God Made Me Do It -- Devil's Gate

Once more, who knew ... perhaps attending private Catholic schools for the last 10 years of my education kept me from being exposed to the history and tenets of the Latter Day Saints, but, I mean, I did take comparative religions -- even if taught by a Jesuit.

Devil's Gate is subtitled "The Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy." Apparently in a mid-19th century cost cutting measure, Brigham Young decided his new recruits, coming basically from the British Isles and Scandinavia, ought to drag or push their measly 17 pounds of belongs using hand carts when traveling from Iowa to Utah instead of going in a covered wagon caravan. The tragedy entails two outings that started out too late in the year and encountered blizzards in the final days of the journey, long after the food had been rationed down to less than a half a pound of flour a day. Hundreds died; others "lost their faith" or either turned back or stayed at frontier outposts.

Like The Monster of Florence, the tragedy of the Devil's Gate was not the starvation and inclement weather, but the crime devolving from the rigidity and negligence of the elders of the Church.

The book is tedious and written in a dry, un-engaging style. If anyone is still interested, read from page 284 on, the last chapter and a half. All the revisionist versus "real" history is recapped (very redundantly) in the last 50 pages. I marked a couple of passages to quote, but now think better on it. Essentially, the author is searching to understand why the travelers put up with the suffering for the greater goodness of God's will. It is not a sympathetic description of the religion, its founders and followers, or the motivation of the principal and minor characters. It is interesting to see how deep the roots of blind adherence to religious fanatics eventfully plays out in the contemporary scandals of child abuse through forced marriages.

Nor is there a good sense of the importance of place ... unless that "place" is not Salt Lake City, but the eternal reward of heaven.

Since I have a stack of Western States books, I started The Worst Hard Time about the Dust Bowl written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author. I can reaffirm that no matter how depressing the topic, a skillful writer can make the reading fly by ... I cannot say that about Utah.