Essential Heavyweight Map Tee

How It Ended
Rescuers brought the Martin handcart company into Salt Lake City on November 30, 1856. Of the 576 people in the company, at least 145 died on the way.

Who Sheltered Here
About 500 emigrants from the British Isles, the Martin company, camped in the cove from November 4 to 9, 1856, with the Hunt and Hodgetts wagon companies nearby. The cold wind and snow made it too dangerous to go on.

The Ground
The cove itself is Bureau of Land Management land. The Church bought access to it, and to Devil's Gate, from the owners of the neighboring Sun Ranch in 1996, and runs the Mormon Handcart Historic Site from the old ranch headquarters.

• October 5, 1856: At Sunday services in Salt Lake City, Brigham Young pleaded for help for the companies still on the plains. Two days later George D. Grant set out with the first relief wagons.
• October 19, 1856: The Martin company crossed the Platte for the last time, in the first winter storm. Six days later its rations were cut to 8 ounces for adults and 4 for children.
• November 4, 1856: The company left Devil's Gate in the morning, walked about two miles to the Sweetwater, and crossed that afternoon with the rescuers' help. By John Jaques's account the river was about two feet deep and 30 to 40 yards wide, with ice three or four inches thick. Women and children were carried over first. Wagons took the sick, and some men waded across pulling their own carts. That night they camped in the cove, half a mile past the river.
• November 9, 1856: The Hunt and Hodgetts companies had emptied their wagons at Fort Seminoe to make room for people who could no longer walk, and the wagons came to the cove to carry them on. Most of the handcarts were left behind.
• August 15, 1992: President Gordon B. Hinckley dedicated the Martin's Cove Monument. He was back on May 3, 1997 to dedicate the visitors' center at the Sun Ranch.

1. Devil's Gate is a gap in the rock made by the Sweetwater River, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Martin company camped near it and set out from there on the morning of November 4. A path from the cove trail reaches it, a mile there and back.
2. Fort Seminoe was the abandoned trading post where the wagon companies unloaded. A 2001 survey found the original site in a hayfield near today's visitors' center, and a rebuilt fort now stands close by. The marker shows the rebuilt fort; the sources don't say whether it sits on the exact original spot.
3. The Sweetwater crossing was about two miles west of the Devil's Gate camp and half a mile below the cove. No account pins down the exact ford, and the marker shows the stretch of river the accounts describe. Rusty Bowers's three life-size bronzes of rescuers carrying emigrants stand on a rise by the river, at the base of the cove. They were unveiled on the 150th anniversary of the crossing, November 4, 2006.
4. Martin's Cove sits about 6,100 feet up. Missionaries can lend a handcart for the first mile and a quarter of the trail, and a round trip to the upper cove is 5 miles. In summer, Church groups come here to reenact the trek.

• The old story says three 18-year-olds carried nearly the whole company across the Sweetwater. In BYU Studies in 2006, historian Chad M. Orton showed that at least 18 rescuers can be placed at the river that day. Of the five whose ages he gives, none was 18. George W. Grant was 16, David P. Kimball and Ira Nebeker were 17, Stephen Taylor was 20 and C. Allen Huntington was 24. Wagons took many, some people waded, and the rescuers carried what Orton calls "only a portion of the company." The Church's history topic on the handcart companies now says the popular account "appears to have been embellished."
• When the cove camp broke up, Salt Lake City was still about 330 miles off. The rescuers had already come about 380 miles from the valley to reach them, and the rest of the journey took three weeks.