Context

Image of the Martin Handcart Company

This past week I spent some time doing some research in pioneer journals for the upcoming trek that my stake is having.  This research is also doubling for a paper that I am presenting at the Mormon History Association's Annual Conference in San Antonio this June.  For my paper I had decided to speak about the ways that American missionaries and British converts felt and wrote about the different environments that the gospel exposed them to.  When the missionaries arrived in England, many of them were shocked to see the admittedly dreary conditions of the industrializing nation.  These missionaries were, for the most part, farmers who although not wealthy, were used to people owning land and animals.  In England's cities they found industrial pollution, housing tenements, and very little private property.  They often wrote home in shock about these conditions, convinced that their own native environments were better (and in some ways making a good case).

But the second part of my paper looks at the way that the British converts of those missionaries experienced America.  We all know about the way that the environment affected the Martin and Willy Companies, but the things that I learned this week gave context to the handcart experience and reshaped my thinking on this pioneer episode.

Not living in the 1850s, we often don't think about the challenges that these converts faced beyond the exhaustion of a long trek with blazing temperatures in the Summer, and freezing temperatures and snow in the early Fall.  We don't ask questions like, "What was it like for people who had never owned oxen to learn how to drive a wagon across the prairies?"  "How did they learn how to care for those animals?"  So often we conceptualize the pioneers as "rugged frontiersmen" and forget that many of them were city dwellers not entirely unlike ourselves.  And these city dwellers had to learn how to drive wagons pulled by large, often unbroken, oxen.

One pioneer, Watkin Rees, recalled, "Driving Oxen was a new business to most of us Emigrants, many of us having never seen a pair of Oxen yoked together before we came to America."  To illustrate his point, he then recalled that "One lady, looking at a bunch of Oxen that had been brought together to be yoked up, asked how they milked them cows" as "they looked different to the cow she had seen milked [once before]" (Reminiscences of Watkin Rees, Church History Library).  A more experienced boy, Charles Bailey, noted that "Green [or inexperienced] Cattle and green drivers made it amusing" (Autobiography of Charles Ramsden Bailey, Church History Library).  Simply put, crossing the plains was not just a matter of hitching up a wagon and pulling the reins.  And inexperienced wagon drivers were not just amusing, they could be dangerous.

Having these problems in mind, as well as the high costs of wagons, Church leaders decided to experiment with handcarts.  Other than the assembly of the carts, there was no training required.  And with the exception of the Martin and Willy Companies, handcarts worked splendidly.  In fact, the handcarts generally arrived in the Valley more quickly than wagon companies.

All too often, we find ourselves making judgments about circumstances and situations without really understanding the context.  People have criticized the handcart experiment because of the heavy losses of the Martin and Willy companies, which, yes, did leave too late in the season.  But it is always easy to point at the places where things went wrong while ignoring the places where they went right.  It is easy to say the Martin and Willy companies should have remained in Nebraska for the winter without feeling any need to then answer the question of where they were to stay, what they were to eat, what shelter they were to enjoy.  It is easy to forget that the highest death totals in the pioneer experience came between 1846 and 1850, when Saints who were not ready to journey to the Valley stayed in makeshift homes at Winter Quarters.

When we look at mistakes and other problems in our lives, we must remember that there is always a context, and often a context which we do not fully understand.  But gratefully, our Heavenly Father and His Divine Son perfectly understand every context of our lives.  The Savior suffered not only for our sins, but also for the circumstances that frequently are the impetus for those sins and mistakes.  Accordingly, what he offers us is not just a theological bandaid to cover up the scrapes, but a genuine cure that addresses the roots of our spiritual wounds.  He grasps the contexts of our imperfections and He heals the whole soul.  And when He comes to us to speak of the areas where we need to improve, it is not with rash judgments or unfeeling edicts.  Rather, He comes to us with compassion and love, a compassion and love that is borne out His perfect understanding and empathy for us.

Brett