This year's LDS Church focus on the 150th anniversary of the handcart pioneers' trek across the Great Plains to Utah is being celebrated online through a virtual history project at Brigham Young University that tracks the daily events of the Willie Handcart Company.
BYU Studies, a quarterly magazine that chronicles research and activities at the church-owned school, has set up the Web site — handcart.byu.edu — that allows users to read about the daily activity of the handcart company from journal entries kept by a company clerk and three other writers. Written commentary on the day's events is offered by Paul Lyman, a juvenile court judge in Richfield whose research into the company's daily activities will be published in book form this fall and was the basis for the project.
The Willie Company became famous in Western history not only for its arduous trek, but because the group was caught in early winter snows on the high plains of Wyoming in October 1856. Scores of company members died of exposure, exhaustion and starvation. Rescue parties sent from Salt Lake City brought the survivors to Utah.
Today, thousands of Latter-day Saints gather each summer in Wyoming on church-owned land where the pioneers perished to pull handcarts across dusty trails, paying homage to their spiritual forbears and learning more about their sacrifice. Lyman said his own research into the details of what the Willie Company experienced came as a result of his family's desire to learn more about the handcart pioneers.
During a 1994 trip to Wyoming, they decided to check out the Willie handcart rescue site. At the time, there were few clues as to where the events transpired, but they eventually found the area, now owned by the LDS Church. A few years later, the church purchased Martin's Cove, about an hour's drive from the Willie site, near where Martin Handcart Company members also perished. It has since developed both properties for use by modern-day "trekkers."
A few years ago, Lyman's extended family decided Martin's Cove would be the site for their family reunion, so he researched the handcart pioneer stories and put together some information. Two years later, he plunged into handcart history again when youths from his LDS ward were planning a trek.
"I found very little in-depth research done into any of it. In particular, I found that historians (who chronicled the events of the Willie Company) always relied on John Chislett's account, which is very negative and covers only the two-week window of the disaster. So I started digging and, by 2002, put together the outline of what would be in the book."
Lyman said he has no direct ancestors in either the Willie or Martin companies but was compelled to investigate because he found the details of their determination fascinating. He focused his research on the Willie group simply because he found more available information, particularly in the details of what happened where.
He approached the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers with a list of names of people he knew had been part of the Willie Company and found their research to be a great resource. Stories they had gleaned from the descendants of company members were added to the journal accounts kept by the company clerk, as well as by Levi Savage, Peter Madsen and William Woodward.
Lyman has included Chislett's remembrance of the disaster, though at the time it was written, "he had left the church. Not one other journal account or reminiscence is negative. Everyone else treats it as 'this is what I'm supposed to be doing in life.' They may complain that it's cold, but they are following the prophet."
By combining the journal accounts, Lyman said he was able to track the company all the way from Great Britain, through their six-week crossing of the Atlantic, their landing in New York, crossing the Hudson River, and the train trip to Iowa. His book will contain maps of where the company camped at each location he was able to document along the handcart route. "I may not have the exact location in each spot, but I believe they're all within a quarter mile of where the pioneers were," he said.
There are only a couple of segments where he hasn't been able to determine where the trail went, when the company may have taken another route for a couple of days.
"Everyone thinks they followed Brigham Young's path, but they clearly didn't. No one has printed things up on this other 'new' trail at all. They crossed the Platte River two additional times because they were starving at that point and didn't want to go uphill with the trail. They would rather stay where it was flat and cross the water," he said.
Jack Welch, a BYU law professor and editor of BYU Studies, said the Web site was a natural expansion of Lyman's work during the sesquicentennial year of the handcart pioneers.
"We had just finished doing the Joseph Smith day-by-day Web site," as part of the LDS Church's celebration of the 200th anniversary last year of Smith's birth. "I thought it would be wonderful if people could sign up to have an e-mail sent to them every day from the Willie Company," alerting them to what happened that day in the history of the company's trek. A link to sign up is available on the Web site.
He suggested the site as a resource for those who plan to make the handcart trek, as well as those interested in handcart history. The project began in March after a mutual friend told Welch about Lyman's book, suggesting that BYU Studies may want to publish it. Welch saw an opportunity to create a virtual history project as well as a new title for publication.
"I believe that this kind of day-by-day interaction is an essential way for people to experience history. Too often modern readers rely on historians to boil everything down and kind of tell you in sound bites what the story was all about. After you've lived with the day-by-day experience of these people, you come to appreciate the faith, the sacrifice, the joys, the struggles.
"It's like not just walking a few miles in their moccasins, but really feeing like you can link arms with them in this whole experience. To me, it's a model of how people can get back into historical events in a way that opens up understanding in a personal, human way."
Welch would like to expand the reach of history in the future by doing a Web site on Brigham Young's daily life and activities. "We have thousands of letters that he wrote and every one of them is dated. We have something like 1,075 transcripts of talks he gave, and only about a third of them are in the Journal of Discourses." If such a project come about, "I think people would stop seeing him as a stereotype and begin to appreciate the amazing contributions that he made to the lives of the Saints, to American, and to the world."
The current Web site should help users understand the entire context of the handcart experience, rather than the two weeks of tragedy that most associate with it, he said. "I have an ancestor who came in 1857, arriving with a handcart company in September. The record of that whole trip is excitement about coming to Zion.
"Most of the handcart experiences were successful, and most of the companies came through without a hitch."
E-mail: carrie@desnews.com