As seen in the previous chapter, not even Pioneer Day celebrations are unambiguous markers of the “Mormonness” of a given community. This last chapter examines the usefulness of Pioneer Day, Mormon-related historical pageants, and LDS Temples in mapping the changes in Mormon human geography into the late twentieth century.
Local Knowledge and Traditional Mormon Regional Scholarship
Folklorist William A. Wilson tells a revealing story about a trip he took to Sanpete County, Utah to photograph buildings in Spring City. He went because many scholars and aficionados of Utah culture consider Sanpete County to be the idyllic heart of Mormon Country and consider Spring City to be the “best preserved” example of a nineteenth-century Mormon village1 and archetypal of [219] the patterns of settlement and material culture used to characterize the Mormon Culture Region. These patterns include such features as: the historic prevalence of Lombardy poplars2 brought by pioneers to line their straight grid-patterned streets that are aligned to the four compass points, loosely following Joseph Smith’s 1833 “Plat of the City of Zion”;3 a Cartesian-style numbering system for addresses;4 open irrigation ditches paralleling streets through town; few of the isolated homesteads common elsewhere in the rural West, but houses clustered in villages and set away from the street on individual large square lots that provide ample space for gardening;5 solid stone houses made from indigenous rock;6 improvisational “Mormon fences” made from barbed-wire strung across a piecemeal assemblage of boards, branches, and other found items;7 cemetery gravestones displaying symbols of Mormon afterlife beliefs such as temple [220] likenesses and handclasp motifs;8 the presence of “hay derricks”—large wooden lever-like devices peculiar to Mormon Country and used to stack hay for long-term storage in large piles outside in the cold, thin, dry Rocky Mountain air that is inconducive to mold.9
While photographing one Spring City street, a cottage occupant emerged to meet Dr. Wilson and “friendly-like” asked what he was up to. Wilson explained to the woman that he was taking photos to show his folklore class at Brigham Young University because her house was an excellent example of Utah’s vernacular architecture and an important part of the region’s distinctive cultural heritage. She replied aghast, “It is? I thought it was just my house!”10
This story underscores an important point about American regional studies made by folklorist William E. Lightfoot.11 Traditionally, regional studies practitioners often determine for themselves what will be considered the significant defining features of a region rather than questioning the “locals” about how they identify the cultural space in which they live, and what they regard as their own regional and sub-regional boundaries. Lightfoot’s argument is a permutation of the emic vs. etic debate about the validity of ethnographic data [221] and its interpretation. (Etic modes of analysis attempt to explain cultures using terms and concepts from outside that are developed to be universally applicable to many societies. Emic analysis attempt to utilize the terms and concepts available from within a specific culture itself to understand its workings.) Today, many fields with a foot in anthropological theory, including cultural geography, have come to regard both “local knowledge” as well as trained outsider interpretation as valuable and ultimately inseparable modes of analysis.12
The Mormon Culture Region—long understood to be one of the most distinctive in America—has been heretofore defined almost entirely in terms of material culture, human-shaped landscape features,13 and demographic concentration of Mormons.14 While these studies have been invaluable in an etic understanding of Mormon cultural geography, there are shortcomings to these criteria.
Material culture artifacts from the moment of their construction increasingly become less and less reflective of the central meaningful activities of a continually developing culture. This trend is countermanded by any reworking of the artifacts for ongoing use, and by any self-reflexive cultural nostalgia that emerges to give selective attention to any particular indigenous material culture [222] artifacts. This is somewhat the case in the Mormon Culture Region where Mormon scholars and regional inhabitants like William A. Wilson “recognize” certain Mormon regional features but not all the “regionals” do.
