The passage of time . . . diminishes our appreciation . . . of the courage and steadfastness that characterized our pioneer progenitors. It is an occasion like this that wipes the dust from our memory pictures.
(Mack Larson’s 1993 Pioneer Day speech in Snowflake, Arizona.)
Each local Pioneer Day celebration is a metonym for the pioneer trope in Mormon popular imagination. Collectively, civic Pioneer Day celebrations help sustain the pioneers’ place in Mormons’ regional imagination. Despite some variation from town to town, some major recurring patterns emerge in comparing all of the civic Pioneer Day celebrations in the Mormon Culture Region. With a broad overview of information provided by fieldwork, former participant interviews, and a 1995 telephone interview, this chapter describes and interprets the patterns and meanings of civic Pioneer Day celebrations.
Key Words
To understand the cultural forms of July 24th celebrations in Mormon Country, some definitions of key words are in order. During her scholarly career, Beverly Stoeltje has refined the word festival into a useful keyword in folklore scholarship.1 In the specialized meaning Stoeltje suggests, festivals are events [128] rooted in community life and often linked to religious devotion. They “occur at calendrically regulated intervals and are public in nature, participatory in ethos, complex in structure, and multiple in voice, scene, and purpose.” Festivals consist of numerous events that are loosely related in purpose and cluster around one time and place. They provide various opportunities for performing and / or observing stylized yet structured devotional, competitive, and creative activity. Participants and observers select from the various festival events the ones to which they will lend their time, energy, attention, and bodily presence.
Some events, such as the parade in most Pioneer Day celebrations, or the sporting contests in others, form the festival’s central nexus and draw nearly all of the community as well as visitors from neighboring communities. Not everyone goes to all events and many occur at the same time. Many events atrophy and die over the years due to changing social mores and sparse attendance; new events may emerge and develop to take their place.
Stoeltje suggests that “festival” in the technical vocabulary of folklorists is an analytic term. Any events self-consciously marketed as “festivals,” particularly “folklife festivals,” are probably folklorismus rather than genuine cultural expressions emergent from folkgroup activity.2 More specific than a just a [129] “cultural event” and, as of yet, not a confabulated “festival of Mormon folklife” but an organic expression of community and historical consciousness, Pioneer Day is the festival of Mormon regional life. Nevertheless, throughout this study I use the term “celebration” more often than “festival” because “celebration” is the emic term most often employed self-referentially by those who practice the Pioneer Day tradition.
Besides “festival,” other key words useful in theorizing Pioneer Day include: ritual, celebration, parade, procession, and community. The following definitions are my proposals of how best to use these terms in relation to Pioneer Day celebrations.
Ritual: Ritual enjoys, or is burdened by, a vast corpus of philosophical analysis.3 In a narrow usage of the term, a ritual can be defined as a repeatable performance with supernatural efficacy in a religion’s theology. Something is brought about—wine is transubstantiated into the body of Christ through Roman Catholic Mass or sins are washed away by baptism. Often, other intense meaningful repeated activities that reflect cultural concerns beyond the immediate purview of the performed actions themselves can be seen as ritual in an expanded or metaphorical sense of the word. Pioneer Day events fall between these narrow [130] and broad definitions of ritual. While they express many religious sentiments and recall sacred history, Pioneer Day is theologically completely dispensable in Mormonism and thus not a Mormon sacred ritual such as baptism or the temple endowment ceremony.
Celebration: An oppositional meaning emerges from comparing ritual to celebration. Both are participatory, meaningful, framed activities but ritual is “for real” while celebration is “for fun.” Festival participants in going from event to event, and even within the events themselves, slide back and forth between, and derive energy from, both ritual and celebratory poles.4 Acting out in pioneer garb slides one toward the celebratory pole during Pioneer Day watermelon seed spitting contests and slides one toward the ritualistic pole while participating in a trek reenactment. The sporting events associated with Pioneer Day celebrations, however seriously they may be taken on their own merits, are celebratory in relationship to commemorating the pioneers. Flag raisings and public lectures on Pioneer Day, on the other hand, are rituals of Mormon civic religion.
