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Handcarts to Zion. The History of a Unique Western Migration, 18561860, with Contemporary Journals, Accounts, Reports; and Rosters of the Members of the Handcart Companies. By LeRoy R. and Ann W. Hafen. Volume XIV The Far West and the Rockies Historical Series 1820-1875. (Glendale, Arthur H. Clark Company, 1960, 328 pp., $4.95) To the relatively fragmentary historical writings about the Mormon handcart pioneers of 1856-1860 has now been added an orderly compilation and organization of the more important data, contemporary testimony, and plain journals previously published. The authors, Dr. LeRoy R. Hafen and his wife Ann W. Hafen, of Provo, add this volume to their series of studies of the Far West and the Rockies. A personal love for the subject is revealed in the dedication to "our mother," Mary Ann Hafen, who as a child of six years trailed a handcart to Utah in 1860. The half million descendants of the three thousand handcart pioneers particularly will find a storehouse of information in the book's 313 pages of text. They contain background explanation of the vast numbers of European converts of the 1850's, the operation of the Perpetual Emigration Fund of the church which aided the worthy poor to travel to Utah, the particular hardships of 1855 in Utah occasioned by drought and grasshoppers which drained the fund and necessitated a cheaper method of transportation than wagons and teams, the details of trans-
