill the Diggers; his counsel was to make slaves of them. Finally, “Supper had been provided for Mr. Bridger and his men and the latter having eaten, the council was dismissed, Mr. Bridger going with President Young to supper, the remainder retiring to their wagons, conversing over the subject touched upon.”7
Observe that final, private conversation between Old Gabe and the Lion of the Lord. The hours of Bridger’s exposition had cleared the obstructions from the channel of inspiration. Now, while Jim sat with Brigham in the patriarchal white-top and a candle burned in a bucket there, unquestionably the heavens opened. It may be that they talked some more about the Paiute, who were in greater force southward from Great Salt Lake than beside it. It may be that there was further talk about the canyons that broke through the Wasatch at the south end of the lake. Whatever they talked about, Jim Bridger became the oracle of revelation and when the time came, Brigham would be able to speak the Lord’s will and say “This is the place.”
Two days later while the pioneers were fording Green River another circuit was closed, when Sam Brannan in person rode into camp. The Saints had circumnavigated the United States — Brannan was coming from the colony which he had planted in San Joaquin Valley. Typically, he arrived in bad company, with a man who had been a counterfeiter at Nauvoo. Typically also, he had a rich stock of truth, rumors, and lies. “Old Boys [Boggs] is on the opposite side of the bay” from the colony, Norton Jacob understood, “and dare not come over for fear of the Mormons:” Sam had made this year’s earliest crossing of the Sierra (not bad for a greenhorn) and, on his way, had met Fallon and the last relief party bringing Keseberg down. The Saints got their first word of last summer’s catastrophe — it is surprising that Harris had not heard of it in Oregon — and began adapting it to fable.8 The fable was to go on growing until it became a permanent part of Mormon mythology. For years (and occasionally now) the innocent victims of Lansford Hastings were murderers of the prophet or hirelings of the devilish Boggs who paid in the snows for having persecuted God’s smuggest people.
Brigham had the satisfaction of learning that his most imperial move, the California outpost, was a success. But he had acquired a Native Son. Brannan was of the type that the golden shore has always furiously oxidized. He was boosting California and would presently have revelations about it. He could not argue Brigham into taking the Church there. Eventually he apostatized — founding a sizable fortune on gold dust from the mines and the tithes he had piously collected from the San Joaquin Saints.
At the camp on Green River mountain fever broke out. The Saints swelled, ached, and burned. Brigham sent back a party of five under Phineas Young to meet the oncoming Church with notes, statistics, counsel, and rebuke. The next day was July 4 and there was another reunion. Twelve outriders from the Battalion sick detachment, coming up from Pueblo, rode into the camp, to loud hosannas, almost exactly a year after Brigham had set up the flag and ordered them to volunteer.
On the way to Fort Bridger Apostle Woodruff’s eye kindled, for some little whitewater brooks must surely have trout in them. He got out the rod he had brought all the way from Liverpool, attached a fly (he thought it likely that he was the first to use one in these parts), and sure enough there were trout. The pioneers camped within a mile or two of the fort on July 7. There was a congregation of mountain men and Indians there, so that the Saints got more intimate details about the route of revelation. The trace of the Hastings Cutoff led west from here, a mere wagon track. As they heard more of its story, the myth grew. The Donners were now from the abhorred Clay County, “a mob company that threatened to drive out the Mormons who were in California, and started with that spirit in their hearts. But it seemed as though they were ripe for judgment.” Woodruff thought that he remembered baptizing Mrs. Murphy in Tennessee. She had apostatized and joined the mob, he decided, and in God’s loving-kindness had been punished by being killed and eaten.
Nevertheless God had used the mobbers and apostates to prepare a way for His chosen, who took the trail the Donners had made. Taking it, they struck the Bear River on July 10, the first part of Zion which they knew by name. Here they met Miles Goodyear, who was driving a herd of California horses toward the emigration. He had just traveled the whole stretch of the Hastings Cutoff — had passed the cabins at Donner Lake, crossed the Salt Desert, and followed the Donner trail through the Wasatch. Moreover, he was the sole proprietor of Zion, having built a cabin and corral and put in crops on the Weber River, some miles above its mouth. Once more they interviewed a veteran mountain man. This one had real estate to sell but he did not sell it now (he did a few months later), for Porter Rockwell rode back with him to examine the direct route to Goodyear’s holdings. This was the Weber Canyon route down which Hastings had taken the Harlan-Young wagon train. Porter needed only a glance at those chasms: the Saints would not go that way. He reported and Orson Pratt was ordered out with an advance party “to find Mr. Reid’s route across the mountains.” Mr. Reid, of course, was James Frazier Reed.
