Barefoot in the Snow
photos by Emmett Orgass
Sept. 13, 1856
I must remember to thank God for filling my shoes with sand, for many others have already lost theirs. If only the colde strong wind blowing across the bluffs would wipe away the heavy sandhills, which continue to slow our progress towards Zion. The handcarts have quickly proved irritable since our late departure from Iowa City in July. Father grumbles incessantly of the axles breaking. I try to tell him to make no complaint lest Captain Willie thrash him with the whip again. Willie said if we do not repent for being so dilatory we would not have the blessings of the Lord nor get through this season. Father and many others have attempted to invent miracle solutions for the broken handcarts, but we had to sell off our tools to abide by the 17-pound baggage allotment. We have been rationed 12 ounces of flour a day to eat. My empty stomach turned as Father greased the axles with the last of our bacon.
Much to our surprise, yesterday Elder Richards and a party of missionaries arrived at our camp on light waggons. Brother Richards jauntily prophesied that God will keep the way open to the faithful at heart and we’ll arrive in the valleys safely. He asserted that to travel by handcart to Zion is nevertheless the Lord’s plan. When I begin to feel as though my body will not carry me another step, I remember that this journey is of divine origin, and I sing “Come, Come Ye Saints” in time with our marching feet:
And should we die before our journey’s through,
Happy day! All is well!
We then are free from toil and sorrow, too;
With the just we shall dwell!
On July 29th, 2010, I met my family for the first time. They were not actually related to me at all, but for the weekend we played pretend. I had a Ma and Pa, and eight siblings. Our family was one of five others in the Purple Company; the Purple Company one of eight others wearing color-coordinated bandannas. Up at a ranch in Donnelly, Idaho, the 450 of us participating in the Eagle Idaho Stake Trek loaded our belongings into wooden handcarts and began our cosplay as Mormon pioneers.
Rented in bulk from church-owned farms, our fortified modern handcart replicas consisted of an approximately five-by-four-foot wooden bed, a five-by-six-foot yoke, two wooden wheels with iron chassis, and steel axles. The handcarts carried our allotted 5-gallon buckets, for which we sewed seat cushions fitted onto the lids. Not only would our personal affects be limited to what could fit inside our buckets, but also, after a long day’s hike, we could sit on it. Mormons are nothing if not resourceful.
Following a monologue from a dollar-store doppelganger of prophet Brigham Young, we prayed, took up our yokes, and started on our dramatized pilgrimage. The handcart queue filtered into the woods on a generally flat trail plainly cleared for vehicle use. Not long into the hike, my brothers began to count down the “99 Bottles of Beer” song, though substituting “beer” for “milk” to keep it church-appropriate. My eyes fixed onto a cool middle school “S” someone had drawn onto their bucket. One foot in front of the other, I boredly sang in my head a simple LDS children’s hymn:
Pioneer children sang as they walked and walked and walked and walked…
Week after week, they sang as they walked and walked and walked and walked and walked…
Oct. 20, 1856
My prayers have become more frequent, yet their answers apparently less so. Sometimes when I feel that I cannot pull the cart the day through, the still small Voice will whisper in my ear, “As thy day thy strength shall be.”
Father has been ill a week with mountain fever, so we began to haul him in the cart. Were it not for his deteriorating condition, I believe he would still be murmuring about the night Elder Richards came to camp. When Brother Richards requested fresh meat, Willie had our fattest calf killed for him, despite the four hundred of us without provisions to spare. Elder Richards promised we would arrive at Fort Laramie to find abundant victuals, but upon our landing there was no resupply at all. I had to sell Mother’s wedding ring for a bag of flour. Luggage and rations have been reduced; heaps of clothing, blankets, and utensils were set ablaze. Sometimes the hunger is so great I feel as if I could eat a rusty nail. I am ashamed to admit I could not help but feel scorn in my heart towards these elders in Israel. I prayed immediately for forgiveness.
Yesterday, remarkably, I briefly forgot about my hunger, only because of our wretched ordeal fording the bitter river. When I saw the river we had to go through I could not keep my tears back—I pulled my bonnet over my face so the brethren should not see. The river was wide, the current strong, the water exceedingly colde and up to our armpits. I lost my footing on the cobblestones, and thought I might die as my face submerged under the icy channel. Nearly drowned, I prayed desperately God please deliver me, please God show me your divine mercy and I shall never doubt thee. Blessed still with my life on the other side, I fell to my knees on the north bank to pray my thanks…and yet, a piercing wind broke through the sky, and it began to snow a never-ending snow.
