This is the Deseret News and BYU afterall...
I fact checked and essentially neutered a Pioneer Day troll here a few weeks ago who tried to pass off similar nonsense, and seriously, I'm in regular contact with Will Bagley who has accessed a huge number of original sources. Will's conclusion is, "There weren't two handcart disasters; there were ten."
Here's a copy-and-paste of the bulk of my reporting:
Per Bagley ("South Pass": 2014, p. 182-183)
>How many people died in the 1856 disaster? Censuses of the dead were never taken, historian Tom Rea observed, but handcart veterans reported about 225 souls perished in the Willie and Martin Handcart companies. The LDS Church's own experts estimate the ten handcart companies suffered between 242 and 340 deaths (extensively footnoted)
There's more... I've seen this sort of shinola shipping among apologists before, folks. They cling to their pre-conceived notions in particularly stubborn fashion and parrot the faith-promoting nonsense repeatedly. Two hundred-twenty-five died in the 1856 snowstorms in Wyoming, and we're supposed to believe only 17 more perished on the other eight treks?
Per David Roberts, whose book "Devil's Gate" is the only modern non-LDS version of events in print:
>As mentioned earlier, even before the last two handcart companies arrived in Salt Lake City, Young launched a strenuous campaign to minimize the disaster. The Prophet himself never publicly reckoned the number of dead in the Willie and Martin parties; instead he found ingenious ways to imply that the toll was not very high.
(p. 309)
Right now I'm working with copies of an original journal of one of my ancestors that describes how in "reverse engineering fashion" a team of "handcart missionaries" was sent back east (to attendant publicity when they arrived in Florence). More from Roberts...
>This return mission has entered Mormon folklore as a vindication of the "divine" handcart plan. LeRoy and Ann Haen call it a "dramatic and successful demonstration of the efficiency of handcart travel." Yet, as historian Will Bagley was the first to point out, an eye witness account of the missionaries' journey flatly contradicts the Florence newspaper's jaunty boast. On his own way from Salt Lake City to Chicago, Chauncey Webb overtook the handcart train at Devil's Gate. Webb had been the master carpenter who had superintended the building of the 1856 handcarts in Iowa City, and his had been the sole voice arguing against the launching out from Florence of the Martin Company in late August.
>The account of Webb's observation of the missionaries appears in the pages of his daughter's "Wife No. 19" an apostate screed so bitter that it may be suspect. But there is no a priori reason to doubt Webb's assessment of the condition of the handcarters at Devil's Gate (Chauncey Webb was still alive when "Wife No. 19" was published in 1875. One assumes that he would ahve objected to a misrepresentation of his testimony on his daughter's part.)
>According to Ann Eliza Young, at Devil's Gate her father found the handcart missionaries "completely jaded and worn out."
>>In truth, they were almost dead from weariness. They travelled slowly, making long stops to rest, and finally they reached the Missouri River in a perfect state of exhaustion. They left their carts there with the utmost willingness.... To this day they all aver they cannot bear to hear the word "Hand-cart" mentioned.
>The fact that none of the subsequent five suffered a major disaster akin to that of the Willie and Martin Companies has solidified the myth, current among today's Mormons, that the handcart plan was fundamentally sound and benign. Thus Andrew Olsen, in "The Price We Paid," argues that the Willie and Martin catastrophe should not "be seen as an indictment of the handcart plan. Three companies before them made the journey successfully, and five companies after them would do the same."
(Roberts, p. 312-313)
And while David Roberts relies heavily on Bagley's guidance, he undertook his own research at LDS archives.
>The diaries and reminiscences of the participants in those last five handcart parties, so assiduously collected in the LDS Archives, tell a different story. They are full of the same kinds of heart-wrenching testimonies to exhaustion and near-starvation as the more oft-quoted Willie and Martin sources. Thus, in the 1857 company, led by Israel Evans, Robert Fishburn complained, "We could not help but feel that somebody was at fault for the scanty supply of provisions furnished us." Of the same expedition, Susan Witbeck remembered forty years later, "There could not have been a more difficult mode of travel. We would push and pull these carts across more than a thousand miles of trackless plains, barren desert, and towering mountains. I knew when I left England that ours was to be a handcart company, but it was impossible for me to realize the hardships I had to meet.
>There is good evidence that the death toll among the last five handcart expeditions has been seriously undercounted by Mormon historians. Andrew Olsen asserts, "In those five companies, totaling 1071 people, only 12 deaths were recorded.
(Roberts p. 313)
Praise the Lard and pass the Etch-a-Sketch...
>The Christiansen expedition is the most sketchily documented among all ten handcart companies, largely because most of its members were Scandinavian. Yet two participants in the party later swore that "One tenth of the company died for want of care and nourishment." Since 330 emigrants set out from Iowa City in the Christiansen Company, that rate of attrition would put the death toll in the vicinity of thirty-three--not "6?"
>Will Bagley calculates the death rate among all ten handcart companies at 10 percent, versus a rate of 4 percent among all Mormon wagon companies. His characteristically acerbic conclusion: "There were more than two handcart disasters: there were ten handcart disasters, plus the comedy that the handcart missionaries staged in the spring of 1857."
Besides Bagley's newest work, "South Pass" (which addresses a lot more than the Mormon migration to Utah; this one offers a thorough and thoroughly researched volume giving an excellent overview of the history of the geographic feature that served as a gateway to the American west), David Robert's "Devil's Gate is worth reading as well. Be prepared, however, to be more than a little angry at the revelations it offers.
http://www.oupress.com/ECommerce/Book/Detail/1836/south%20passShttp://www.amazon.com/Devils-Gate-Brigham-Handcart-Tragedy/dp/1416539891There's not much difference between Will's estimate of a mortality rate of 4% among regular members of wagon trains and the 3.5% figure given,
I have no doubt the LDS revisionist historians will try to claim that the people traveling to Utah were "safer" than the ones who continued on to California or Oregon, but those people continuing to the West Coast traveled an additional 800-1,000 miles further, and their journey included crossing several deserts.