Mountain fever had stricken a good many of them. Now it afflicted Brigham, who was so sick that, stopping beside the trail, the priesthood had to minister to him. From here on the pioneers traveled in three divisions. While some of the priesthood, in their Temple robes, went up into the high place to pray for the sick, forty-two men with twenty-three wagons, under Orson Pratt and Stephen Markham, led the advance. Pratt rode a few miles into Weber Canyon, determined that Porter Rockwell’s judgment had been sound, and set his men to work improving the Donner road. He could understand what his predecessors had endured. In spite of their more than two weeks of agonizing labor in brush, along mountainsides, and down the beds of creeks, “we found the road almost impassable and requiring much labor.” He had his party supply the labor. They hacked the brush away, pried boulders out, leveled, graded, felled trees. He kept riding ahead to reconnoiter and sent his data back to those who were following. Through most of this scouting his companion was John Brown, of the Mississippi Saints, and after a Sabbath rest on July 18 it was these two who caught the first glimpse of the promised land. On July 19 from the ridge beyond Big Mountain which had thrown the Donners into their first panic they “could see an extensive level prairie some few miles distant, which we thought must be near the Lake.”
But it was Erastus Snow, from the second group, who was with Pratt on July 21. (Now the time was the time of the first ripe grapes.) That day they followed the Donner road up Little Mountain and “looked out on the full extent of the valley where the broad waters of the Great Salt Lake glistened in the sunbeams.” Seeing that land from the wilderness of Zin unto Rehob, as men come to Hamath — seeing it, Pratt says, “we could not refrain from a shout of joy which almost involuntarily escaped from our lips.” They made their way downhill to Emigration Canyon, down that winding, gentle gulch, and out at last to Zion. They made a twelve-mile circle on the holy land before going back into the mountains. Pratt was back the next day with another Apostle, George A. Smith from the main company, and seven men. Young had sent instructions (unquestionably from the revelation unto Jim Bridger) for them to turn north for a few miles after reaching the valley. This brought them to the twinned creek where ground would first be broken. They rode carefully, examining the soil, thinking of dam sites and crops to come, ominously noting a profusion of black crickets. That night all the wagons except those which lingered with the sick prophet camped in Canaan. The next day, July 23, they sent a report to Brigham and moved the whole camp to the divided creek. “Here we called the camp together,” Pratt says, “and it fell to my lot to offer up prayer and thanksgiving in behalf of our company, all of whom had been preserved from the Missouri River to this point; and, after dedicating ourselves and the land unto the Lord and imploring His blessings upon our labors, we appointed various committees to attend to different branches of business, preparatory to putting in crops, and in about two hours after our arrival we began to plow, and the same afternoon built a dam to irrigate the soil, which at the spot where we were ploughing was exceedingly dry.”
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There had lately been some showers in the Wasatch but they could not have greatly freshened the valley. In late July it is always a dry land weary with summer. When the Apostle Orson came over the ridge of Big Mountain he was in a zone where the ground whitened with frost at daybreak and the silver undersides of aspen had the first gilt tinge of autumn. But he came down past the benches of the prehistoric lake to a plain of sage and stunted oak brush smelling of dust under a brazen sun. Dust lay on the oak leaves, dust made a flour to the tops of their boots, the tar-and-turpentine stench of sage was in their nostrils, and the sky whitened with heat. They saw the valley as men coming from a far country to the promised land. It was the women whose hearts sank at sight of desolation — the empty plain, the line of the Wasatch stretching south with perhaps a few patches of snow left still like outcrops of chalk just below the ridge, to the south the more desolate Oquirrhs canting westward toward the end of the lake, and then those bright, amazing waters with peaks rising from them and the sun striking a white fire from them and from the whiter sand. Well enough for the Apostle Orson to fall on his knees and dedicate the land unto the Lord and give thanks. “Because the Lord loved you and because he would keep the oath which he has sworn unto your fathers hath he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you out of the house of bondage.” But to the women it was a stark and hideous land. The years of persecution and the long moving ended here — but in a desert. The ground crawled with crickets, a rattler slid into the sage, well out of rifle range a coyote loped and sat and stared and panted off into emptiness.