Parade: In parades, groups of people move though important community space along a pre-determined path. The location of the path itself is important. The parade and its meanings claim the significant community public space, often main street, through occupation and imply that the symbols mobilized at the parade have a right to a central place in the community. Parade participants usually move in groups emblematic of something larger than themselves—an [131] occupational or recreational organization, an age group, or a social group. Sometimes these groups exist only for the purpose of parade participation, in which case they are likely to be more elaborate in their parade presence by constructing “floats”—a purposely ephemeral genre of cooperatively built mobile folk-sculpture. The values of the parade are often interpreted by community members to be expressions of not only the values of the parade organizers but the whole community as well.
Procession: “Parade” and “procession,” like “ritual” and “celebration,” can be seen as forming opposite poles on a spectrum distinguishing two similar things. Both processions and parades involve organized sequential movement of groups along pre-established paths, and both involve the fashioning and mobilizing of event-specific material culture. However, “processions” differ from parades in much the same way that rituals differ from celebrations. Parades tend to be more “for fun” and secular while processions are more “for real” and religious. More significantly, parades are observer-centered and exist for spectacle’s sake, while processions are participant-centered and exist for performance’s sake. Neither a parade nor a procession can exist without participants, but a parade requires observers and processions do not. Also, a procession’s movement often exists for a purpose or goal. Something, offerings and / or artifacts, are placed and / or collected by the marchers. For example, as mentioned in chapter two, the original 1849 Pioneer Day procession ended at the Salt Lake City Bowery where copies of the sacred documents of Americanism of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were presented to Brigham Young and the next phase of the ceremony continued. [132]
Over the past 150 years, organized movement though public space on Pioneer Day has shifted from being participant-focused to observer-focused and from existing primarily for devotion to existing primarily for entertainment. That Pioneer Day has undergone a desacralization process over the years is evident in the shift from the term “procession” (common in nineteenth-century accounts)5 to “parade” (the only viable term today) in describing the event. Also, the percentage of purely religious symbols and concepts mobilized in Pioneer Day processions/parades has declined in the wake of the increasingly secular self-conception of Utah.
Community: The telephone helps break down geographic data-collection barriers in this experiment in ethnography, but the loci of Pioneer Day celebration has changed little due to the rise of modern communications and transportation.6 Pioneer Day celebrations are still organic to local “communities” that are more often than not still isomorphic with towns and villages founded by Mormon colonizers in the nineteenth century.
As early as the 1920s, Howard W. Odum emphasized “community” as a key word in the study of “folk regional sociology.”7 Later, Robert Redfield examined community among Mexican peasants. He posited a “folk society” marked by a single culture, isolation, and intimate communication as a Weberian [133] ideal type on one end of a spectrum of sociological categorization.8 Modern urban city-scapes with high levels of cultural diversity, connection to the outside world, and complex, long distance communications media occupied the other end of the spectrum.
Twentieth-century rural villages in mono-cultural Mormon country frustrate Redfield’s spectrum. Rural Mormons enjoy satellite television, VCRs, fax machines, and Internet access even as they participate in face-to-face village harvest festivals whose roots extend back to the European Middle Ages. Denizens of the Mormon Culture Region are not alone in this way. Much the same could be said for rural Quebec, Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, Louisiana’s Cajun Country, or other distinctive North American cultural areas.
In the 1970s, folkloristics’ “folklife” movement used the concept of “community” to refocus folklorists’ specialized attention from just the music, just the material culture, or just the oral narratives of a group to analyzing the full range of a group’s expressive activity together as part of a whole lifestyle.9 Folklife scholars sought to distinguish their endeavors from the broader goals of anthropology. “Instead of studying all of a culture, folklife scholars concentrate on the particular ideas and behaviors that demonstrate localized social patterns which are connected to family, neighborhood, town, or region.”10 Since this study [134] does not seek to interpret the many aspects of Mormon culture shared with other rural, American, and world-wide peoples, it is an examination of one aspect of Mormon regional folklife.