My brothers were down to about twenty bottles of milk when our company arrived at a wide riverbank. Handcarts parked, we sat along the bank waiting for the caravan behind us to catch up. Forty minutes went by, my navy long-sleeve, ankle-length dress from Deseret Industries absorbing the summer sun. When the next historical sketch finally began, I heard a woman’s desperate voice over a microphone:
“When I saw that we had to cross the Sweetwater yet again, I fell to my knees sobbing—it was more than I could bear…”
Trapped in the heat of my neuter polyester costume, sweat rolled out of my armpits and knee pits, through my scalp under my handmade bonnet, down my brow. My mouth was as dry as a chalkboard. I reached for my water bottle—nearly empty. The sun beat down belligerently. I was a ham roasting under a broiler.
“…I resigned myself to the fact that this would be my final resting place…”
Shoulder to shoulder, everyone around me suddenly stood up. Dizzily, I followed—heaven forbid I stand out as an un-follower. Scrawny boys lifted pink-faced girls off their feet and cradled them in their arms to walk across the knee-deep river in a faux-perilous demonstration of the church’s orthodox gender binaries. While my surrogate deliverer carried me to the opposite bank, I avoided eye contact at all costs, said nothing, and tried to dissociate from the worry that he might think I’m fat and/or ugly. I thought about how unpleasant it would be to walk the rest of the day with wet socks and shoes and pants like the boys would be. I thanked God for sparing me some discomfort.
Late afternoon, we pushed up a dusty hill and finally arrived at a wide clearing. Organized upon our arrival to camp were rows of porta-potties, and commercial stoves where adults dressed in vague period garb were preparing dinner. Shy and bedraggled, I puttered aimlessly around a carnival of frontier-style games. Kids were shooting airsoft guns, throwing axes, lassos, and cow chips, bowhunting, crafting leather bracelets, and mas-wrestling. I wondered why, after hiking eight miles, these kids wanted to play games that necessitated physical exertion. I wandered lazily with nowhere to go, except maybe to sit on my bucket, anxious about the forced socialization, and also about the unseemly rip in the crotch of my bloomers, which had torn while giving my friend a piggyback ride.
Meanwhile, the jamboree was soundtracked by a family bluegrass sextet. Most church activities are not co-ed, so a flutter in the air materialized as boys and girls held hands and began to do-si-do in a square dance, linked together like flaccid daisy chains. Their smiles seemed almost manic, straight white teeth and braces protruding out of their watermelon pink mouths, dirty flaxen hair sticking to their sunburned faces, armpits stained with salt and sweat. En masse they grapevined, waving imaginary lassos over their heads, hopping in the air and clicking their heels together gleefully. Circling and circling and circling, they spun and smiled and clapped and held hands, as if they had not just spent the last eight hours needlessly performing hard manual labor in the grand, fetishized LARP of our collective ancestral suffering. A specter of doubt’s tendrils snaked through my gut: Are these the people I’ll have to hang out with in the afterlife? Do I even want to go?
Nov. 3, 1856
Our zeal for the appearance of rescue waggons did not last long as we stood at the base of what is called the Rocky Ridge. The wind blew bleek and colde, and our ascent awful hard, some five miles in length, steep and covered with knee-deep snow. Having lost my shoes in the river, I could barely get my feet to follow my will. Father too was very weak from lack of food…At camp that night I laid beside him, and when I listened for his breath, there was no sound. To my horror, he was colde and stiff—rigid in the arms of death. It was a bitter freezing night and the elements had sealed up his frame.
In the morning, he was wrapped in a blanket and placed with thirteen others who had died in the night, laid in a circle with feet to the center and heads out. The ground was frozen so hard that they could not dig a grave. Before covering them up, I looked at Father’s heavy-laced shoes guilty with the desire to appropriate them. I watched torpidly as an emaciated man scavenged Father’s shoes for himself. We prayed, paying our usual devotions to the Deity, and buried the deceased under willows and snow. We abandoned those two-wheeled man tormentors and rode the rest of the way in covered waggons, carrying on towards Brother Brigham’s prophecy.
The following day’s push was about the same as the previous—boring, tiring, hot—though sometimes contoured by the crossing of a muddy pothole or a fallen tree trunk. Occasionally NPCs peppered the trail, such as prospectors panning for gold, or a couple burying a doll baby in a tiny grave, or an apostate heckling us to turn back around, to which kids would giggle and reject the suggestion that they had any other options.