Relying on hay derricks and Lombardy poplars to define the boundaries of today’s Mormon Culture Region tends toward an antiquarianism that could possibly obfuscate more than illuminate Mormon Country’s current boundaries. Using demographic data poses certain problems as well. The West’s tendency toward large counties and Mormons’ tendency to be distributed unevenly within county boundaries can lead to misleading depictions of the Mormon cultural region. For example, Apache and Navajo County in Eastern Arizona extend from the northernmost part of the state well into the south. North eastern Arizona is by no stretch of the imagination primarily part of the Mormon Culture Region. It belongs to two regional cultures who have made an even more unique and distinctive cultural impress onto the landscape—the Navajos and Hopis. Between the Navajo Nation of northeastern Arizona and the Apache reservations of central eastern Arizona lies the Mormon settlements along the Little Colorado River—the largest island of Mormon culture not contiguous with the main body of the Mormon Culture Region (MCR). Because Apache and Navajo counties cross-cut these Mormon and Native American regions, maps of Mormon Country that rely on county-based demographics imprecisely suggest that most of eastern Arizona is uniformly 10–50 percent Mormon, while in fact northeast Arizona is hardly Mormon at all and central east Arizona is very Mormon indeed.
A remedy to the problems inherent in defining regions through material culture or demographics is to investigate indicators of an emic regional awareness. [223] As of yet, no map of the Mormon Culture Region has been proposed that uses regional self-identification by actual inhabitants, or the presence of ongoing Mormon-marked cultural activity to help delineate its boundaries. This chapter attempts to remedy this situation.
The Maps
The following maps suggest several new views of the American West’s Mormon Culture Region focusing on two overlooked criteria that indicate a local “regional consciousness:” (1) the extent of the presence in Western towns of civic Mormon Pioneer Day Celebrations that claim the public space of Main Street—as opposed to ones held in the private space of LDS-owned meeting houses or parks, which I did not count, and (2) the local conceptions of people throughout the West of whether or not they live in “Mormon Country.” This information was gleaned during the telephone survey described in chapter five. The resultant map of the Mormon Culture Region shows general similarity, but also some interesting variations, to the outlines proposed by geographers such as D. W. Meinig, Ben Bennion, and others.
Map 1 shows the seminal Mormon Culture Region map first proposed by D. W. Meinig in 1965. The concentric lines display his proposed core, domain, and sphere of Mormon cultural influence in the West.
According to Meinig’s definitions, the core, despite its significant Gentile minority, is the urban center of Utah Mormondom. Today most Utahns live in Meinig’s core and Salt Lake City is the center of regional financial and governmental power as well as the LDS Church’s ecclesiastical authority. [224]
The domain, while rural and much less populous, is the Mormon “heartland” containing a much smaller Gentile minority both proportionally and in absolute numbers. The domain is characterized by the human landscape features described in the introduction to this chapter.
The sphere suggests an area of lesser LDS influence and includes concentrated outposts of Mormon culture as well as rural and urban areas where Mormons are a significant minority. The problems with relying on county-based demographics are most evident in the sphere as suggested by Meinig. Its chief drawback as a concept is its lack of discreteness; as is evident in Eastern Arizona.
Map 2 displays the location of all the communities that held a civic Pioneer Day celebration sometime between 1990 and 1995.
Map 3 shows the location of Mormon-related historical pageants. Like Pioneer Day historical pageants indicate a living sense of Mormon identity linked to a specific locale. Some pageants are annual and some emerge once and disappear. This map shows all of the pageants held in 1996, which was Utah’s centennial year. Therefore, this map may over-emphasize Utah by highlighting some one-time Utah centennial events.
Map 4 proposes a shape for the late 1990s Mormon culture region using a combination of (1) the presence of civic Pioneer Day celebrations and Mormon-related historical pageants, (2) telephone survey responses about local perceptions [225] of dwelling in “Mormon Country,” and to a lesser extent, (3) demographic data,15 and (4) historical information about known areas of Mormon colonization.16
This map retains Meinig’s terminology of domain and sphere but proposes the following alternate meanings. The domain includes areas of contiguous Mormon locales that entertain a consciousness of being “Mormon Country” and are predominantly Mormon demographically. (These areas turned out for the most part to be the legacy of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mormon colonization projects.) I did not make the presence of relics of Mormon pioneer material culture and human-shaped landscape criteria for this evaluation, though my informants may have in their own determinations.
