The Mormon Handcart Migration: “Tounge nor pen can never tell the sorrow” is an emotional story of faithful perseverance despite extreme hardship. While the experiences pioneers faced while walking over one thousand miles from Iowa to Utah are far from unknown, Candy Moulton interprets them through a broadened scope, innovative methods, and unique positionality, that illustrates the lived experience of 19th century handcart pioneers in a way that appeals to a mixed audience of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and historians of the American West.
Moulton’s first contribution to the history of the handcart companies lies in the scope of her work. Typically hyper-focused on the faith, sacrifice, and suffering of the Willie and Martin handcart companies, Moulton responds by including accounts of all ten companies who traveled to Utah between 1856-1860. She also tells the story from the beginning, when European Saints left their homes to travel to Liverpool, England. There they boarded ships to cross the Atlantic, and once they disembarked, some worked for weeks or months in the Eastern United States to earn their fare for steamboat or railroad passage to Iowa or Nebraska. Only then does Moulton narrate the experiences of their overland migration to the Salt Lake Valley.
Moulton also broadens the audience of this history to demonstrate its importance to the settlement of Western America. The events of the handcart migration have primarily been catered to an LDS audience through films, books, and reenactments in modern youth “treks,” many of whom are among the progeny of the handcart pioneers. Moulton disrupts that pattern by critically analyzing church leaders and pioneers, working to bridge a gap between LDS devotionalism and academic conversation.
The scope of Moulton’s work additionally augments the historical narrative by contextualizing it within broader happenings of religious and national significance. Between winter storms in 1857, political and sectarian storms coalesced into “the greatest crisis for Brigham Young in his entire presidency” (163). As President Buchanan dispatched a large regiment of the U.S. Army to Utah to replace Young as territorial governor, conflicts over slavery continued to escalate, antipolygamy rhetoric began to circulate, and aid from American Indians brought much needed nourishment and rest to handcart travelers under otherwise dire circumstances. Newspapers across the country also belatedly communicated the flight and plight of the Mormons’ first year on the trail.
Moulton draws upon diaries, newspapers, memoirs/autobiographies, church records, journals, correspondence, and family histories (all of which roughly double the number of secondary sources in her bibliography) to expose and bring to life the human and experiential complexity of the handcart journey, giving readers a vivid, yet acutely inadequate understanding of what they willingly undertook. Additionally, having walked the “Mormon” trail multiple times (once as part of the Mormon Trail Sesquicentennial in 1997 as participant and journalist), Moulton uniquely approaches the history through an ethnography of sorts that emphasizes individual agency through a semi-vicarious and embodied research methodology. This symbiotic archival groundwork and extraordinary fieldwork demonstrates her painstaking effort and skill as a researcher.
A third accomplishment of Moulton’s work is achieved through her positionality as a non-member of the LDS tradition. On one hand, this creates a space for her to critique the management of handcart migration without risking theological security, while on another, she often turns to harsh criticism where her dislike for Brigham Young comes through clearly. Nevertheless, she openly acknowledges that her personal connections to the experience compromise her emotional objectivity. By balancing her positionality as outsider and insider, Moulton both pays homage to and critically appraises those involved in the overland trail in a way that shows the character and circumstances around the travail in a more complete picture.
Perhaps if there is anything to critique in her book, it would be the increasingly negative attitude Moulton displays toward Brigham Young and other church leaders. While Young’s bold non-conformism, patriarchal leadership, and intolerance for casual obedience are well known, Moulton’s portrayal of him and other leaders as negligent, hypocritical, and even tyrannical seems to magnify his flaws at the exclusion of his undoubted effectiveness as a leader -- for few others could orchestrate such a mass exodus and still garner profound love and admiration from thousands of followers despite constant struggles with political leaders, Native Americans, and shortages of crops and goods in an isolated desert. While Moulton does acknowledge the sincere faith of the handcart migrants, she also questions their prudence in following the council of their misguided leader.
In contrast to Moulton’s strong judgment of Mormon leadership, one strength of The Mormon Handcart Migration is its blending of chronological and theoretical structuring. While the chronological and geographical trajectories are self-evident, the theoretical patterns reflect the multi-faceted texture of the history that is often flattened by limited focus. What The Mormon Handcart Migration ultimately shows is that individual devotees experience religion, and that institutional religion does not provide the needed support, structure, and means for expressing faith. Moulton’s criticism of the church’s leaders and its hierarchical organization juxtaposed with her celebration of the bravery and faith of the saints on the trail manifest her understanding of religion as an individual and community experience, and not as organized religion. This indispensable factor is integral to understanding why and how such an ill-equipped, poorly planned, and logistically impossible endeavor such as the Mormon handcart migration was able to triumph and become a bedrock foundation of devotion and culture for a worldwide church. To Moulton’s credit, she ultimately lets the saints speak, and their speech is replete with expressions of their belief in God, and receipt of his mercy, despite Moulton’s perceived flaws of Brigham Young. While she may not share their faith, Moulton does justice to the faith of the religious vagabonds on the trail who endure extreme weather, starvation, and physical exertion for the glory of God and his kingdom.
Mitch Nelson is a student at Claremont Graduate University.
Mitch Nelson
Date Of Review:
May 18, 2021