Midday, the boys and Pas broke off, and us girls waved goodbye in trepidation of one highly anticipated cutscene in our reenactment: the Women’s Pull. As one last “go get ‘em, girls!” before a dramatic uphill march, the Mas gathered us around for a devotional. They reminisced on stories of female pioneers who braved the trail without the men by their sides. Some girls around me began to cry, apparently moved by those miserable pioneer stories. The pep talk maintained the church’s usual nebulous platitudes that women are strong, women are courageous, women have a valuable role in God’s plan. Meanwhile, per church protocol, our strictly feminine devotional was being mandatorily presided over by a couple male, priesthood-holding elders—authority even the most righteous among us girls lacked prerequisite on the mere condition of her gender.
The only way forward was up: up the steep and winding hill where the pines loomed over us like Snow White’s haunted forest. Girding our loins, we tucked our skirts into our bloomers, disregarding church proprieties. Some girls wore duct tape wrapped around their blistered palms; one cart was pulled by a girl with dwarfism at its fore. We folded our hips over the yokes like paper dolls and pushed, hard. Taciturn and trying not to slip on the rubble, I rhythmically leaned into the rigor, suddenly resolute against our uphill battle. Shoulders hunched, calves burned, sweat dripped, lungs heaved. Then, a warm swelling, some barely perceptible tremor, murmured from within the belly of my skepticism–a frisson, perhaps, of pride, or grit, or aplomb—an anonymous still small Voice. We trudged past a sign posted in the ground: “Oh youth of the noble birthright, Carry On, Carry On, Carry On!”
As we began to summit, I looked up to find the corps of boys standing, watching, completely quiet, some apathetically holding their hats over their hearts. Wincing at the sight of our toil, though likely relieved to be sidelined, they had been instructed not to help. My eyes stayed low, sentient as a caged zoo animal. Once we crested the hill, the teenage priesthood-holders slipped as silent saviors back into our gasping cadre, relieving us of our vain exhibition. The trail flattened. My shoes coughed with dust. That dissonant tremor remained. Its hum vibrated down into the soils of my soul: maybe, I could be better off carrying on without them.
I must remember to thank God for filling my shoes with sand, for many others have already lost theirs. If only the colde strong wind blowing across the bluffs would wipe away the heavy sandhills, which continue to slow our progress towards Zion. The handcarts have quickly proved irritable since our late departure from Iowa City in July. Father grumbles incessantly of the axles breaking. I try to tell him to make no complaint lest Captain Willie thrash him with the whip again. Willie said if we do not repent for being so dilatory we would not have the blessings of the Lord nor get through this season. Father and many others have attempted to invent miracle solutions for the broken handcarts, but we had to sell off our tools to abide by the 17-pound baggage allotment. We have been rationed 12 ounces of flour a day to eat. My empty stomach turned as Father greased the axles with the last of our bacon.
Much to our surprise, yesterday Elder Richards and a party of missionaries arrived at our camp on light waggons. Brother Richards jauntily prophesied that God will keep the way open to the faithful at heart and we’ll arrive in the valleys safely. He asserted that to travel by handcart to Zion is nevertheless the Lord’s plan. When I begin to feel as though my body will not carry me another step, I remember that this journey is of divine origin, and I sing “Come, Come Ye Saints” in time with our marching feet:
And should we die before our journey’s through,
Happy day! All is well!
We then are free from toil and sorrow, too;
With the just we shall dwell!
On July 29th, 2010, I met my family for the first time. They were not actually related to me at all, but for the weekend we played pretend. I had a Ma and Pa, and eight siblings. Our family was one of five others in the Purple Company; the Purple Company one of eight others wearing color-coordinated bandannas. Up at a ranch in Donnelly, Idaho, the 450 of us participating in the Eagle Idaho Stake Trek loaded our belongings into wooden handcarts and began our cosplay as Mormon pioneers.
Rented in bulk from church-owned farms, our fortified modern handcart replicas consisted of an approximately five-by-four-foot wooden bed, a five-by-six-foot yoke, two wooden wheels with iron chassis, and steel axles. The handcarts carried our allotted 5-gallon buckets, for which we sewed seat cushions fitted onto the lids. Not only would our personal affects be limited to what could fit inside our buckets, but also, after a long day’s hike, we could sit on it. Mormons are nothing if not resourceful.
