We Have Come to Help You

Cedar Valley News
July 29, 2026
We Have Come to Help You
By Lars Olson

In the summer of eighteen fifty-six, a man named Levi Savage stood up in a meeting at Florence, Nebraska, and said the unpopular thing.

He was no stranger to hard country, just home from four years as a missionary, halfway around the world and back. He looked at the two companies about to start west, the Willie and the Martin, and saw what they were. Hundreds of people, many of them old, many of them women with small children, about to walk thirteen hundred miles pulling everything they owned in carts of green, unseasoned wood. And he saw the calendar. It was too late in the year, and he said so, plainly, in front of everyone.

They voted him down.

Savage said the other thing, the one I cannot stop turning in my head. Since they were going forward, he told them, he would go too. He would work with them, and suffer with them, and if it came to it, he would die with them. Then he picked up a cart and went. A captain later wrote it down: Savage, the man they had censured for telling the truth, was the best help the company had.

Now here is the wood.

I am a hardware man, and I know what green lumber does. Cut a board before it has dried, and it keeps drying after you build with it, shrinking, checking, opening every joint you drove tight. On the dry plains the wheels went out of round, and the carts began to fail, a little more each day; the repairs ate the daylight, and the daylight ran out into an early snow.

What it cost, a survivor named John Chislett wrote plainer than I could. Many a father, he said, pulled his cart with his little children riding on it, until the day before he died. Picture the arithmetic. A man too weak to walk, still walking, because the small faces in the cart cannot pull it and there is no one else. He does it one more day, and one more, until the morning he does not wake. Around two hundred and fifty never reached the valley.

But the truer part of the story is what came the other way.

When word reached Salt Lake the companies were down, men loaded wagons and drove east into the same storm which was killing the pioneers. They reached the Martin company at the Sweetwater, a river forty feet wide and running with ice. Think what it takes to stop a person there. These were people who had buried their own along the trail and kept walking. And they stood on the bank and could not make their legs carry them in. And a handful of young men from the rescue waded in and carried them across. Not the whole company, the way the story sometimes grows in the telling. Some waded on their own frozen feet, and some rode across in the wagons. But the ones who had nothing left, those young men carried, back and forth, until it was done. When a woman tried to thank one of them, he waved her off. We have come to help you, he said.

And here is what the bishop in me holds onto. Some of the people carried out of the snow spent the rest of their lives loading wagons for whoever was down next. They had felt the arms close around them at the river. They knew the worth of it.

On the far side of Pioneer Day, I keep thinking of two men.

One is Levi Savage, who did the work honestly, told the truth about it, was overruled, and pulled the cart anyway to the end.

The other is the young man at the Sweetwater with somebody’s frozen weight in his arms and nothing to say but come on, we have got you.

You want to be both. Build your cart honestly, and say the plain true thing even when they vote you down. And when the cart breaks anyway, and it will, walk into the cold water and carry whoever cannot cross alone.

Build it right. And go back for the ones who could not.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Who told you the true thing when you did not want to hear it, or who waded in for you? Come and tell us. And if we get something wrong, tell us, and we will run the correction. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

Cedar Valley News is free, and it comes to your inbox every morning, six days a week. If this morning’s editorial was worth your time, please forward it to someone who would value it. And if someone forwarded it to you and you’d like your own each morning, just reply with the word “subscribe.”

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the town of Cedar Valley is fictional, the people named here are real. In eighteen fifty-six the Willie and Martin handcart companies set out for the Salt Lake Valley dangerously late, with many handcarts built of green, unseasoned wood after seasoned lumber ran short at Iowa City. Levi Savage, a returning missionary and sub-captain, warned at Florence the season was too late, was overruled, and went with the company anyway; a fellow captain later credited him as its best help. Survivor John Chislett recorded how many a father pulled his cart, with his little children on it, until the day before he died. Roughly two hundred and fifty pioneers died. At the ice-filled Sweetwater River, young men from the rescue party carried the weakest across, while others waded or crossed in wagons; historians, including Chad M. Orton in BYU Studies, note the popular tale of three teenagers carrying the entire company and dying of it is largely folklore, since the named rescuers lived long lives. Sources include BYU Studies, the Wyoming State Historical Society, and the historical record of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Start Your Publishing Journey with Expert Guidance.
Unlock Exclusive Tips, Trends, and Opportunities to Bringing Your Book to Market.

About Us

Kindly contact us if you've written a book, if you're writing a book, if you're thinking about writing a book, we can help!

Departments

My Account

Social Media

Payment

Publication Consultants Publication Consultants

Copyright 2023 powered by Publication Consultants All Rights Reserved.