Review
Title: Sex and Death on the Western Emigrant Trail : The Biology of Three American Tragedies
Author: Grayson, Donald K.
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Genre: History
Year Published: 2018
Number of pages: 246
Binding: Trade paperback
ISBN10: n/a
ISBN13: 978-1-60781-601-0
Price: $29.95
Reviewed by Dennis Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters. Dec. 10, 2018
It is a mark of how precise an investigator Grayson is that his title is literally accurate. By “sex” he means those characteristics of humans that distinguish between male and female at birth. By “death” he means dying, the cessation of biological function in any given human. By “western emigrant trail” he means emigration from the United States to California before that area was a territory of the United States, as well as deaths on that trail, both animal and human. This precision may seem to break down when we reach the subtitle. With “the biology of three American tragedies,” he seems to indulge in hyperbole, since as he himself makes clear, the decisions surrounding the disasters befalling the Donner Party, the Willie Handcart Company and the Martin Handcart Company were questionable at best, and may have been foolish, improvident, even stupid — but tragedies?
Well, if you consider the essence of tragedy as the hamartia, or fatal flaw in a leader’s personality, you could argue that these were not mere disasters, but tragedies of high order, if limited scope.
In either case, you could not ask for a better summary of the events surrounding these catastrophes than Grayson provides. He uses all the sources I am familiar with, and brings in many more I had not been aware of. All this leads into biological analyses of the deaths that resulted from the hardships these emigrants encountered. He provides a general overview of the historical setting, a general review of the biological setting, and a narrative for each group relating how each got into trouble, and what the troubles were. Each of these narratives is a chapter. He follows the narratives with a chapter for each of his biological analyses. The only thing missing is a review of the statistical method he uses, which he assumes the reader understands.
He is even correct in the “emigrant” element of his title for all three parties. The handcart companies were essentially emigrants from the United Kingdom to the United States, headed inland, into what was by then American territory.
Bear in mind that the Donner Party was traveling to California in 1846, the year before Mormons arrived in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, and three years before the “gold rush” of 1849. This truly was a party of emigrants, hopeful of a better life. They traveled in heavily-loaded wagons drawn for the most part by oxen — male cattle castrated in youth and trained as draft animals. By the time the Donner Party had managed to muscle through the Wasatch Range and across the salt flats, many of those animals had died — and many wagons had to be abandoned on that 75-mile waterless stretch of trail. They were ill prepared for what is now Nevada, and the Humboldt River.
The winter of 1846-47 was far harder on the Donner party than on the Mormons in Winter Quarters in Iowa and Nebraska territories. What makes this all the more poignant for those of us who idolize the pioneers of ’47 is that the route they followed over the Wasatch and down Emigration Canyon was cut through the wilderness of the Wasatch Range by the men of the Donner Party. And again, this was the result of poor leadership.
I learned this for the first time from Grayson. I also learned how flawed their information concerning the trail was. They had been seduced by the self-serving promotion of Lansford W. Hastings, who had written a guide to the trail without ever having traveled it, and was now on the trail promoting his “cut-off,” which would take the Donner Party across those salt flats. Hastings, traveling 4 days in advance of them, had taken his party down the Weber River and along the Wasatch Front. But Hastings then rode back up the river to leave a note telling the Donner party to wait near what is now Henefer, Utah, until he could show them a better route. Through a series of unfortunate events, the Donner advance party ended up having to backtrack up what is Emigration Canyon, blazing a trail back to the waiting party, then reverse direction and cut a wagon trail through the mountain dales to reach the valley of the Great Salt Lake.
That extra labor delayed them enough — a little over two weeks — that they were crossing the salt flats at the end of August, which in turn cost them enough extra time that they were unable to get over the Sierras in time, and had to eat their own dead to survive.
The story of the Willie Handcart Company and the Martin Handcart Company I would have thought I knew much better. But I had always heard of them together, as if they were one company. They were not. They were far better organized than the haphazard Donner group, traveling a much improved trail ten years later, starting further west, at Iowa City, Iowa instead of Independence, Missouri. But, as Grayson’s extensive research shows, they suffered as much as the Donner party from lack of good judgment in their leaders, including Brigham Young.
As I said above, Grayson presents the narrative of each of the handcart companies separately. He documents the poor decisions made, and the ill effects resulting therefrom, for each company, both of which were far larger than the Donner group but suffered fewer deaths and did not get snowbound. Some of his conclusions about the parties will be controversial, such as his statement that our usual celebration of the rescue discounts the loss of limbs and appendages, which was devastating to survivors, and a lifelong handicap. But the conclusions seem to me well documented. And some of his biological analyses, published separately, have drawn rebukes from other scholars.
Grayson is upfront about that. But his conclusions are based on extensive statistical analysis of all three groups, as against the age-class profile of the Seventh U.S. Census (for the Donner group) and the Eighth (for the Willie and Martin companies). This comparison ensures that his analysis is not of outlier cohorts, but of groups characteristic of their decade. His conclusions seem unsurprising to me, and very well supported. Age, sex, and family or cohort ties, determined who lived or died.
But they have proven controversial to some of his interlocutors. Grayson is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington. So some other academics have raised questions about his methods. But he knows the territory. He is the author of The Great Basin: A Natural Prehistory (2011), a 418-page textbook published by the University of California press, which is a revision of his earlier text The Deserts Past (1993). He also wrote The Establishment of Human Antiquity (1983), a study of the development of anthropology as a discipline which was widely used as a textbook — and, more recently, Giant Sloths and Sabertooth Cats: Archaeology of the Ice Age Great Basin (also University of Utah Press, 2016). So he brings the knowledge of a great many fields to bear on his subject in this book, and many years of intensive study. That study shows.
For a Mormon audience, Sex and Death is worth reading for the historical information alone. Leaving aside the implications of the biological analysis, the historical synthesis is enlightening, disquieting and thought-provoking.