This group of men, women and children could not afford to ride in horse-drawn covered wagons. Instead, after a train trip to Iowa City, they began the trek to Salt Lake City pushing handcarts -- five people per 250-pound cart.

The many calamities that beset this group would make the plot of a grade-B movie: a delayed departure that eventually placed them at the mercy of winter weather for which they had inadequate clothing and bedding; a cattle stampede that left them with too few oxen to pull their commissary wagons and resulted in added burdens for the handcarts and an inability to use their milk and beef cattle for food because the animals were needed to haul the wagons; a failure to find the additional rations they had anticipated at Fort Laramie and, finally, before they could reach their destination, a snowstorm that trapped them in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming.

The pattern of mortality in this group was similar to that in the Donner party. "I found pretty much the same thing," Dr. Grayson said in an interview. "Although they were stuck for a much shorter time -- five weeks, and during three of those weeks they got help from Salt Lake City rescuers -- the death rate among the men was three times higher than among the women."

All told, 68 of the emigrants died of the cold and starvation -- 25 percent of the men and 8.5 percent of the women. But unlike the Donner party, Dr. Grayson found, death struck mostly older people. Mortality was highest among those over 40, he said, and in this older group the odds of a man dying were 10 times as high as they were for a woman. Among those under 40, the mortality ratio for men to women was 2 to 1.

Dr. Grayson's findings on the Willie Handcart Company will be published this summer in The Journal of Anthropological Research.

The anthropologist readily concedes that it is not just body size, body fat and fat distribution that favor female survival. "The men died because they were doing what they are biologically fit to do," Dr. Grayson said. "Characteristically, men take greater risks and do heavier work. The men in both parties did a lot of energy-requiring tasks -- hunting, cutting down trees, etc. -- which depleted their energy stores and put them at risk of an early death."

These differences, the anthropologist maintains, "are biologically -- not just culturally -- determined," adding: Men and women are built differently. Men's bodies are better designed to perform tasks that require strength, which uses energy." Furthermore, he added, men are more likely than women to take risks and to act aggressively, which puts them at greater risk of injury and death.

"Women, on the other hand, are designed to have children, and what adapts them to have kids enables them to deal better with deprivation," he concluded. Even though the women and young girls in the Willie Handcart Company did their share of pushing and pulling the carts and often also carried their young children, the female advantages in conserving body heat and energy fostered their survival, the anthropologist maintains.