One hundred and seventy-eight years ago this coming week they started rolling in, the first non-Indians to enter the Salt Lake Valley and not keep going.
Much has been written about the 148 souls who made that historic 111-day, 1,031-mile trek from Winter Quarters (now Omaha, Nebraska) to the shores of the Great Salt Lake, arriving in July of 1847. Their journals have been all but canonized. Their names forever emblazoned on the Brigham Young statue at the top of Main Street.
But one element of the vaunted Vanguard Company is often lost in the telling.
It was a guys trip.
One hundred and forty-three of the 148 were men. There were just three women: Lorenzo Young’s wife Harriet, Brigham Young’s wife Clarissa and Heber Kimball’s wife Ellen. There were also two 6-year-old boys, Harriet’s son Isaac and stepson Lorenzo.
Other than that, nothing but males, ranging from the ages of 18 to 62. Brigham Young was 46. The average age was 32.4.
All this, history records, was by design.
“They were hand-picked,” explains University of Utah historian W. Paul Reeve, “these were young people who were perceived to be physically fit and able to prepare a place for the rest of the settlers. They were the pioneering type capable of doing the difficult work.”
William Clayton, 32, acted as the group’s scribe. The man famous for writing the lyrics to “Come, Come Ye Saints” was assigned to be the trip’s historian by Brigham Young. He didn’t miss a day writing, despite a toothache and other ailments he details very matter-of-factly. He writes of hunting, fishing, horses, 15-shooters, Indians, wolves, thunderstorms, river crossings, sunsets and of prairies black with buffalo.
“I should imagine that at a moderate calculation we have seen over fifty thousand (buffalo),” he recorded on May 5 when they were crossing Nebraska.
The journey sounds idyllic — wide open spaces, the stars as your night light, buffaloes begging you to shoot them, fish practically jumping on your hook.
“They probably did enjoy the adventure,” says Reeve, “but while we tend to think of hunting and fishing as recreational, for them it wasn’t just recreation, it was survival.”
And even though they were on God’s errand — scouting out a place where the Latter-day Saints could practice their religion without outside interference — 143 men on the open road, or trail, without female supervision, led to the inevitable Going Too Far.
By May 29, just east of today’s Wyoming border — almost exactly halfway into the journey — Brigham Young had seen enough.
As they were about to leave that morning, the Latter-day Saint leader said, probably literally, hold your horses.
The tongue-lashing he delivered for the next couple of hours is recorded in Clayton’s journal, all 4,427 words of it (the man was prolific; I’d like to know how he captured it all without a tape recorder).
This is how Brigham began: “This morning I feel like preaching a little, and shall take for my text, ‘That as to pursuing our journey with this company with the spirit they possess, I am about to revolt against it.’ … Consequently, I am in no hurry.”
English translation: if they didn’t shape up they weren’t going anywhere.
Brigham Young continued, “Nobody has told me what has been going on in the camp, but I have known it all the while. I have been watching its movements, its influence, its effects, and I know the result if it is not put a stop to.”
He listed card-playing, checkers, dominoes, staying up till midnight, quarreling, dancing (yes, dancing) and profane language among the things that were causing discord. He came down especially hard on making fun of others. “Some of you are very fond of passing jokes, and will carry your jokes very far,” he said. “But will you take a joke? If you do not want to take a joke, don’t give a joke to your brethren.”
Not the first or last time that’s ever been said.
They didn’t leave that day “till half past one,” records Clayton, until the men had repented and promised to shape up and be perfect the rest of the way.
Which of course didn’t happen. Notes Reeve, “These are human beings, we do ourselves and them a disservice when we place them on such a high pedestal that they’re unreachable. They had the same kinds of feelings of exhilaration, depression, anger, joy, that all of us feel.”
But they did press on, and eventually, of course, all that testosterone did make it, and the men wound up taking their spot in history as people who did something for the very first time. Two months later, another 1,000-plus Latter-day Saint pioneers came to the valley, arriving safely via the path the Vanguard Company laid out. More than half of them were women. And the West was saved.