Church History

Levi Savage had been trying to get home for nearly four years when, in the summer of 1856, he found himself among several hundred Latter-day Saint emigrants who were also going to Zion. Savage was thirty-six years old, a widower, a veteran of the Mormon Battalion, a pioneer who had already crossed the plains, and now a returning missionary whose extraordinary assignment had taken him to India and Burma.

He had crossed oceans and continents, survived dangerous seas, and learned in very practical ways what distance, weather, hunger and exhaustion could do to human beings. Now, almost home, he joined the emigrants who would become the Willie Handcart Company, with the Martin Handcart Company coming behind them. Their names would eventually become inseparable from one of the most terrible episodes in Latter-day Saint pioneer history. But in August 1856, nobody knew what was coming. What Levi Savage knew was that they were late—dangerously late—and at Florence, Nebraska Territory, with nearly a thousand miles still between them and Salt Lake City, he told them they should not go.

Savage was not frightened of hardship. He had been baptized in June 1846 and enlisted in the Mormon Battalion the following month, serving as a private in Company D. After his discharge, he traveled to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. He married Jane Mathers the next year, but by the time he received another call from the Church in 1852, he was a widower with a young son. He left that child in the care of family and departed on a mission intended for Siam, an assignment that ultimately took him to India and Burma.

War blocked the missionaries’ intended route into Siam, and Savage and Elam Luddington attempted passage to Burma instead; a severe storm nearly destroyed their vessel. By the time Savage turned toward Utah again, he had been away from home for years and had accumulated precisely the sort of experience that made his judgment at Florence worth hearing.¹

The Summer They Had Already Lost

The Willie and Martin handcart disaster did not begin when snow started falling in Wyoming. It began months earlier, through a sequence of delays that slowly consumed the margin of safety. The emigrants who would form the Willie Company sailed from Liverpool aboard the Thornton on May 4, 1856; those who would largely form the Martin Company did not leave aboard the Horizon until May 25. The emigrants had experienced difficulty obtaining ships, and both companies were already late for people who, after crossing the Atlantic, still faced an immense overland journey. The Thornton reached New York on June 14, and its passengers did not arrive at Iowa City until June 26. The Horizon reached Boston on June 30, and those emigrants reached Iowa City July 8.

There they encountered another problem. Agents had not been prepared for so many emigrants arriving so late, and sufficient handcarts, tents and other equipment were not waiting for them. More had to be built and supplies assembled while July days disappeared. The old explanation that the late companies’ handcarts were simply cobbled together entirely from green wood appears to be an oversimplification; the more important point is that preparations were incomplete, repairs became necessary, and more time was lost. Savage himself was helping with the outfitting. On July 12, his journal shows him searching for timber needed for wagon bows and failing to find suitable material. The Willie Company did not begin moving west from Iowa City until the middle of July.²

A seasoned frontiersman who knew the mountains as well as anyone in the Church, Savage quickly began seeing evidence of how vulnerable some of the emigrants were. These were not companies composed of young, hardened frontiersmen. They included mothers with small children, elderly men and women, and people whose previous lives had given them little preparation for walking mile after mile across the American West. Even during the summer crossing of Iowa, the heat and dust were exhausting some of the old and young. An infant died. Long marches proved too much for some of the infirm. None of this meant they could not reach Utah, but every difficult day was another reminder that the journey would become less forgiving as the season advanced.

Florence

The Willie Company reached Florence on August 11. Savage knew that another handcart company had departed from there weeks earlier, and he understood exactly what those missing weeks meant. The mountains did not become lower because the emigrants were faithful, nor did autumn agree to arrive later because their intentions were good. On August 12, as company leaders considered who would continue and who might remain behind, Savage put his judgment into his journal. He was “much opposed to taking women & Children through destitute of clothing” because winter would likely overtake them before they reached the valley.³

The power of that entry lies partly in when he wrote it. There was no snow on the ground at Florence. There were no frozen bodies at Rocky Ridge. Savage was not reconstructing events years later and claiming foresight. He was writing on August 12, before the decision had been made, and he believed the danger was foreseeable. Nor was he entirely alone. Millen Atwood, another experienced leader in the Willie Company, had privately expressed serious concern. Savage recorded Atwood telling him that in all his experience in the Church, circumstances had never appeared so dark as they did at the prospect of taking this company through so late in the season.

The emigrants, however, had another reality before them. They had left countries, families, occupations and possessions because they believed they were gathering to Zion. Remaining at Florence meant feeding and sheltering hundreds of largely impoverished immigrants through a Nebraska winter, postponing the destination toward which they had sacrificed so much, and accepting months of uncertainty. Captain James G. Willie believed they could continue. On August 13 he addressed the company, urging them forward despite the sacrifice that might be required, and then invited Savage to present his view.

