Pioneer Trails Workshop, Day 2

"Hey everybody - look at that cool field over there!"
"Oh yeah, I see what you mean. What an AWESOME empty field!"


To most people it's just an empty field, but this is where "Brigham's Chastisement" took place. WOW, Brigham Young was good at rebuking people! Basically, this is where he called people to repentance and tried to get them to regain their focus on the mission at hand. This was our favorite quote from it:

"If any man had sense enough to play a game at cards, or dance a little without wanting to keep it up all the time, but exercise a little and then quit it and think no more of it, it would do well enough, but you want to keep it up till midnight and every night, and all the time. You don't know how to control your senses."

It's so easy to get fully caught up in anything these days, especially media, it seems. It's so accessible, and so easy. This quote reminds me to keep Christ at the center of my life, and not the computer or TV. Maybe I should embroider a bunch of Brigham Young's calls to repentance on pillows all over my house to help me out a little. :)

At one point, the men all stood up and sang "Ye Elders of Israel." I feel really blessed that Marty gets to work with such good men. The spirit was so strong when they sang this together, and I'm so thankful that I have a husband who treats me like a queen and his children like gold. He tries so hard to humble and obedient and...darn it, he's just such a good guy! :) I love you, Marty.

We were surprised at how much dust 25 cars could kick up. The dust was coming in through the A/C and choking us, and I bet the PIONEERS never had to deal with that.

Just kidding, we couldn't even imagine the dust that must have been kicked up by the oxen and wagons of hundreds of people. That's another thing that pioneer journal entries talked about over and over.

Fort Laramie
The Gurnsey wagon ruts.

I'm sitting in a part of the trail through which my ancestors traveled! How cool is that!?!

This is another place we know the pioneers came through, for a few reasons. Register Cliffs is on the right side, and the Platte River is on the left. In between those two landmarks there is a depression in the land, and we know the pioneers pretty much had to travel there, and that's what caused the depression.
By the way, Register Cliffs is soft limestone that travelers of the Oregon Trail would inscribe their names on. Often that was so that family members or others following behind them could look at the names and know those people had made it that far.

Ayer's Natural Bridge.

It was a really beautiful place to stop for lunch. Yet another place that you can stand on and know for certain that Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and other pioneers were. Heber wrote about it in his journal. I guess he's a lot taller than me or something (surprise), because I sure couldn't reach the top like he could!

We went to a is a visitor's center in Wyoming (the National Historic Trail Interpretive Center, in Casper) that was really cool! They devoted the museum to four different groups of travelers: The Oregon Trail, the California Gold Rush Trail, the Pony Express, and the Mormon Trail!

Here you could climb into a covered wagon with a movie screen in front. While they play the movie, the wagon bumps up and down and makes you feel like you were fording a river.

Same thing, but with a stage coach.

Here, you pull the wagon on sort of a treadmill and the chart on the left will tell you if you are pulling too hard (you'll exhaust yourself before the end of the journey), not hard enough (you won't get there before supplies run out), or just right. And that's me trying to smile while I pull with all my strength to even come close to that middle ground.

There was a pretty sad display here. Behind this snowy handcart, there is a movie about Heber McBride from the Martin Handcart Company. He was a 13 year old who found his father frozen by the side of a wagon. This set the tone for the next day, which almost exclusively dealt with the tragedy of the Martin Handcart Company. I'd been waiting for this day, because I have ancestors that survived the ordeal.

And since I already have Heber's journal typed up for a fireside Marty and I did recently, I just included a portion of his journal entry about that night:

“Father was very bad and could hardly sit up in the tent. . . . I managed to get Father in one of the wagons. That was the last we ever saw of him alive. . . .

"[That evening] the snow was getting very deep and my sister and me had to pitch our tent and get some wood, but there were plenty of dry willows. After we had made mother as comfortable as possible, we went to find father, but the wind was blowing the snow so hard we could not see anything. . . . We did not find father that night.

"The next morning the snow was about eighteen inches deep and awful cold. While my sister was preparing our little bite of breakfast I went to look for father, and found him under the wagon with snow all over him and he was stiff and dead. I felt as though my heart would burst as I sat down beside him in the snow and took his hand in mine and cried, 'Oh, Father, Father.'

"There we were, away from everything, away out on the plains with hardly anything to eat or wear, and father dead and mother sick; a widow with five children and hardly able to live from day to day. After I had my cry out I went back to the tent and told mother and the children. To try to write my feelings is out of the question.

"We were not the only family called upon to mourn the loss of a father that morning, for there were thirteen men dead in camp.”