Jens Nielson — Crippled Willie Handcart Survivor Testifies the Hole-in-the-Rock Trek Was More Severe (1879–1880)

In late 1879, some 250 men, women, and children from Cedar City, Parowan, Paragonah, and surrounding southern Utah settlements answered a call to colonize the San Juan Mission in the Four Corners region. The assignment was itself an act of faith: they were sent to plant settlements that would serve as a buffer between Native Americans and the lawless element hiding out in that remote country. Rather than follow long established routes, the company attempted a shortcut through an unexplored wasteland, which required them to carve a wagon road down a narrow crevice in the canyon wall — the Hole-in-the-Rock — a 45-degree plunge of roughly 2,000 feet to the Colorado River. Working through the winter with picks, shovels, and black powder, with expert blasting directed by Welsh coal miner Benjamin Perkins, they widened the fissure and lowered their wagons down its face, then faced still further obstacles of slick rock, ravines, deep sand, and the agony of Clay Hill Pass and San Juan Hill before reaching the San Juan River Valley in 1880. Turning back was never an option they considered — retreat meant certain death.

Among the called was Jens Nielson, who years earlier had crossed the plains in the ill-fated Willie Handcart Company of 1856, where his feet were crippled by the frozen ordeal. Though he had already paid so heavy a price for the gospel, Nielson answered this second call without hesitation, driving his own outfit down the road the company had blasted through solid rock. After the trek he testified: "As extreme as the handcart ordeal was, the trek through the Hole-in-the-Rock was more severe." His judgment, from a man uniquely qualified to compare the two greatest ordeals of the Mormon pioneering era, has preserved for later generations the staggering scale of what the San Juan pioneers endured — and the faith with which they answered.

Fuller account of this event (as retold in Biography of Nielson, Jens – Hole In The Rock Foundation):

Jens was appointed chaplain of the San Juan company and captain of the first “ten.” When discouragement settled over the camp, it was Jens who said, “We must go on whether we can or not,” and “If we have plenty of stickie-ta-tudy we cannot fail.” His faith and encouragement got the company back to work to create the road over impossible country. He said the hole in the rock expedition was worse than the handcart trek twenty years earlier. With him traveled his wife Kirsten and her children; Elsie’s daughter, Mary, accompanied her husband, Kumen Jones. Elsie, and Trena remained in Cedar City, waiting for the new settlement to be established.