A shining chapter, and a terrible price
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IOWA CITY, Iowa — Though the Church has become a power for good in the world, "we must ever look back to those who paid so terrible a price in laying the foundations of this great latter-day work," President Gordon B. Hinckley affirmed June 11 at a sesquicentennial Handcart Pioneer Commemoration Fireside carried over the Church satellite system.
President Hinckley and President Boyd K. Packer, Acting President of the Quorum of the Twelve, spoke in the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium. Also addressing the congregation was President Andrew M. Hall of the Iowa City Iowa Stake. The meeting concluded a weekend of observance of 150 years since the first handcart pioneers embarked for the Salt Lake Valley from Iowa City, the staging point for their journey.
"The Mormon migration from Nauvoo on the Mississippi to the valley of the Great Salt Lake is a shining chapter in the history of America" because, unlike other westward movements, it was religious in its purpose and motivation, the Church president declared. He said his own grandfather lost his wife and brother to cholera during an 1850 wagon trek. "He carefully dug a grave, buried those who had perished, tenderly picked up his infant child and traveled a thousand miles to the west. He later remarried and became a leader of prominence in the Mormon community."
President Hinckley said that on the recent Memorial Day, he decorated the grave site of his wife, Marjorie, who died two years ago. "Then I looked down the hill of the cemetery a short distance to the grave site of Mary Penfold Goble. She was one of those 1856 pioneers who never lived to see the place of her dreams, the Salt Lake Valley."
Mary died just before entering the valley and was buried in the Salt Lake City cemetery.
The Church president quoted at length from the autobiography of Mary's daughter, also named Mary. In the account, she told of her family joining the Church in England and then starting for Utah on May 19, 1856.
"I pause to say that some years ago I visited the Liverpool docks from which so many of our people sailed," President Hinckley said. "I was given the courtesy of examining the registry books of the various emigration ships that sailed from there with Mormon converts. I read the names of the very many and the ships on which they sailed. Among those was the Goble family, the parents and six children."
Mary in her account wrote that her 2-year-old sister Fanny contracted measles while onboard ship and then died in the Iowa campgrounds.
"Somewhere in this area is the unknown grave site of the child Fanny Goble, and perhaps the grave sites of many others," President Hinckley said. "There is sacred ground somewhere in this vicinity."
Mary and her family were members of the Hunt wagon train attached to the ill-fated Martin and Willie handcart companies. Mary wrote that at the Platte River, "I wondered what made my mother cry. That night my mother took sick and the next morning my little sister was born. It was the 23rd of September. We named her Edith and she lived six weeks and died for want of nourishment."
The account describes further suffering along the Platte and at Devil's Gate (near Martin's Cove in Wyoming), of the death of her brother James, of her and her sister and brother having their feet frozen.
"There were four companies on the plains," Mary wrote. "We did not know what would become of us. One night a man came to our camp and told us there would be plenty of flour in the morning for Brother (Brigham) Young had sent men and teams to help us. There was rejoicing that night."
Mary's mother, who never got well, died between Little and Big Mountain, near Salt Lake City.
"We arrived in Salt Lake City nine o'clock at night the 11th of December 1856. Three out of four that were living were frozen. My mother was dead in the wagon. ...
"Early next morning Bro. Brigham Young and a doctor came. The doctor's name was Williams. When Bro. Young came in he shook hands with us all. When he saw our condition — our feet frozen and our mother dead — tears rolled down his cheeks.
"The doctor amputated my toes using a saw and a butcher knife. Brigham Young promised me that I would not have to have any more of my feet cut off. The sisters were dressing mother for the last time. Oh how did we stand it?"
President Hinckley recounted the story in which members of a Sunday School class were criticizing the Church for permitting the handcart companies to start so late in the season and a man, Frances Webster, stood and asked them to stop the criticism.
"Cold historic facts mean nothing here, for they give no proper interpretation of the questions involved," he reportedly said.