Following a monologue from a dollar-store doppelganger of prophet Brigham Young, we prayed, took up our yokes, and started on our dramatized pilgrimage. The handcart queue filtered into the woods on a generally flat trail plainly cleared for vehicle use. Not long into the hike, my brothers began to count down the “99 Bottles of Beer” song, though substituting “beer” for “milk” to keep it church-appropriate. My eyes fixed onto a cool middle school “S” someone had drawn onto their bucket. One foot in front of the other, I boredly sang in my head a simple LDS children’s hymn:
Pioneer children sang as they walked and walked and walked and walked…
Week after week, they sang as they walked and walked and walked and walked and walked…
Oct. 20, 1856
My prayers have become more frequent, yet their answers apparently less so. Sometimes when I feel that I cannot pull the cart the day through, the still small Voice will whisper in my ear, “As thy day thy strength shall be.”
Father has been ill a week with mountain fever, so we began to haul him in the cart. Were it not for his deteriorating condition, I believe he would still be murmuring about the night Elder Richards came to camp. When Brother Richards requested fresh meat, Willie had our fattest calf killed for him, despite the four hundred of us without provisions to spare. Elder Richards promised we would arrive at Fort Laramie to find abundant victuals, but upon our landing there was no resupply at all. I had to sell Mother’s wedding ring for a bag of flour. Luggage and rations have been reduced; heaps of clothing, blankets, and utensils were set ablaze. Sometimes the hunger is so great I feel as if I could eat a rusty nail. I am ashamed to admit I could not help but feel scorn in my heart towards these elders in Israel. I prayed immediately for forgiveness.
Yesterday, remarkably, I briefly forgot about my hunger, only because of our wretched ordeal fording the bitter river. When I saw the river we had to go through I could not keep my tears back—I pulled my bonnet over my face so the brethren should not see. The river was wide, the current strong, the water exceedingly colde and up to our armpits. I lost my footing on the cobblestones, and thought I might die as my face submerged under the icy channel. Nearly drowned, I prayed desperately God please deliver me, please God show me your divine mercy and I shall never doubt thee. Blessed still with my life on the other side, I fell to my knees on the north bank to pray my thanks…and yet, a piercing wind broke through the sky, and it began to snow a never-ending snow.
My brothers were down to about twenty bottles of milk when our company arrived at a wide riverbank. Handcarts parked, we sat along the bank waiting for the caravan behind us to catch up. Forty minutes went by, my navy long-sleeve, ankle-length dress from Deseret Industries absorbing the summer sun. When the next historical sketch finally began, I heard a woman’s desperate voice over a microphone:
“When I saw that we had to cross the Sweetwater yet again, I fell to my knees sobbing—it was more than I could bear…”
Trapped in the heat of my neuter polyester costume, sweat rolled out of my armpits and knee pits, through my scalp under my handmade bonnet, down my brow. My mouth was as dry as a chalkboard. I reached for my water bottle—nearly empty. The sun beat down belligerently. I was a ham roasting under a broiler.
“…I resigned myself to the fact that this would be my final resting place…”
Shoulder to shoulder, everyone around me suddenly stood up. Dizzily, I followed—heaven forbid I stand out as an un-follower. Scrawny boys lifted pink-faced girls off their feet and cradled them in their arms to walk across the knee-deep river in a faux-perilous demonstration of the church’s orthodox gender binaries. While my surrogate deliverer carried me to the opposite bank, I avoided eye contact at all costs, said nothing, and tried to dissociate from the worry that he might think I’m fat and/or ugly. I thought about how unpleasant it would be to walk the rest of the day with wet socks and shoes and pants like the boys would be. I thanked God for sparing me some discomfort.
Late afternoon, we pushed up a dusty hill and finally arrived at a wide clearing. Organized upon our arrival to camp were rows of porta-potties, and commercial stoves where adults dressed in vague period garb were preparing dinner. Shy and bedraggled, I puttered aimlessly around a carnival of frontier-style games. Kids were shooting airsoft guns, throwing axes, lassos, and cow chips, bowhunting, crafting leather bracelets, and mas-wrestling. I wondered why, after hiking eight miles, these kids wanted to play games that necessitated physical exertion. I wandered lazily with nowhere to go, except maybe to sit on my bucket, anxious about the forced socialization, and also about the unseemly rip in the crotch of my bloomers, which had torn while giving my friend a piggyback ride.