The sphere includes areas that are sparsely settled; are more culturally diverse but where LDS are still the largest, if not the majority, religion; are strongly influenced by another overlapping cultural region (the Hispanos in Colorado’s San Luis Valley for example); and / or the area has somewhat of a Mormon identity for historical reasons, but the locals express uncertainty or difference of opinion as to whether their locale is Mormon.
Areas of minimal or no habitation, or distinctly of a different cultural region (Navajo country in north eastern Arizona for example), or of a fully heterogeneous population were all excluded from the Mormon Culture Region that this map suggests. [226]
Some recent maps of Mormonism’s North American cultural footprint stress the emergence of significant LDS urban and suburban minority populations particularly in the South and on the West Coast. They also point out the increasing but still minority presence of rural Mormons spreading outward from the traditional Mormon Cultural Region (MCR).17 Map 4 seeks to display the boundaries of “Mormon Country” as it is understood by those who live there. I discovered no evidence that people who actually live in recently-designated MCR sphere areas such as far western and southwestern Colorado and far eastern Oregon considered their locale to be part of the MCR despite growing double digit percentages of LDS people in these areas.18
Some determinations in creating this map were easy. The boundary between Utah and Colorado clearly separates “Mormon Country” from an area with no Mormon consciousness. Some determinations were difficult. Much of eastern Idaho is over 90 percent Mormon while LDS are in the minority in western Idaho. The geographic transition from one side of the state to the other proved to be complex and difficult to determine.
Maps 5, 6, and 7: A full examination of the question of whether the growing metropolitan Mormon minorities in some cities consider themselves part of “emerging Mormon centers”19 goes beyond the scope of this study. However, [227] the distribution of LDS temples world-wide suggests a growing LDS international geographic consciousness. Only Latter-day Saints in good standing may enter temples once dedicated. There they enter sacred time and spaces to receive ordinances to prepare them for the privileges and responsibilities of the most exalted realms of the afterlife. Mormons believe that only in temples can couples have their marriages sealed to last for eternity and only in temples can the vicarious salvific ordinances for the dead, such as baptism, be carried out. Through temple ceremonies Mormons believe that they will be bonded in a great chain of familial relationship with their ancestors. For “ethnic” Mormons these are the very pioneer ancestors they honor on Pioneer Day.
For Latter-day Saints, temple work is the most serious and holy form of worship. It is comparable in significance and symbolic potency to the Hajj for Muslims. Mormons who live, or learn that they will soon live, within easy traveling distance of a temple feel as if they “have arrived” and regard a temple as an indicator of a healthy Church community that has achieved a “critical mass.”20
In their performances of religious identity and their connections to the broad historical flow of their faith, Latter-day Saints exist in creative tension [228] between a pole of romantic nostalgia for past pioneer times and a pole of enthusiasm for the Church’s current growth, progress, and internationalization. As is the case in Pioneer Day celebrations, temple worship transports participants back to a sacred time and place in the Mormon conception of world history through recapitulative reenactment. Pioneer Day relives the nineteenth-century Exodus, while the temple relives the story of Adam and Eve and the creation of the world.
Even more than civic Pioneer Day celebrations, temple worship is an ongoing symbolic activity that signifies being a Latter-day Saint. Most of the over eighty civic-Pioneer Day celebrations take place in rural communities in the Intermountain West, and their number has been relatively stable since the end of the Mormon colonization enterprise. Conversely, the overwhelming majority of LDS temples are not found in rural areas nor the Intermountain West and their numbers are exploding worldwide. Since the Church carefully selects temple sites to efficiently serve the most Latter-day Saints possible, temple distribution indicates a new non-regional, non-rural Mormon cultural footprint.21 Even in the international distribution of temples, one sees the lingering importance of the MCR into the late twentieth century.
Map 5 displays the location of all of the LDS temples in the West in 1997—including those under construction and recently announced.