Savage told Willie that if he spoke, he must “speak my mind, let it cut where it would.”⁴ He then described what he believed could happen if they continued: they might encounter deep snow before reaching Utah and find themselves sleeping on frozen ground with insufficient bedding and clothing. His objection was not to the principle of handcart emigration; Savage specifically believed the problem was the time of year. Willie countered with confidence in God’s ability to preserve the Saints and did not want discouraging voices weakening the company’s resolve. Savage nevertheless refused to say what people wanted to hear simply because the truth, as he understood it, was unwelcome.

The company decided to continue. At that moment Savage faced a decision of his own. His mission was finished. He knew the road. He believed this company was undertaking a dangerous journey it should postpone. He had actually been chastised for speaking his mind. He could have remained behind and, had tragedy followed, no one could reasonably have blamed him. Instead, John Chislett later remembered Savage responding that since the company was determined to go, he would go too and “will suffer with you, and, if necessary I will die with you.”⁵ Whether every word of Chislett’s later recollection reproduces precisely what Savage said that evening, it accords completely with what Savage did next.

He did not make agreement the price of his loyalty.

Once the Decision Was Made

The Willie Company left Florence on August 16, and Savage’s journal is remarkable for how quickly the dispute disappears from his daily concerns. He had made his case while the decision could still be changed. Once the emigrants went west, his attention shifted to getting them through. He served as a subcaptain, retrieved cattle, helped manage teams and provisions, searched for an elderly man who had been left behind, hunted when food could be obtained that way, and watched over people already beginning to weaken. When difficulties arose, his journal does not repeatedly say, in effect, This is what I warned you about. The people rather than the argument became his concern.

Early in September came a setback far more serious than a broken handcart. Thirty of the company’s best working cattle disappeared. Savage joined the search, but the animals were not recovered. Without those oxen, the remaining teams had to do more work, and thousands of pounds of flour that had been transported in wagons had to be shifted onto the handcarts themselves. The emigrants would now help pull the very food upon which their survival depended. For anyone in the company, losing the cattle was disastrous; for Savage, who had argued that their greatest enemy was time, the days and strength lost must have been particularly ominous.

Still, he did not interpret every hardship as evidence that God had abandoned them. Savage’s journal contains the interesting tension that makes him such a compelling figure: he could believe deeply in divine help while simultaneously insisting upon hard physical realities. Faith, for him, did not mean pretending that weather, food, distance and human endurance did not matter. That may be why the confrontation at Florence should not be reduced to a simple contest between faith and doubt. Savage was a missionary returning from four years of Church service. His warning was not an absence of faith. It was judgment informed by experience.

The Race Against the Season

By October, the very thing Savage had feared was happening even before winter arrived. Food was diminishing, animals were failing, and the weaker emigrants were deteriorating under the strain of the journey. At Fort Laramie, the supplies the company hoped to obtain were inadequate to their needs. Rations were reduced. On October 8, Savage wrote that “our olde people are nearly all failing fast.”⁶ The company continued because stopping would consume their scant provisions without bringing them any closer to the valley.

A week later the situation was much worse. Seventeen-year-old Caroline Reeder died during the night of October 14–15. Savage recorded her burial and then turned to those still walking. The people were “geting weak, and failing very fast,” he wrote, with many sick and the teams failing as well.⁷ Men’s flour rations had fallen to about ten ounces, women received nine, and some children received as little as three. On October 16, Savage recorded the brutal arithmetic of life and death on the trail: “This morning we had three deaths and one birth.”⁸

It is worth remembering what had not yet happened. The great snowstorm had not arrived. Savage’s August prediction was already unfolding through hunger and exhaustion alone. The old were failing, the animals were giving out, the company was moving more slowly precisely when speed mattered most, and every additional sick person had to be carried by teams already struggling beneath their loads.

Then Winter Came

On October 19, near the Sweetwater River, the weather finally turned. Snow and bitter wind struck the company, catching people whose bodies had already been diminished by months of walking and reduced food. The poorly clothed women and children whom Savage had worried about in August were now exposed to Wyoming winter conditions in October. Yet that same day men from the Salt Lake rescue effort reached them with news that wagons and provisions were coming. The timing was almost unimaginably close. The company had reached the extremity of its food supply just as assistance found them.

Rescue did not mean that suffering ended. Food, clothing and additional teams improved their chances of survival, but the company still had difficult country between them and the Salt Lake Valley. The ordeal culminated at Rocky Ridge, where the exhausted emigrants confronted a long ascent through snow and piercing wind. Savage, Atwood and William Woodward remained with teams carrying children, sick people and those who could no longer walk. People fell behind as darkness came, some so exhausted that stopping to rest became dangerous because they might never rise again.