Meanwhile, the jamboree was soundtracked by a family bluegrass sextet. Most church activities are not co-ed, so a flutter in the air materialized as boys and girls held hands and began to do-si-do in a square dance, linked together like flaccid daisy chains. Their smiles seemed almost manic, straight white teeth and braces protruding out of their watermelon pink mouths, dirty flaxen hair sticking to their sunburned faces, armpits stained with salt and sweat. En masse they grapevined, waving imaginary lassos over their heads, hopping in the air and clicking their heels together gleefully. Circling and circling and circling, they spun and smiled and clapped and held hands, as if they had not just spent the last eight hours needlessly performing hard manual labor in the grand, fetishized LARP of our collective ancestral suffering. A specter of doubt’s tendrils snaked through my gut: Are these the people I’ll have to hang out with in the afterlife? Do I even want to go?
Nov. 3, 1856
Our zeal for the appearance of rescue waggons did not last long as we stood at the base of what is called the Rocky Ridge. The wind blew bleek and colde, and our ascent awful hard, some five miles in length, steep and covered with knee-deep snow. Having lost my shoes in the river, I could barely get my feet to follow my will. Father too was very weak from lack of food…At camp that night I laid beside him, and when I listened for his breath, there was no sound. To my horror, he was colde and stiff—rigid in the arms of death. It was a bitter freezing night and the elements had sealed up his frame.
In the morning, he was wrapped in a blanket and placed with thirteen others who had died in the night, laid in a circle with feet to the center and heads out. The ground was frozen so hard that they could not dig a grave. Before covering them up, I looked at Father’s heavy-laced shoes guilty with the desire to appropriate them. I watched torpidly as an emaciated man scavenged Father’s shoes for himself. We prayed, paying our usual devotions to the Deity, and buried the deceased under willows and snow. We abandoned those two-wheeled man tormentors and rode the rest of the way in covered waggons, carrying on towards Brother Brigham’s prophecy.
The following day’s push was about the same as the previous—boring, tiring, hot—though sometimes contoured by the crossing of a muddy pothole or a fallen tree trunk. Occasionally NPCs peppered the trail, such as prospectors panning for gold, or a couple burying a doll baby in a tiny grave, or an apostate heckling us to turn back around, to which kids would giggle and reject the suggestion that they had any other options.
Midday, the boys and Pas broke off, and us girls waved goodbye in trepidation of one highly anticipated cutscene in our reenactment: the Women’s Pull. As one last “go get ‘em, girls!” before a dramatic uphill march, the Mas gathered us around for a devotional. They reminisced on stories of female pioneers who braved the trail without the men by their sides. Some girls around me began to cry, apparently moved by those miserable pioneer stories. The pep talk maintained the church’s usual nebulous platitudes that women are strong, women are courageous, women have a valuable role in God’s plan. Meanwhile, per church protocol, our strictly feminine devotional was being mandatorily presided over by a couple male, priesthood-holding elders—authority even the most righteous among us girls lacked prerequisite on the mere condition of her gender.
The only way forward was up: up the steep and winding hill where the pines loomed over us like Snow White’s haunted forest. Girding our loins, we tucked our skirts into our bloomers, disregarding church proprieties. Some girls wore duct tape wrapped around their blistered palms; one cart was pulled by a girl with dwarfism at its fore. We folded our hips over the yokes like paper dolls and pushed, hard. Taciturn and trying not to slip on the rubble, I rhythmically leaned into the rigor, suddenly resolute against our uphill battle. Shoulders hunched, calves burned, sweat dripped, lungs heaved. Then, a warm swelling, some barely perceptible tremor, murmured from within the belly of my skepticism–a frisson, perhaps, of pride, or grit, or aplomb—an anonymous still small Voice. We trudged past a sign posted in the ground: “Oh youth of the noble birthright, Carry On, Carry On, Carry On!”
As we began to summit, I looked up to find the corps of boys standing, watching, completely quiet, some apathetically holding their hats over their hearts. Wincing at the sight of our toil, though likely relieved to be sidelined, they had been instructed not to help. My eyes stayed low, sentient as a caged zoo animal. Once we crested the hill, the teenage priesthood-holders slipped as silent saviors back into our gasping cadre, relieving us of our vain exhibition. The trail flattened. My shoes coughed with dust. That dissonant tremor remained. Its hum vibrated down into the soils of my soul: maybe, I could be better off carrying on without them.