In the 1990s, “community” still carries a stronger connotation of actual group cohesiveness and self-awareness than does the term “folkgroup”—a term used by today’s folklorists in the broadest possible manner as any set of at least two people bound by at least one thing in common.11 Festival performances designate, and help create and maintain, the “epicenter” of a community. On Pioneer Day in Mormon Country, villages present to themselves signs of the tastes, values, and folk historiographic beliefs that distinguish them as a people, and constitute the complexities of their regional and religious identity.
“Event Structures” in Pioneer Day Celebrations
Certain features common to civic Pioneer Day celebrations emerged from comparative fieldwork, interviews, and telephone surveys. The event structures described below were common enough to constitute the building blocks of a “normal form” for civic Pioneer Day celebrations. The concept of a “normal form” in folkloristics refers to instances of material and expressive culture that display the required elements to be evaluated, from within the culture in question, as a “standard” manifestation of the genre of folklore in question.12 [135]
A “normal form” rural Pioneer Day would have to occur on the week of July 24th and have a parade; some sort of competitive tournament(s) or games; and some opportunity for community feasting. These are the least common denominators of a Pioneer Day celebration in Mormon country. As long as they occur sometime during the week of July 24th, celebrations without one of these features may still be Pioneer Day celebrations but would be judged to be a variation from the standard variety. No value judgment is implied here. Indeed many Pioneer Day celebrating towns have a “gimmick” to make theirs stand out or more specifically reflect their local culture and history. A common Pioneer Day variation is for the town to put on some form of dramatic or musical entertainment.13
The events of a typical civic Pioneer Day celebration loosely follow the general categories of festival “event structure” proposed by Stoeltje—opening ceremony, ritual, drama and contest, the feast, dance and music, and concluding event.14
Pioneer Day opening events often include a community breakfast sponsored by the Lion’s Club, Boy Scouts of America, volunteer fire department, or another community service organization. Proceeds from the breakfast benefit the sponsoring organization which in turn aims to serve the town.15 In some cases, [136] the fire department runs their engines through town at dawn, sirens blaring, to wake the people for festivities.16 In some towns antique cannons are fired for the same purpose. Residents of Snowflake, Arizona use high explosives to launch an anvil high into the air to kick off their Pioneer Day festivities.17 A prayer service and a flag raising at the Church, court house, or Pioneer cemetery are also common. [137]
After these opening events, people begin to assemble along the parade route or ready their floats. Some will go to a formal ceremony honoring the pioneers. Designated speakers such as historical aficionados, town dignitaries, or especially youth being honored for some accomplishment, speak reverentially about the brave and noble deeds of their pioneering ancestors who fought Indians, tamed the wilderness, and lived in faith to bequeath to their descendants a legacy of greatness that we today must always keep in mind as we make choices about our future and the future of our community.18 Some towns have a tradition of having a special guest lecture by a native son or daughter of the town who left to “make it big” but has come back as part of one of the numerous family reunions held during the Pioneer Day Season.19 Late July in Mormon Country witnesses a great temporary backwash of the twentieth-century urbanization of Mormonism. Rural village populations swell with family reunion participants in an expression of Mormons’ well known emphasis on family togetherness.
Pioneer Day parades in Mormon country resemble the summer parades of any small town in America.20 In their parades, Mormon Americans put their own values and meaningful activities on display through their selection of parade [140] entries. Typical entries include farm implements, 4H livestock, historical re-creationists dressed as pioneers, antique and high performance cars, as well as vehicles and participants from the day’s sporting contest. In a celebration of American democracy and entrepreneurialism, the mayor and other dignitaries cruise by in convertibles provided by local car dealerships displaying the intermixed nature of celebrity, political office, commercialism, and political power.
