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"The Operations of the Church Are Paralysed With Poverty"

The Salvation Missions of 1847-48

We probably shall remain in this place [Winter Quarters] until next May, if we should live so long and then start for the mountains. . . . I am also destitute of clothing. My old coat that I am now wearing is an old broad cloth . . . as to our cooking utensils we have one pot that we used up on our store, when we had one, one black kettle without a lid, . . . four or five old knives, [and] three old broken forks to eat with. As to earthen dishes we have none. We have four 3-pint tin basins which we brought with us from Massachusetts nearly rusted out so as to have holes in them, 3 or 4 tin pans, 2 or 3 tin plates, 3 britannia cups, one tin cup, one old tin coffee pot and [an] old tea pot. . . . I wish you would write me soon informing me what the prospect is of raising money for me. . . . We fell to the hands of the bishops and are still living on the means of others.1

So wrote a desperate Lyman Hinnman in the summer of 1847. And his condition was representative of hundreds of other families then living in Winter Quarters. Those who had gone ahead in the emigration camp were generally the better prepared and provisioned. For those waiting to follow, their uppermost question was simple: "Where will the money come from?" Even Brigham Young was forced to admit the painfully obvious: "The operations of the Church are paralysed with poverty."2

Little wonder, then, that the primary reason for the call for missionaries in November 1847, just after the return of the Twelve from the Salt Lake Valley, was to raise money-from anyone, anywhere.

"I wish that Andrew would send me all the money that he has collected of mine," wrote an anxious John A. Wolfe to his mother in New York in February 1847, "as I am going a long journey and I know not how much expense I may be to before I may again be settled upon a farm."3

Even the First Presidency was reduced to begging for help. "I am confined to my bed by sickness, and in debt," Willard Richards wrote David Hollister in the spring of 1848. "And I know of no one who has the means. I therefore send to [you], in the name of the Lord, for help, and this the more freely as I know you have the heart to do good . . . so that you can send me one thousand dollars, which will relieve me from my present encumbrances."4

The poverty alluded to by Hinnman was everywhere. "Our camp is almost universally destitute of sugar and all the comforts of life vested in groceries of any kind," admitted Brigham in a letter to Kane near the end of 1847.

Almost the entire sustenance of this great people consists in corn and garden vegetables, for our cattle have become few in number and our money expended, so that we cannot purchase pork. . . . We have had no raw material to manufacture; consequently, our clothing is worn and useless or threadbare and cold.