"Was I sorry that I chose to come by handcart? No! Neither then nor any minute of my life since. The price we paid to become acquainted with God was a privilege to pay, and I am thankful that I was privileged to come with the Martin handcart company."
President Hinckley commented: "Now 150 years have passed — a full century and a half. There are no survivors. They are all gone. But there will continue to be symposia to discuss the disaster. In air-conditioned comfort many will speak in recrimination of the leadership who permitted the ill-fated companies to move so late in the season. Books will be written to add to the many now available.
"Lee Groberg is preparing a film scheduled to be shown this fall on PBS. I am confident it will tug at our emotions.
"I salute the people of the Riverton Wyoming Stake of the Church who carried forward a program known as the Second Veil Crossing of 1997 and also the Second Rescue.
"All of this is good, but perhaps the most telling thing of all is the words of Frances Webster spoken in Cedar City, when he said, '(We) came through with the absolute knowledge that God lives, for we became acquainted with him in our extremities.' "
President Packer told of his great-grandmother, Christena Olsen Wight, an 1857 handcart pioneer who had purchased three pairs of shoes. The last she tied around her neck with a string, saving the shoes so she would not have to walk into the Salt Lake Valley barefooted. But on the last day, she found that her feet were so swollen and cut that she could not put the shoes on.
President Packer quoted from her journal: " 'I had to walk into Salt Lake Valley still carrying the shoes like I had for so many hundreds of miles. I walked into the valley barefooted, and with each step I took I left bloody footprints in the snow.' "
President Packer also told of the family of Robert and Ann Parker, members of the Daniel McArthur company, the second to leave Iowa City in 1856. Their 6-year-old son Arthur was lost, the parents having thought him to be playing along the way with the other children.
"Someone remembered earlier in the day, when they had stopped, that they had seen the little boy settle down to rest under the shade of some brush," President Packer said. "You who have little children know how quickly a tired little 6-year-old can fall asleep on a sultry summer day, so soundly that even the noise of the camp moving on might not awaken him.
"For two days the company remained, and all of the men searched for him. Then reluctantly on July 2, with no choice, the company was ordered west."
The diary records that the father went back alone to search for his little son. "As he was leaving camp, his wife pinned a bright shawl about his shoulders," President Packer related," and said, 'If you find him dead, wrap him in the shawl to bury him. If you find him alive, you could use this as a flag to signal us.' She, with the other little children, took the handcart and struggled along with the company.
"Out on the trail each night, Ann Parker kept watch. At sundown on July 5 she saw a figure approaching from the east! Then, the rays of the setting sun caught the glimmer of the bright red shawl.
"Under July 5, Brother (Archer) Walters recorded: 'Brother Parker brings into camp his little boy that had been lost. Great joy through the camp. The mother's joy I can not describe.'
"Another diary recorded: 'The brave little mother sank, in a pitiful heap in the sand,' and that night, for the first time in six nights, she slept.'"
Quoting President George Albert Smith to the effect that Church members came west willingly — because they had to, President Packer said, "The 'had to' part was not because of persecutions or mobbings. ... The 'had to' was because of what was inside of them. They knew why they came.
"They knew that there had been a restoration of the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. They knew from the revelations to expect such treatment. They had firm, unshakable, individual testimonies of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. They knew that the authority of the priesthood had been restored to earth by angelic messengers."
President Hall noted that the handcart pioneers had little when they arrived in Iowa City. "This was the end of the tracks, literally," he said. "They had no means to go further unless they walked.
"Sometimes, we too can feel like we are at the end of the tracks, that we cannot go further in life. We take heart from this great pioneer spirit. They believed God had spoken again, called prophets and apostles and restored His Church to the earth. Whether we have handcart pioneer ancestry or not, we all have an ancestral heritage that is to be remembered and cherished. Those who go before leave tracks for others to follow. Knowing of them helps us know ourselves better."
E-mail: rscott@desnews.com