That night Savage was not the man standing at Florence explaining what winter might look like. He was inside the thing he had imagined. He worked with the teams, sought assistance for those stranded behind, and remained awake as rescuers brought the suffering into camp through the darkness. Some were badly frozen. Some were dying. Families had become separated in the confusion, and Savage recorded the distress around the fires as parents and children tried to find one another. By morning thirteen people were dead and were buried together in a common grave.

The warning at Florence could not have felt like vindication now. Being right had become indistinguishable from watching people suffer.

The Journal Grows Quiet

After Rocky Ridge, something changes in Savage’s record. For months he had carefully noted distances, campsites, weather, meetings, animals, provisions, illnesses and deaths. Now the regular daily narrative faltered. Conditions had become so overwhelming that keeping the journal itself became secondary to survival and responsibility. The Willie Company continued west under the assistance of the rescuers and finally entered the Salt Lake Valley on November 9, 1856—the same date Church records give for the end of Savage’s missionary journey begun four years earlier.

He had finally come home, but not by the journey he could have imagined when he left Utah in 1852. Between departure and return he had crossed oceans, labored in Asia, survived dangerous seas, traveled around much of the globe, and then walked back toward Utah with a handcart company whose leaders made a decision he believed was gravely mistaken. The remarkable part of Savage’s story is not simply that subsequent events proved his warning justified. History is filled with people who predicted something correctly.

What makes Savage compelling is what happened after his counsel was rejected. He neither pretended the decision was wise nor surrendered his judgment merely to appear united. Yet neither did he use disagreement as permission to detach himself from the consequences. He said what he thought while speaking might still affect the decision, and then, once the company committed itself to the road, he committed himself to the people.

William Woodward, who endured the journey beside him, later remembered the man who had been censured at Florence as perhaps “the best help we had—resolute & determined.”⁹

That judgment came not from someone looking backward from a comfortable distance, but from a fellow officer who had watched Savage work when food disappeared, bodies weakened and the snow finally came.

At Florence, Savage held two convictions at the same time. He believed the company was making a serious error in judgment, and he believed these were his people. He refused to surrender either conviction. Then he walked west with them, through the hunger, through the snow, and across Rocky Ridge, until at last the road he had warned them not to take brought him home.

Notes

1. Church History Biographical Database, “Levi Savage, Jr.” Church records give his birth as March 23, 1820; baptism June 12, 1846; service as a private in Mormon Battalion Company D beginning July 16, 1846; 1847 pioneer journey; and missionary service from October 21, 1852, until his return November 9, 1856. The BYU Studies history of the India mission documents Savage’s assignment toward Siam, his work in India and Burma, and the dangerous storm encountered on his attempted voyage to Burma.
2. Levi Savage Journal, July 1856; see also the Church History Biographical Database and histories of the Willie Company. Church historical accounts document the late ship departures and delays at Iowa City while handcarts and tents were prepared.
3. Levi Savage Journal, August 12, 1856, Florence, Nebraska Territory. Savage’s original spelling and capitalization are retained in the quoted phrase. The fuller entry says he opposed taking inadequately clothed women and children onward because he believed snow and severe cold would overtake them before they reached the valley.
4. Levi Savage Journal, August 13, 1856. Savage records the Florence meeting, Willie’s appeal that the Saints continue forward, and his own insistence that if he spoke he would speak his mind regardless of how his warning was received.
5. John Chislett, “Narrative,” later published in T. B. H. Stenhouse, The Rocky Mountain Saints (1873), chapter 37. This celebrated statement is Chislett’s recollection of Savage’s response, not wording found in Savage’s August 13 journal entry. Chislett had traveled with the Willie Company and subsequently described Savage pledging to remain with the emigrants despite opposing the decision to continue.
6. Levi Savage Journal, October 8, 1856, quoted in Howard A. Christy, “Weather, Disaster, and Responsibility: An Essay on the Willie and Martin Handcart Story,” BYU Studies.
7. Levi Savage Journal, October 15, 1856, Sweetwater. Savage records Caroline Reeder’s death, the rapidly weakening emigrants and teams, and the reduced flour rations.
8. Levi Savage Journal, October 16, 1856, Sweetwater. The brief entry records three deaths, one birth and the increasing burden on the worn-down oxen as more sick emigrants had to be carried.
9. William Woodward’s later assessment of Savage describes him as the company’s outstanding help, resolute and devoted to its salvation. Woodward was another officer in the Willie Company and had witnessed Savage’s warning at Florence and his conduct during the subsequent journey.