Map 6 displays the location of all of the LDS temples in North America in 1997—including those under construction and recently announced. [229]
Maps 7 through 13 show the spread of LDS temples over the world representing the successes of the “modern pioneers” of the twentieth-century Church. In 1900, there were only four temples, none outside of Utah. In 1950, all of the Church’s eight temples were still located in historically “Mormon towns” in the West and Hawaii. By the end of 1980, the Church had built four temples in the Mormon “ethnic Diaspora” cities of Los Angeles (1956), Oakland (1964), Washington, D.C. (1974)—the nation’s capital was chosen for symbolic reasons as well—and Seattle (1980). Also, signs of an international church were beginning to emerge with temples in Switzerland (1955), New Zealand (1958), London (1958), Brazil (1978), and Tokyo (1980).22
In the 17 years between 1980 and 1997, the number of temples more than tripled from 19 to 66. In 1997, over half of the 66 completed or announced LDS temples were outside of the United States. While Utah’s number of temples has increased to ten, and the traditional MCR is still obviously the nexus of worldwide Mormondom, the international character of late twentieth-century Latter-day Saint religion is clear.
Map 7 displays the location of all of the LDS temples in the world in 1900.
Map 8 displays the location of all of the LDS temples in the world in 1950.
Map 9 displays the location of all of the LDS temples in the world in 1960. [230]
Map 10 displays the location of all of the LDS temples in the world in 1980.
Map 11 displays the location of all of the LDS temples in the world in 1985.
Map 12 displays the location of all of the LDS temples in the world in 1990.
Map 13 displays the location of all of the LDS temples in the world in 1997—including those under construction and recently announced. [231]
Map 1. The Mormon Culture Region map proposed in “The Mormon Culture Region: Strategies and Patterns in the Geography of the American West, 1847–1964,” by D. W. Meinig in Annals of the Association of American Geographers 55 (June 1965), 191–220. [232]
Map 2. Communities that held July 24th Pioneer Day parades between 1990 and 1995. [233]
Map 3. Map of Mormon-related historical pageants in 1996—Utah’s centennial year. [234]
Key for Map 3. 1996 Mormon-related Historical Pageants.
(1) “America’s Witness for Christ” Hill Cumorah, New York
(11) “Castle Valley Pageant” Castle Valley, Utah (rotates between Castle Dale, Emery, and Ferron)
(12) “Chief Kanosh Pageant” Fillmore, Utah
(13) “UTAH!” Tuacahn Amphitheater, near St. George, Utah
(14) “Land of Our Destiny” Orderville, Utah
(15) “Jesus the Christ” Arizona Temple, Mesa, Arizona [235]
Map 4. Late 1990s Mormon culture region as defined by this dissertation’s 1995 survey results. The inner lines indicate domain and outer lines indicate the sphere. [236]
Map 5. Western Latter-day Saint temples completed, under construction, and announced as of 1997. [237]
Map 6. North American Latter-day Saint temples completed, under construction, and announced as of 1997. [238]
Map 7. World-wide LDS temples in 1900. [239]
Map 8. World-wide LDS temples in 1950. [240]
Map 9. World-wide LDS temples in 1960. [241]
Map 10. World-wide LDS temples in 1980. [242]
Map 11. World-wide LDS temples in 1985. [243]
Map 12. World-wide LDS temples in 1990. [244]
Map 13. World-wide LDS temples completed, under construction, and announced as of 1997. [245]
Conclusions and Further Directions
Early on in the telephone interviewing and fieldwork process, like William A. Wilson, I realized that I read the Western cultural landscape differently than my informants. The idea of a Mormon Culture Region was only marginally salient to the people with whom I talked. Their geographic identity was tied to a much smaller local community, its people and its history. Their religious identity, to the extent that it was geographic, bound them to local ecclesiastical units and to an excitement about a newly international worldwide Mormondom. Being from Utah, Idaho, or Nevada evoked more totemistic sentiment from people than being from “Mormon Country.”
Civic Pioneer Day historical programs almost always deal with very local history. The parades honor local beauty queens and local rodeo heroes. A focus on state- or region-wide history rears its head only in the Salt Lake City capital celebration. No one volunteered the interpretation that individual civic Pioneer Day celebrations constituted metonyms for the place of pioneers in the Mormon West of the imagination or that these celebrations maintained a living Mormon regional culture. However, many locals agreed with my interpretation along these lines. Perhaps this is where etic cultural analysis shows its greatest value in unearthing meanings not explicitly stated but recognized and understood when uncovered.
