The Rescue of the Martin Handcart Company: Brigham Young Sends Everything Within One Hour

In early October 1856, a party of fast-traveling missionaries returning to Utah from Europe arrived in Salt Lake City with urgent news: two large handcart companies — the Willie and Martin companies — were still out on the trail, dangerously late in the season, with winter already closing in.

It was Saturday, October 4, 1856 — the last day of General Conference. When Brigham Young received word, he stood before the congregation and spoke with unusual urgency. He told the Saints that the text he had prepared to deliver was thrown aside. 'I will now give this people the subject and the text for the Elders who may speak today and hereafter: Go and bring in those people now on the plains.'

He then organized relief immediately. He called for wagons, mules, flour, potatoes, onions, clothing — everything. He said: 'I want forty good young men and as many wagons. I want them to come in not in a week, but tomorrow morning.' Church members stripped their pantries, their wardrobes, their barns. Within hours — by Sunday morning — wagons, supplies, and volunteers were moving east.

The rescue party found the Willie Company on October 19, 1856, near the Sixth Crossing of the Sweetwater River. The company had been living on 3 ounces of flour per day; many were dying. The rescuers arrived to find the pioneers in the snow. Rescuer Ephraim Hanks wrote: 'The starved forms and haggard countenances of the poor sufferers, as they moved about slowly, shivering with cold, to prepare their scanty evening meal, was enough to touch the stoutest heart. They hailed me with joy inexpressible. There was only one day's quarter rations left in camp.'

The Martin Company was found ten days later, 100 miles further east at Red Buttes, in even worse condition. In the nine days since crossing the frozen Platte River, the entire company had moved only a few miles. Fifty-six people had died in those nine days alone.

At the Sweetwater River crossing in early November, members of the Martin Company — exhausted, starving, and barely able to stand — faced one final icy crossing. Eighteen-year-old rescuers carried hundreds of them across on their backs. President Gordon B. Hinckley later said of these young men: 'They saved people from death. I love these brethren. I love them with a love that goes beyond my ability to express. They were cold. They were hungry. But they were animated by a divine spirit.'

The Willie Company arrived in Salt Lake City on November 9. The Martin Company arrived on November 30, 1856. Of the approximately 1,100 people who had set out, historians estimate 67 died in the Willie Company (about 14%) and 135–150 in the Martin Company (about 25%). Those who survived described the experience as transformative — a fire that forged rather than destroyed their faith.

Thomas Stenhouse, a journalist who was present when the survivors arrived, wrote: 'They had come across the plains in November — starved, frozen, half-dead. And yet these people were full of faith. I have never seen anything like it.'