Fire of the Covenant

  © 1999 Gerald N Lund .

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Deseret Book Company, P.O. Box 30178, Salt Lake City Utah 30178. This work is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of the Church or of Deseret Book. Deseret Book is a registered trademark of Deseret Book Company.

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 99-97186

  ISBN 1-57008-685-0 (hardbound) ISBN-10 1-59038-411-3 (paperbound) ISBN-13 978-1-59038-411-4 (paperbound)

  Printed in the United States of America Banta, Menasha, WI

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  Let us here observe, that a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation. . . . It was through this sacrifice, and this only, that God has ordained that men should enjoy eternal life; and it is through the medium of the sacrifice of all earthly things that men do actually know that they are doing the things that are well pleasing in the sight of God. When a man has offered in sacrifice all that he has for the truth’s sake, not even withholding his life, and believing before God that he has been called to make this sacrifice because he seeks to do his will, he does know, most assuredly, that God does and will accept his sacrifice and offering, and that he has not, nor will not seek his face in vain. Under these circumstances, then, he can obtain the faith necessary for him to lay hold on eternal life.

  — Joseph Smith, Lectures on Faith, delivered to the School of the Elders, Kirtland, December 1834

  To Elders James G. Willie and Edward Martin:

  Who bore the weight of responsibility and never faltered in their courage or slackened in their service. How warm a reunion must have awaited them when it was their time to “lay this mortal by”!

  To the men of the rescue company:

  Who left home and hearth at enormous risk to themselves when they heard the call: “Go and bring in those people.”

  To the members of the James G. Willie and Edward Martin Handcart Companies:

  Who even now, a century and a half later, kindle in us a great desire to let the “fire of the covenant” burn in our hearts like flame unquenchable.

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  List of Characters

  The Call

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  The Gathering

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  The Journey

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  The Storm

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  The Rescue

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  The Valley

  Chapter 32

  Sources Cited in Chapter Notes

  About the Author

  Preface

  It was the middle of January.

  The sun was shining from a cloudless sky of incredible blue. It had been a dry month thus far, and there was only an inch or two of snow amidst the grass and the sagebrush.

  I was standing at the top of the great sand hill that sits squarely in the middle of Martin’s Cove, not far from Devil’s Gate in central Wyoming. All around me in a great half circle loomed the red-brown granite faces of what the locals call the Sweetwater Rocks, a part of the Rattlesnake Range. This is not a mountain range where flatland gives way to foothills and then rises to forested glades and alpine meadows. This is all rock, thrusting out of the flat plain like the sides of a half-buried basketball. Cedar trees dot the hillsides, but most of the range is sheer, naked stone, its stark beauty sufficient to overwhelm the eye.

  It was here, in this natural cove formed by the granite ridges, that about five hundred people of the Edward Martin Handcart Company and another four hundred people from two independent wagon companies took shelter in early November 1856. Low on food, desperately cold, they huddled together in misery, waiting out yet another winter storm.

  From the top of the sand ridge, I could see down into the cove itself. There was dry, brittle grass, scattered cedar trees, clumps of sage. I could close my eyes and picture the scene as it must have looked back then: round canvas tents, their whiteness almost invisible in the snow; the trails that ran from tent to tent and to the small spring—and to the burial ground. There some fifty-six people had finally escaped the cold and found rest.

  On that day I was there, the temperature was hovering somewhere around ten or twelve degrees Fahrenheit. I was grateful. It could have been much worse. On the sixth day of November 1856, the thermometer registered eleven degrees below zero! Ten above in January was pure luxury.

  And the wind was blowing. Of course! It is a rare day when the wind is not blowing in this part of Wyoming.

  I had come out here fully expecting such treatment from the weather, and I had dressed accordingly. I wore two pairs of jeans and thermal underwear beneath them. Fleece-lined insulated boots with two pairs of heavy woolen socks protected my feet. Beneath a heavy winter parka specifically designed for subzero temperatures I had on a long-sleeved flannel shirt and over that a sweatshirt. My ensemble was completed by heavy snowmobile gloves and a fur-lined hat with earflaps.

  I stood there in the wind, shivering violently, stamping my feet up and down, anxiously waiting for the signal to get back into the four-by-fours so we could crank up the heaters full blast.

  And I marveled.

  The day before, we had stood at Bessemer Bend, about twelve miles south of Casper, Wyoming. Here the North Platte River makes a long, lazy bend and then starts on its long march to join the Platte River somewhere in Nebraska. South of me, in a great arc that covered almost 180 degrees of our view, brilliant red ochre hillsides, studded with the dark green of cedar forests and half-covered in snow, provided a backdrop to the site where the Martin Handcart Company ground to a halt and waited nine days for help. This was what the pioneers called Red Buttes.