Even though they usually did not see themselves as part a greater cultural region, many people understood their own immediate locale, at least, to be historically and culturally very much “Mormon Country.” The “Greater Mormon Country” of geographers remains an etic construct primarily of interest to [246] scholars. I uncovered little sense of regional identity let alone chauvinism among those who lived in it. The Mormon Culture Region does not seem to contain the seeds of a Quebec-style separatism. There is not even a tongue-in-cheek “Deseret shall Rise Again” popular sentiment similar to the South’s fading feelings along these lines. Mormonism’s world-wide expansion has taken the place of The Gathering in Mormons’ conception of their earthly kingdom. In the late twentieth century, the Mormon Culture Region is an historical relic of an abandoned Church policy of Gathering.
Even though this exercise did not uncover much evidence of a “grass-roots” self-conscious regional identification along the lines recognized by geographers, local community “Mormonness” emerged very clearly as a living salient concept. Spatially connecting these emic Mormon local identities provides an etic map of a Western Mormon space to compare to traditional scholarly understandings of the Mormon Culture Region.
The self-identified Mormon Country of the late 1990s displays generally the same geographic parameters as the settlement patterns of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Mormon agricultural colonization efforts. A few exceptions to this rule include (1) some migratory extension further west and north in Idaho; (2) the retreat of Gentiles from the former railroad town of Corinne, Utah, and its take over by LDS farmers. (Corinne still does not have a civic Pioneer Day celebration); and (3) the Gentile demographic takeover of Moab. By using local responses, the MCR as seen in Map 3 is less extensive and more discrete than the outline proposed by Meinig in Map 1. [247]
But what of the geographic consciousness of the international Church? Convert Mormon growth worldwide has taken place largely in suburban and urban environments. The majority of Mormons through conversion and migration have become “citified” following demographic shifts in America and much of the world. The traditional Mormon Culture Region has remained stable in shape and predominantly rural except for the geographically small Wasatch front area which still constitutes the only areas where Mormons are a non-rural majority. With few exceptions, Civic Pioneer Days seem locked into the traditional Mormon Culture Region and have not tried to claim the public space of non-Mormon settled towns—however “Mormonized” they may have become in recent years.
On the other hand, the proliferation of temples signifies the emergence of an international LDS consciousness, and of important Mormon minorities in specific urban centers as seen in Maps 5, 6, and 7–13. While these maps reflect actual LDS geographic distribution, Map 2 of historical pageants also reflects the landscape of the Mormon historical imagination and shows the symbolic reclaiming by Mormons of locales they abandoned during nineteenth-century persecutions.
Unlike early Christianity in Europe and Islam in Arabia and Indonesia, Latter-day Saint Christianity has not grown in the United States through mass conversion of whole geographic areas. While the model of emergent urban minorities is the predominant mode for LDS growth worldwide,23 a new kind of Mormon Culture Region is emerging in a few places. [248]
In the latter half of the twentieth century, mostly Pentecostal but also Jehovah’s Witness and Latter-day Saint, American-fostered Christian groups have spread rapidly through Latin America. Charismatic Evangelicals have had the most success in some countries such as Guatemala, which may be, by some reckonings, no longer predominantly Catholic countries. Since the 1950s Mormonism has experienced its most phenomenal growth in Latin America. Spanish will soon be the mother tongue of most Mormons. As a result of this growth, there are a smattering of almost fully LDS towns in Latin America, particularly in the Yucatan and Chile.
Some of the emergent “islands” of this new variety of predominantly Mormon cultural area are quite literally islands. Several small islands in the South Pacific, where Mormons have been proselytizing since the 1850s, are inhabited exclusively by Mormons. The island nations of Western Samoa and Tonga are a still-growing 25 percent LDS and 40 percent LDS, respectively.24 These islands’ human geography feature contiguous, primarily LDS villages. Certain areas of the South Pacific seem to be experiencing the first instance of total cultural conversion to Mormonism.
