Handcarts: 150 years
E-mail story
It's easy. Send a link to the story you were just reading to a friend. Just fill out the form on this page and we'll send it along.
Your name and e-mail address are transmitted to the recipient. Otherwise, it is considered private information; see Privacy policy.
To the brass-band strains of "Come, Come, Ye Saints" and "The Spirit of God," a train of some 500 walkers with 100 handcarts trekked into downtown Salt Lake City Sept. 26 in a re-enactment of the arrival of the first two handcart companies into the Salt Lake Valley exactly 150 years previously in 1856.
Sponsored by the SugarHouse Chapter of the Sons of Utah Pioneers, it was the latest event in a year-long sesquicentennial observance. There will be other commemorations before the year is out, but probably none more visually spectacular than this one.
Curious on-lookers waved from sidewalks and gazed down from office buildings at the noontime spectacle. Some shot pictures with cell-phone cameras. Students at a youth academy applauded as the train passed by their school.
"Is this the right place?" event organizer and handcart captain Rob Race would occasionally call out to a spectator along the route, an allusion to Brigham Young's famous declaration when he led the first group of 1847 pioneers into the valley.
The commemorative handcart train commenced from This Is The Place Heritage Park on the land where President Young uttered those words. Under a deep-blue and cloudless sky in a comfortable autumn temperature, the company descended into the valley, passing Rice-Eccles Stadium, where the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2002 Olympic Games were held, and made a rest stop at the historic Salt Lake 10th Ward meetinghouse, erected in 1909.
There, in a brief program, they were greeted by actor Steve Sorenson, who, in the guise of President Young, welcomed them to "Zion."
"But I want you to know that I do not wish any man to think that I had anything to do with bringing us here," he said, continuing in the character of Brigham Young. "It was, instead, the providence of the Almighty and His mighty arm of salvation to His people. That we all played a small role, well, perhaps we might take credit. And yet it is because of that that we are able to gather here in these chambers of the mountains, free from our persecutors, to enjoy a season of peace together."
On they trekked, bearing dozens of American flags and led by the reconstituted "Nauvoo Brass Band." Passing the historic Eagle Gate on State Street and turning onto South Temple, the handcart-train members began waving white handkerchiefs, a gesture that was returned by spectators on the sidewalks adjacent to the Church Office Building plaza and the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. "Brigham Young" stood on the steps of his Beehive House residence, and he also waved a handkerchief in greeting.
Proceeding around Temple Square, the group ended their 7.3-mile trek at the Conference Center Plaza. There, Elder Marlin K. Jensen of the Seventy, Church Historian and Recorder, addressed the re-enactors speaking of remembering as an "almost sacramental" concept in the Church. "We remember, because a people, someone has said, can be no greater than its stories," he declared.
"The scene you have re-enacted this morning, of a group of people trudging, some pushing, some pulling a handcart, has become, in a way, the enduring symbol of the pioneers and the trail experience," he said, adding that with the passing of generations, "the fire has to be kept burning" in remembrance of their heroism.
A second reason, he said, why such commemorations are important has to do with the question sometimes asked in the Jewish culture: "Will we have great men as our fathers only?"
Remembering great events from history can be a motivator "in how we live our lives today," he said. "We can claim, because of our birthright, no great distinction, really, simply by being related to these great people. The virtue and the qualities they possessed in such rich abundance are not inheritable. They have to be conquered and won and acquired by each succeeding generation."
In a sense the handcart re-enactment in Salt Lake City culminated what began in June with sesquicentennial observances in Kearney, Neb., and in Iowa City, Iowa, where a youth handcart trek set off on a 14-mile trek from the very staging ground where the first handcart companies, led by Edmund Ellsworth and Daniel D. McArthur commenced 150 years ago, this on June 9, the anniversary of the departure of the first handcart train.
The commemoration in Salt Lake City paralleled the actual event 150 years ago in several ways. History records that the first two companies entered the valley together on Sept. 26, 1856, that when Gov. Brigham Young learned of their imminent arrival, he sent a military escort with musical bands to meet them at the foot of Little Mountain in Emigration Canyon (This Is The Place Heritage Park is at the mouth of the canyon), and that the people of the city turned out en masse to receive them (see B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church 4:86).
At the heritage park, near the "Journey's End" bronze sculpture depicting a family of handcart pioneers kneeling in a prayer of thanks for their safe arrival, Brother Race asked the re-enactors to show by raised hands how many were descended from the handcart companies that came to the valley in 1856. Response indicated there were descendants of pioneers in not only the Ellsworth and McArthur companies, but in the third company, led by Edward Bunker, and in the fourth and fifth, the ill-fated James Willie and Edward Martin companies.
Walking along the route, re-enactor Kathy Judd carried a poster-size portrait of her great-great-grandmother Sarah Goode Marshall with a caption proclaiming Sarah as the first handcart pioneer to enter the valley. Sister Judd's niece, Marjorie Eddy, walking alongside her aunt, said that Sarah was a widow with six children.
"Captain Ellsworth told her she would never make it," Sister Eddy said. "She begged to come. She told him, 'In fact, I'll beat you.' So the morning that they came in she got permission to go early because she had so many children. And some men riding on horseback came out, greeted them, took her children so she and her sister could push the handcart in and be first. So she beat them in the end."
E-mail to: rscott@desnews.com
