Join Lindsay as she interviews Joe Geisner about the Martin and Willie Handcart Company experience and how it relates to polygamy.   Links mentioned and read in this episode:

• Kirsten Erickson’s experience
• Brigham Young’s One Mighty and Strong Statement
• South Pass: Gateway to a Continent by Will Bagley
• “ONE LONG FUNERAL MARCH”: A REVISIONIST’S VIEW OF THE MORMON HANDCART DISASTERS by Will Bagley
• LDS Overland Travel Database
• Devil’s Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy by David Roberts
• Denver Post: Handcart Hypocrisy 
• Sunstone: Two-Wheeled Torture Devices: A Contrarian’s View Of The Handcart Disaster
• Live Science: Going West Wasn’t So Deadly for Early Mormon Pioneers
• Human Mortality in a Natural Disaster: The Willie Handcart Company
• John Turner’s take on the Handcart expeditions
• Leadership, Planning, and Management of the 1856 Mormon Handcart Emigration by Don H. Smith
• By Common Consent: Learning the wrong lessons
• LDS version of the rescue
• HANDCART MYTH AND FACT
• The Martin Handcart Company at the Sweetwater – BYU Studies

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Join Lindsay as she talks about Emma Batchelor Lee French, a favorite wife of John D. Lee of Mountain Meadows Massacre fame.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

  Links mentioned in this podcast:

• Will Bagley’s: “ONE LONG FUNERAL MARCH”: A REVISIONIST’S VIEW OF THE MORMON HANDCART DISASTERS
• Courageous Emma Lee Endured Many Hardships in Pioneer Utah
• Emma Lee by Juanita Brooks
• John D. Lee family site

  Excerpt from Emma Lee:

When the soldiers arrived about noon the next day, the commanding officer didn’t seem surprised to find John absent. The captain just shook his head and asked the three of us who were outside if we knew why the army wanted to arrest our husband. When we didn’t answer, he said, “John D. Lee is a murderer.” He went on to tell us that John’s Mormon Militia and Indian allies had slaughtered over 120 unarmed men, women and children. He said they had killed almost everyone in a wagon train that was passing through southern Utah on the way to California. He asked us if we were proud of the way John had participated in the bloodbath at Mountain Meadows, and of the way the head of our household and his cohorts had slaughtered everyone except the tiniest of their children. . . . That was it. I couldn’t listen to any more of the government man’s hateful lies. I turned and made my way down to the creek as fast as my pregnant belly would allow. When I got there, I bent over and splashed water on my face over and over again. I wanted the water to wash away the memory of what I had just heard. But it didn’t. My distress turned into dizziness, which made me fall on a jagged rock and bruise my unborn baby. John came back and comforted me after I gave birth to a stillborn son a month later.