No research into the geography of emergent international Mormon cultural areas has yet appeared. Future maps of the Mormon Culture Region will have to include places in the Pacific and Latin America. The over 90 percent LDS town of Laie, Hawaii, is the first of these “new Mormon cultural areas” outside of the North American Mountain West. Located on the northern shore of Oahu, Laie is unique [249] in being a former official Gathering site for Pacific Mormons until the early 1900s. Laie is home to the first LDS temple outside of Utah and Brigham Young University’s only extension school. Its six thousand residents are virtually all LDS and display not only the extraordinary ethnic diversity of Hawaii, but Polynesian Mormons from all over the Pacific still gather in Laie to settle, go to BYU–Hawaii, and / or work at the Church’s tourist-oriented Polynesian Cultural Center.
On July 24th, Laie celebrates Mormondom’s most unique civic-sponsored Pioneer Day celebration. Called “Laie Day,” it has little to do with covered wagons and sun bonnets but a lot to do with local Hawaiian and pan-Polynesian cultural identity and the faith that binds them together. While not a celebration of Utah pioneers, Laie Day is a celebration of Mormon identity. LDS wards organize religiously-themed floats for the parade, and individuals dress up as famous figures in the LDS Church’s history in the Pacific. As in the Mountain West, feasting forms a central aspect of Laie’s Pioneer Day activity. Instead of the pot-lucks and barbecues of Western Pioneer Day celebrations, Laie residents of Tongan and Samoan decent head into the forest to hunt for wild pigs to bake underground in traditional “Imu” parties. Or the village might turn out for a “Hukilau”—a Hawaiian tradition where a boat lays out a net into the ocean extending as a half-circle from the beach. Everybody then takes hold of a spot along a section of the net and walks toward the beach scooping up fish that are then grilled for lunch.25[250]
This final chapter attempted to provide some new ways of looking at Mormon cultural geography using regional self awareness and the presence of identity-enacting rituals. Civic Pioneer Day celebrations suggest that the Mormon culture region suggested by American regional geographers endures, in essentially the same shape established by nineteenth-century colonizers, through ongoing late-twentieth-century human activity. The explosion of Latter-day Saint temples worldwide indicates the shape of the emergent Mormon global geographic footprint with its deepest impression still in Mormon Country.
A full investigation of syncretic Pioneer Days and other LDS religiously-inspired public events in these new Mormon culture areas awaits a researcher. How the increasing numbers of Latter-day Saints in these areas respond to the celebratory potential of Pioneer Day will in large part determine the fate of the pioneers of Mormon popular historical expression in the worldwide Mormondom of the future. [251]
Notes
1. Spring City has a special place in the popular imagination of nostalgic Utah Mormons. Since the time of Wilson’s visit, Spring City has become a bucolic “escape village” for Utah artists who form a large part of the village’s population and perpetuate the village’s mystique by enforcing strict building codes to maintain its nineteenth-century look. BYU English professor Edward Geary points out that the pioneer towns of Spring City and Scipio today have become “self-conscious museum pieces” of the mythic past of pioneer heritage that are populated by artists, nostalgic retirees, and yuppies pining for a long-gone bucolic lifestyle. These “new rural Mormons” have created less of an authentic continuation of the pioneer lifestyle (less so than the actual, up-dated continuations of agricultural life lived by many contemporary rural Utahns) than they have made these towns pickled theme parks. Edward Geary, “For the Strength of the Hills: Imagining Mormon Country,” in After 150 Years: The Latter-day Saints in Sesquicentennial Perspective, eds. Thomas G. Alexander and Jessie L. Embry (Provo: Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, 1983), 89. Spring City: A Guide to Homes and History (Spring City: Friends of Historic Spring City, no publication date).
2. Wallace Stegner, Mormon Country (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1942), 21–22.
4. The primary north/south street is typically State Street and the primary east/west street is typically Main Street. Other significant streets are numbered in accordance to their relationship to the primary north/south and east/west streets: 100 North, 200 North , etc., 100 East, 200 East, etc. (Streets are written as 100, 200, etc., but spoken as “first,” “second,” etc.) A typical building address might read 148 West 400 South (the building being on 400 South between 100 West and 200 West) or 667 East Main Street (the building being on Main Street between 600 East and 700 East). The presence of this system is a sure sign of a town’s settlement by Mormons. Maps are rarely needed to find an address in areas of Mormon towns retaining this system.
