In all its history, the
American West never saw a more unlikely band of pioneers than the four
hundred-odd who were camped on the bank of the Iowa River at Iowa City in early
June, 1856. They were not colorful—only
improbable. Looking for the brown and
resolute and weather-seasoned among them, you would have seen instead starved
cheeks, pale skins, bad teeth, thin chests, all the stigmata of unhealthy work
and inadequate diet. There were more
women than men, more children under fifteen than either. One in every ten was past fifty, the oldest a
woman of seventy-eight; there were widows and widowers with six or seven
children. They looked more like the
population of the poor farm on a picnic than like pioneers about to cross the
plains.
Most of them, until they
were herded from the crowded immigrant ship and loaded into the cars and rushed
to the end of the Rock Island Line and dumped here at the brink of the West,
had never pitched a tent, slept on the ground, cooked outdoors, built a
campfire. They had not even the
rudimentary skills that make frontiersmen.
But as it turned out, they had some of the stuff that makes heroes.
Mainly Englishmen from
the depressed collieries and mill towns… they were the casualties of the
industrial revolution, life’s discards, to whom Mormonism had brought its
irresistible double promise of a new start on earth and a guaranteed Hereafter. They did not differ in any essential, unless
perhaps in their greater poverty, from hundreds and thousand who had started
for Zion before them. But their
intention was more brash—was so impudent it was almost sublime. Propertyless, ill-equipped, untried and
untrained, they were not only going to Zion, they were gong to walk there,
nearly fourteen hundred miles, having their belongings on handcarts. (Stegner , pp 221-2)
For studying the handcart pioneers, this book is a must. Stegner has a way of writing which is very nice and so I would recommend this book. However I would overlook some of his work with regards to background, and take it as his listening to the wrong sources, or deciding incorrectly who is the most neutral.