  A few days before reaching here, in the midst of a howling Wyoming blizzard, women of the Martin Company had hiked up their skirts and plunged into the frigid waters at the last crossing of the Platte. Even though the river is tamed now with a system of dams, where we stood that day it ran swift and deep, fifty yards across. Chunks of ice four and five feet long and half again that wide floated steadily eastward. As I tried to imagine stepping into that current, I was chilled more deeply than I had been by the wind.

  And as I stood there, I wondered.

  During that January visit to the various handcart company sites along the Sweetwater River, I realized something I had not understood before. That trip was not my first time out across the Mormon Trail in Wyoming, nor would it be my last. It has been my privilege to traverse the trail more than a dozen times and visit the sites that have become so etched in our Latter-day Saint history—Emigrant Gap, Prospect Hill, Independence Rock, Devil’s Gate, Ice Springs, the Sixth Crossin
g, Rocky Ridge, Rock Creek.

  I had read the pioneer journals, pored over the accounts written later by the survivors of the handcart disaster. I knew their story well and had been deeply touched by the faith and sacrifice of those handcart pioneers. But on this trip something different happened. I stood there in my fleece-lined boots and snowmobile gloves and Gortex parka and thought of the people who had come through here 140 years before.

  And I was astonished.

  I knew about the frostbite that took fingers and toes and is some cases feet and legs. I had read about the deaths and the daily burials, sometimes in mass graves. But I had not given that much thought to those who survived. The people of the Willie and Martin Companies had no heavy winter clothing. In the first place, they came from places where the winters are not so terrible and where arctic wear is not required. In the second place, a few days before reaching this bend on the river, they had tossed their heavy clothing and their extra blankets onto their campfires, thinking that if they lightened their loads, perhaps they could meet the wagons from Salt Lake City that much sooner.

  As that first October storm ripped down upon them, their clothes were tattered and heavily worn. Shoes and boots were falling apart. Some had no shoes at all and wrapped their feet in burlap. Many had only a single blanket or quilt for bedding. Thin canvas tents provided their only shelter. They were living on four ounces of flour per day—barely enough to make one normal-sized biscuit. And with all of that, they were forced to pull their handcarts through heavy snow—an exhausting task for even the healthy and the strong.

  I no longer wondered why so many died. Another question now pressed in heavily upon me. How did anyone survive?

  Of the five hundred people who started west from Iowa City with the Willie Handcart Company, sixty-seven would perish before they reached the Valley. Fifteen of those, or about 25 percent of the total deaths, occurred in one day! This was the day after they fought their way in a ground blizzard over a place known as Rocky Ridge. They had no choice. They were out of food, and the wagons from the Valley were waiting for them some sixteen miles to the west.

  I have been privileged to pull a handcart over Rocky Ridge. That was on another trip and it was summer then, late in July. It had been hot when we started at the base of the long climb, so I was in Levis, a light summer shirt, and a baseball cap. Then, about two-thirds of the way up, a brief afternoon thunderstorm raced over us. The temperature plummeted fifteen or twenty degrees. It rained for no more than three or four minutes, but enough that we were soaked. The wind was blowing at thirty or thirty-five miles an hour and probably gusting to fifty. In a matter of minutes my teeth were chattering and I was shivering so violently I could hardly walk. I knew that if I stopped I was in danger of suffering a mild case of hypothermia. And that was in July! As I plodded along, feeling like my legs were useless stumps and that someone had poured acid down into my chest, I thought of exhausted, starving emigrants, starting out in the dead of winter, with snow providing treacherous footing in many places.

  When we reached the top of Rocky Ridge, our four-by-fours were waiting for us. When the Willie Company reached the top, they had another eleven miles to pull! We took approximately two hours that day. The last of the Willie Company did not straggle in until some twenty-two hours after their departure!

  I stood in awe of what they had done.

  Standing at Bessemer Bend that day in January, I gazed moodily at the river, watching the ice float steadily past me in the current. My thoughts were on an Englishwoman in the Martin Company. Her husband had died a few nights before, leaving her a widow with three small children. One night she didn’t even have a tent to sleep in. That night the ground was so frozen and the few men who were still able to walk were so exhausted that they could not raise their shelter. She sat down on a rock on that bitterly cold night, one child on her lap and one under each arm, as she said, “with nothing but the vault of Heaven for a roof, and stars for companions.” And there she spent the night.

  As I stood there, chilled and shivering even in my heavy clothing, I began to realize that behind the well-known story of tragedy and commitment and sacrifice, there was another story. A story I had not seen before. A story that needed to be told.

