Brigham Young's Spirits and the Handcart Disaster
In 1856, the same year a church member named Caleb Green freighted six tons of tobacco, rum, whiskey, brandy, tea, and coffee across the plains for Brigham Young personally, roughly 200 to 250 members of the Willie and Martin handcart companies died attempting the same crossing, caught by early snow after a late departure. The traditional church account holds Young did not know the companies were in danger until early October. The most substantial independent scholarship on the episode argues otherwise, and identifies the "didn't know" defense as the institution's own retelling rather than a neutral finding.
Whether Young specifically diverted rescue resources to retrieve his own liquor before or after learning of the companies' peril is a narrower and less certain question than whether he knew, in general terms, that hundreds of Saints were still on the trail, dangerously late in the season. On that broader question, the best-documented independent scholarship says he did.
The 1856 shipment
According to Stanley P. Hirshon's The Lion of the Lord: A Biography of Brigham Young, in 1856 a church member named Caleb Green freighted six tons of tobacco, rum, whiskey, brandy, tea, and coffee across the plains for Young personally. This was not an isolated indulgence: early Mormon settlers in Utah both consumed and manufactured alcohol commercially, and the church held a functional monopoly on the territory's liquor trade for a period, including wine production centered in southern Utah that continued for decades. Wine was frequently paid as tithing and stored in bulk in local church offices for sale to non-Mormon miners and other buyers. A bottle of locally grown wine was placed in the cornerstone of the St. George Temple by Young and other church leaders several years before its 1877 dedication.
This pattern is consistent with the broader documentary record on early Word of Wisdom observance: the original 1833 text explicitly permitted "mild drinks" including beer and wine, and complete prohibition did not become official church teaching until Heber J. Grant's 1921 directive. See Requirement and Exception. Young's personal consumption of spirits, judged against the standard in force during his own lifetime, was not itself a violation of church teaching as then understood.
The disaster, in parallel
Late departure
The Willie Company leaves Florence, Nebraska on August 16; the Martin Company does not leave until August 25, a dangerously late start for a crossing of more than 1,000 miles before winter. A sub-captain, Levi Savage, warns the company in advance of the risk of severe cold and is publicly reprimanded for undermining morale.
Salt Lake City learns, or confirms, the companies are still out
Returning missionaries who had passed the handcart companies on the trail arrive in Salt Lake City and report their location. The next day, October 5, Young addresses the general conference congregation directly, calling for immediate rescue: "on the 5th day of October, 1856, many of our brethren and sisters are on the Plains with handcarts... they must be brought here, we must send assistance to them."
Storms, deaths, rescue
Winter storms strike the companies beginning in mid-October; the Martin Company's crossing of the North Platte River on October 19 is followed immediately by a severe storm. Rescue wagons from Salt Lake City, dispatched after Young's October 5 address, reach the companies but not before an estimated 200 to 250 of roughly 980 total travelers had died of exposure, starvation, and related causes, the deadliest single episode in the history of American westward migration by handcart or wagon.
Two accounts of what Young knew, and when
Young did not know
The church's own historical materials and most Mormon-authored retellings hold that Young had no knowledge any handcart companies remained on the trail until the October 4 report reached Salt Lake City, and that his response, an immediate call for rescue wagons at general conference the next day, was swift and unhesitating once he learned the truth. In this account, the tragedy is framed as an unforeseeable, weather-driven catastrophe met with heroic and immediate institutional response.
Young knew, and later denied it
Roberts's book-length study, built from primary sources including LDS archival material in Salt Lake City, argues Young "consistently undervalued human life, created dangerous situations with regard to provisions in order to pinch pennies, and dissembled after the fact about not having any knowledge of the emigrants' late start." Roberts's central claim, stated directly: nearly two months before the companies' arrival, Young and Heber Kimball "were fully aware that more than seven hundred more handcart Saints were preparing" to make the crossing, meaning general awareness of the scale and timing of the migration predates the October 4 report by roughly two months.
Reviewers and the book's own framing identify the "didn't know" narrative specifically as the church's institutional retelling, not an independently established finding. Publishers Weekly's review of Devil's Gate notes that "Mormon retellings of this story have emphasized the subsequent daring rescue" while Roberts treats the episode as "an entirely preventable disaster from start to finish," built, in the reviewer's assessment, from "dozens of primary sources." The book's publisher description states more directly that Young's biographers "ignored or minimized this tragic and preventable event" and "tacitly accepted the official version of the story, which casts it as an unavoidable act of God that tested and proved the faith and steadfastness of the Mormon spirit." That framing, recasting institutional failure as evidence of collective virtue, is characteristic of apologetic historical writing rather than independent scholarship. Roberts's account has also received scrutiny in academic religious studies: a 2009 review in the University of Chicago's Journal of Religion engaged the book on scholarly terms, and Kirkus Reviews, while calling the account "solid," judged that Roberts "oversimplifies in order to blame Young," noting that other historians, including Leonard Arrington and Bernard DeVoto, have identified multiple contributing causes beyond Young's individual decisions, including poor communications and the new converts' own zeal to reach Utah before winter.
