Church and State

Managing Mormonism on the Mormon Trail

By Tom Rea, Wyofile, Guest Writer, 12-26-08

	Martin's Cove, where many Mormons died on their trek.

Among the most sacred Mormon sites anywhere is Martin’s Cove, a broad niche in the Sweetwater Rocks near Devil’s Gate in central Wyoming, where a sage-covered sand dune laps up into the granite slopes and boulders.

The wind blows most of the time. The rocks offer some shelter, and that’s why hundreds of converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints pulled up into the cove early in November 1856. They had pulled disintegrating handcarts 900 miles from Iowa City, yet still were 350 miles from the Salt Lake Valley. There had been a blizzard. They were starving and freezing, and many died at the cove. Many, many more died that month, all along the trail.

Mormon storytelling in later generations, however, concentrated on the dying at the cove. That storytelling, as much as the actual events of 1856, made this land holy.

So it’s not surprising that the LDS Church seized an opportunity in the late 1990s to acquire the historic Sun Ranch at Devil’s Gate, remodel the old ranch house into a museum and visitors’ center, and make the land a shrine to a Mormon story. The visitor’s center now draws 70,000 people per year.

Nor is it surprising that a Republican Mormon congressman from Utah led an effort five years later to sell nearby U.S. government land—the holiest land, right at Martin’s Cove—to the LDS church.

What did surprise then-House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Hansen, however, and perhaps the LDS Church itself, was the eruption of local opposition in Wyoming. What resulted was one of the most intense church-state conflicts of recent times.

Opposition among non-Mormon public-land users in Wyoming was particularly strong. Wyoming’s Republican Rep. Barbara Cubin, a member of Hansen’s committee, found herself torn between supporting her chairman and pleasing her constituents.

The conflict peaked in 2002, when Hansen’s bill passed the House but stalled in the Senate, where Wyoming’s late Republican Sen. Craig Thomas opposed the sale in part because he feared that American Indians would use it as precedent to lobby for the sale of Devils Tower and other sites they consider sacred.

A compromise lease was worked out the following year. But conflict continued through 2006, when a suit brought by the ACLU against the federal Bureau of Land Management over religious-freedom and public-access issues in the lease was finally settled.

At the same time, controversy arose over the BLM’s apparent failure to protect fragile public land 75 miles west of Martin’s Cove that had been overrun by handcart trekkers re-enacting the pioneers’ travails. Mormon church groups pulled handcarts, drove big support RVs, and even played sacred music along the trails over big loudspeakers drawn on trailers behind pickups.

The BLM since then has cut the number of permitted handcart trekkers on federal land by more than half, irritating some Mormons who feel their rights to enjoy public lands are being abridged, while more or less well satisfying at least one longtime public-lands advocate who once feared the establishment a Mormon empire along the historic trails.

Lately, federal and church officials have nothing but good words for each other over management issues. The BLM and the missionaries cooperate on strict training for trek leaders. And perhaps most important, the church has turned one of its new sites on private land 50 miles west of Martin’s Cove—called Sixth Crossing, near the Sweetwater Station Rest Area on U.S. Route 287-- into a well-managed venue for trekker overflow. Complete with campgrounds and a 10-mile trek loop, it accommodates tens of thousands of trekkers every summer and thereby cuts the trail traffic on public land.

The handcart treks have become a major youth program, led by local trek leaders and overseen by missionaries, most of whom are retired people and spend a single summer at the sites on the Sweetwater. Their leader reports to the church missionary department in Salt Lake City.

But the origins go back to the efforts of local Wyoming Mormons, members of the nearby Riverton stake, who just wanted to honor those pioneers who lost their lives on the road to Deseret, the Mormon Zion.

To read the rest of this story at Wyofile, click here.

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