  I, along with many others, had wondered why this had happened. These people were faithful. Many of them had sacrificed everything to come to Utah. So why hadn’t God tempered the weather? Why was that early storm so vicious and so unrelenting? One experienced guide said he had crossed the trail forty-nine times before and this was the worst he had ever seen. Had God forsaken them because they had foolishly come on so late in the season? That conclusion, which a few writers hinted at, had always troubled me. I did not believe that a loving and merciful Father dealt with His children in that manner.

  I went back to the journals again, this time reading with new eyes, this time searching for new insights. Now I saw something else. There were the tragedies, the losses, the daily deaths. The Willie Company lost sixty-seven out of the original five hundred. The Martin Company, with only about seventy more people, lost about twice that number.

  But there was something else. There was evidence of the marvelous sustaining power of God. The storms were not turned aside, nor did manna rain down from heaven, but neither were those hapless emigrants forgotten by the Lord. Collectively and individually, they were not forsaken.

  Gradually I came to realize that there was an incredible miracle taking place here, a miracle largely unseen and passed over without comment by those who experienced it. It was not only that the marvelous sustaining power of God was there, but that these exhausted, starving, freezing emigrants never lost faith in that power, not even in the hour of their greatest extremity. I realized then that they fully understood the words to one of the popular hymns of Zion, which they sang as they came westward.

  When through the deep waters I call thee to go,

  The rivers of sorrow shall not thee o’erflow,

  For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless,

  And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.

  (“How Firm a Foundation,” Hymns, no. 85)

  When I came to that realization, something else happened as well. I decided that this was a story that had to be told.

  In the fall of 1846, while the Saints were gathering on the Missouri River, Brigham Young received word that the poorest of the Saints, who had not yet been able to leave Nauvoo, had been driven across the Mississippi River at bayonet point by the mobs. Brother Brigham gathered the brethren around him and reminded them of a covenant they had made in the Nauvoo Temple. Then, calling on them to go and rescue those poorer Saints, he said: “Let the fire of the covenant . . . burn in your hearts like flame unquenchable.”

  That was what I found as I began to read the journals and accounts with different eyes. I found the fire of faith burning in the hearts of those people so brightly that no amount of cold, no amount of hunger, no amount of suffering could extinguish it. In like manner, it burned in the hearts of those who left their homes and mounted one of the most amazing rescue efforts in American history.

  It is my hope that as you read the remarkable story of these two companies, and those who came out to save them, you too will look for evidence of that “fire.” If you miss it, you will not fully understand the story these people have to tell.

  •••

  In writing the story of the handcart pioneers, I ran into several challenges. The first of those was how to tell the actual story of what happened in a way that the modern reader could feel what it must have been like to undergo that experience.

  Normally, to say a book is a historical novel means that it is a work of fiction set in a true historical context. How true the author is to that historical setting varies from book to book. Fire of the Covenant is neither a work of fiction nor a historical novel in the traditional sense of that term.

  This story is true. Most of the characters in the book were real people. This book tells thei
r story as it actually happened to them, relying heavily on their own accounts of their experience. A few fictional characters are created to help convey to the reader the fulness of the experience, but the story is not fiction. And therein lies its power to touch our hearts and inspire our minds.

  A second challenge lay in the fact that in the minds of some people, the handcart experiment involved only two companies—the Willie and Martin Companies. In actuality, five handcart companies came to Utah in that same year, 1856, three of them arriving without undue incident. Five additional companies came in later years, the last arriving in 1860. They came successfully as well. Only two of the companies ran into tragedy, and this book focuses primarily on that story. But while the others came without disaster, that is not to suggest that they came easily. Each group of handcart emigrants faced the challenge of crossing the plains on foot. Each had to agonize over how to cull out precious possessions in order to reach the required seventeen-pound limit. No handcart could carry sufficient food to sustain full rations across eleven hundred miles of wilderness, so every handcart company faced hunger to one degree or another.

  I wanted to help readers glimpse the full handcart experience. Though I focus only on the Willie and Martin groups in this novel, in a few cases I chose to bring in stories from other companies as well. These experiences actually happened but not to people traveling with James G. Willie or Edward Martin. When I do this, the notes at the end of the chapter clearly indicate that that is the case.

  Another significant challenge for me as a writer was that we have in the story of the Willie and Martin Handcart Companies two stories in one, and one story in two. These two companies traveled separately, and except for a brief few days’ overlap at Iowa City, they did not see each other. Thus, each group has their own story. And yet it is the same story. Both were late in coming to America. Both were plagued with delays, shortages, and setbacks. Though they were separated by more than a hundred miles at that point, both were caught in the same winter storm that struck the high plains on 19 October. And both were saved by the same heroic and courageous men as the Lord moved upon them to become instruments in His hands. So it is one story in two, two stories in one.