On the specific, narrower question of whether the October wagon trains sent from Salt Lake City were originally dispatched to retrieve Young's personal shipment of liquor and other goods before being redirected to handcart rescue once the companies' peril became known, a claim that circulates in critical and ex-Mormon accounts of this episode, the sourcing available for this entry does not rise to the same standard as Roberts's broader, well-corroborated argument. That more specific sequence would need direct citation to Roberts's text or an equivalent primary source before this site treats it as established rather than as a claim requiring further verification.
Establishing that Young had general advance knowledge of the handcart companies' existence and rough timing is not the same as establishing that any specific wagon train was diverted for a specific personal purpose on a specific date. The first claim is well-supported by Roberts's published, reviewed scholarship. The second is a more granular factual claim this entry has not yet verified to the same standard, and it is presented here as an open question rather than a settled one. The Hirshon biography cited above for the 1856 liquor shipment is itself a contested source: contemporary LDS-affiliated scholarship, including a review by historian Leonard Arrington, and later academic assessment in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, characterized the book as openly hostile to its subject rather than a neutral biography. The specific shipment detail, sourced to a named freighter and consistent with the independently documented pattern of church-linked alcohol commerce in territorial Utah, is treated here as reliable; broader interpretive claims from the same biography are not assumed to carry the same weight.
Reading this against the site's other entries
This episode sits naturally beside the Word of Wisdom material already built out on this site: the same institution that would, under Heber J. Grant in 1921, make total alcohol abstinence a binding condition of temple worthiness was led, sixty-five years earlier, by a president who personally imported spirits by the ton, whose settlers manufactured and sold alcohol commercially, and whose own temple cornerstone held a bottle of wine rather than a statement of prohibition. See Requirement and Exception for the fuller arc of that shift.
It also sits beside the pattern this site calls "keep, destroy, de-contextualize, out-wait" on The Speaker and the Room: an institution's own retelling of a formative crisis, shaped over time into a narrative of unforeseeable tragedy and heroic response, examined here against the earliest and most heavily footnoted independent account available.
Sources
- Stanley P. Hirshon, The Lion of the Lord: A Biography of Brigham Young (Simon & Schuster, 1969), as cited in Whisky Magazine, "Young was once a distiller," May 2023, and Mormon Truth, "Mormon Prophets: Smoking, Drinking, Chewing Since... About 1830," citing the freighter Caleb Green by name.
- Leonard J. Arrington, review of Stanley P. Hirshon, The Lion of the Lord, BYU Studies 10, no. 2 (1970) — on the book's documented hostility toward its subject.
- Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, review of Stanley P. Hirshon, The Lion of the Lord — on the book's characterized "barely concealed antagonism to the Saints."
- The Salt Lake Tribune, "Brigham Young's southern Utah wine mission fueled LDS profits, prophecy and alcoholism," September 25, 2023.
- David Roberts, Devil's Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy (Simon & Schuster, 2008).
- Publishers Weekly, review of Devil's Gate, publishersweekly.com.
- Kirkus Reviews, review of Devil's Gate, kirkusreviews.com — on scholarly qualifications to Roberts's argument and alternative causal accounts from Leonard Arrington and Bernard DeVoto.
- Seth Perry, review of David Roberts, Devil's Gate, The Journal of Religion 89, no. 1 (University of Chicago Press, January 2009).
- Free Thinking Bibliophile, review of Devil's Gate, April 11, 2024, citing Roberts's direct claim regarding Young and Heber Kimball's advance knowledge.
- WyoHistory.org, "Journey to Martin's Cove: The Mormon Handcart Tragedy of 1856."
- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Go and Bring Them In," Ensign, December 2006 — the church's own account of the October 1856 rescue.
- Doctrine and Covenants and Church History Seminary Teacher Manual, "Lesson 150: Handcart Pioneers, 1856–1860," churchofjesuschrist.org.
- Utah.gov, History to Go, "Handcart Companies," William G. Hartley.
- BYU Studies, "Weather, Disaster, and Responsibility: An Essay on the Willie and Martin Handcart Story."