5. Richard Jackson and Robert L. Layton, “The Mormon Village: Analysis of a Settlement Type,” The Professional Geographer 28 (1976): 136–41.
6. Thomas Carter, “Traditional Design in an Industrial Age: Vernacular Domestic Architecture in Victorian Utah,” Journal of American Folklore 104 (1991): 419–42.
7. Mark P. Leone, “Archeology as the Science of Technology: Mormon Town Plans and Fences” in Research and Theory in Current Archeology, ed. Charles L. Redman (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1973), 125–50.
8. George H. Shoemaker, “Symbolic Consideration in Nineteenth Century Tombstone Art in Utah,” Material Culture 20 (summer/fall 1988): 19–26.
9. Austin E. Fife and James M. Fife, “Hay Derricks of the Great Basin and Upper Snake River Valley,” in Austin E. Fife, Exploring Western Americana, ed. Alta M. Fife (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 141–58.
10. William A. Wilson, interview by author, November 1995.
11. William Lightfoot, “Regional Folkloristics,” in Handbook of American Folklore, ed. Richard M. Dorson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 183–93.
13. Wayne L. Wahlquist, “Review of Mormon Settlement Literature,” Utah Historical Quarterly 45 (winter 1977): 4–21. Lowell C. Bennion, “Meinig’s ‘Mormon Culture Region’ Revisited,” Historical Geography 24, no. 1 & 2, (1995): 22–33.
14. Lowell C. Bennion, “Saints of the Western States (1990),” in Historical Atlas of Mormonism, eds. S. Kent Brown, Donald Q. Cannon, and Richard H. Jackson (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 128–29.
16. Wayne L. Wahlquist, “Mormon Expansion,” in Atlas of Utah, 90–93.
17. See Klaus D. Gurgel, “Churches and Church Membership Patterns,” in Atlas of Utah, 140–49. For a more recent treatment see Bennion, “Meinig’s ‘Mormon Culture Region’ Revisited,” 22–33.
18. Bennion, “Saints of the Western States,” 128–29.
19. Klaus Gurgel optimistically suggests “emerging Mormon centers” in all of the West Coast metropolitan areas as well as Reno, Spokane/Cour d’Alene, Denver, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Washington, D.C., Columbia, and Atlanta. Gurgel, “Churches and Church Membership Patterns.”
20. As suggested by the maps shown here, even though Church growth began to skyrocket in the 1960s, the rate of temple building did not follow suit until the 1980s. This represents the results of an increased focus by Church leaders on temple attendance as a defining feature of Latter-day Saint religiosity. Before, Mormons regarded temple attendance primarily as a service to the dead. Recently the meaning of temple worship has shifted to include its spiritual benefits for living attenders as well. Latter-day Saints before the 1980s most likely referred to temple attendance as “temple work.” Now, they are likely to refer to it as “temple worship” as well. This late-twentieth-century shift from observer- (the dead) to participant- (the patrons) centered temple ceremonies is an inverse parallel to nineteenth-century Pioneer Day’s participant- to observer-centered shift from procession to parade.
21. Brad Westwood, “Houses of the Lord,” in The Ensign of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 27 (June 1997): 9–17.
23. This is not by accident, but the Church has focused its proselytizing efforts in larger cities because it has found more success there. Jan Shipps, interview by author, May 1997.
24.Deseret News 1999–2000 Church Almanac (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1998), 395, 408.
25. Joni Spurrier, interview by author, December 1997. Mike Smith, interview by author, July 1997. Randall Allred, interview by author, December 1997.
Joni Spurrier is an ethnic Hawaiian student from Laie studying at Brigham Young University, Provo. Mike Smith is a “haole” Laie Hawaiian from birth in graduate school in linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. Randall Allred is a BYU–Hawaii English professor on exchange at BYU in Provo during the 1997–98 school year. The reminiscences of these three informants helped flesh out this portrait of Laie’s Pioneer Day celebration.