Subdivisions within the community such as church congregations or service clubs often collaborate to construct floats built on a theme. Floats provide spectacle during a parade and draw attention to the float’s theme. To draw attention, floats are elevated and brightly ornamented and may be reused or refashioned from year to year. Floats commonly celebrate pioneer nostalgia with living dioramas of popular pioneer stereotypes. Any relic of a town’s pioneer past, such as period quilts or wagons, are prime candidates for transportation by a float in a Pioneer Day parade. Not only age and tradition are celebrated by Pioneer Day parades but also youth and the future, as is seen in another common float theme—local beauty pageant royalty. [141]
Business and enterprise are a major strand of society anywhere in America and many floats rely on corporate sponsorship for funding. Businesses such as agricultural equipment manufactures, sellers of hybrid seed grains, dairies, grocery stores, nursing homes, hunting supply shops, and automotive dealerships may sponsor floats that focus on their own services or they may simply provide financial assistance in exchange for advertising space on floats whose theme is not directly related to business enterprise.
The photographs on the following pages [not reproduced from the original] are a selection of representative participants in Fairview, Utah’s 1995 Pioneer Day Parade. Their presentation in relatively undigested format, except for captions, is intended to provide a sense of the flow of a whole a Pioneer Day parade in a medium-sized town in rural Mormon Country. A loose structure organizes the parade entries. A children’s parade serves as a prelude to the major parade which is led by a military honor guard. Local pageant royalty and city dignitaries follow. Then the parade continues with a variety of entries by local individuals, clubs, and businesses climaxing with a procession of cars to participate in the evenings’ demolition derby. [143]
After parades, the second most common and near-universal feature of Pioneer Day celebrations are an organized contest or group of contests. These range from professional rodeos in larger towns to kids’ balloon tosses and sack races in small hamlets. Rodeos and baseball tournaments are particularly common. With basketball courts in virtually every North American LDS chapel, it has come to be seen as the “Mormon sport.” However, it is baseball with its association with summer, its history as the most nostalgia-riven American game, and its long tradition of being played on Pioneer Day that make it the most common tournament game of choice. In Afton, Wyoming the Pioneer Day baseball tournament is the central focus of the celebration eclipsing even the parade.21 In the tiny hamlet of Flowell, Utah teenagers have kept alive a tradition of playing a dangerous kick-the-can game involving a large bonfire as their central celebratory contest. None of the parents feel like they can stop this traditional game since they participated themselves as teenagers, and so did their parents for as long as anyone can remember.22
Another common Pioneer Day activity is a special program for entertainment involving professional music (often for a community dance), cowboy poetry, dancing or clogging performers, or as is often the case, local melodrama by community theater groups. Throughout the late twentieth-century rural West community theater melodramas are a little studied but very vibrant folk tradition. In Mormon country melodramas are often performed in conjunction [152] with Pioneer Day celebrations. Beaver, Utah’s melodrama is one of, if not the, major event of that town’s Pioneer Day week. Often, theatrical performances have little direct relation to pioneering except that they play on “old time country nostalgia.” In 1995, Fairview actors performed “Hillbilly Wedding” and “Li’l Abner” in Spanish Fork.23 In Spring City, clergy of several faiths cooperated to stage a respectful yet tongue-in-cheek “Old Time Camp Meeting.”24
Some towns stage more serious theater on religious themes. Snowflake, Arizona recently launched a new event for the week of Pioneer Day—the play “Plates of Prophecy” about Joseph Smith’s discovery of the Golden Plates.25 Nearby Joseph City, Arizona also produces a devotional play on the history of the LDS Church in their town.26 In a more elaborate and more specifically Mormon dramatic tradition, some Mormon country towns host sweeping historical pageants that in some cases displace Pioneer Day altogether.27 Chapter seven discusses historical pageants and their geographic distribution relative to Pioneer Day celebrations in more depth. [153]
On any Pioneer Day in any town in the Mormon culture region, one is likely to encounter car shows, crafts fairs, traveling vendors, reenacted demonstrations of pioneer life, and occasionally carnival operations. At some point, usually near the end of Pioneer Day activities, a community dance, or several community dances are held. Often these will be “old tyme” in their affected style and employ professional musicians.
The most common way to close a Pioneer Day celebration is with a fireworks display that celebrates the Mormons’ achievement of freedom through their arrival in Utah. Much like July 4th fireworks displays, Pioneer Day fireworks shows take place in stadiums or open fields. In a few towns, the fireworks display receives special emphasis to become not only the final but the crowning event of the celebration.28
Ward Pioneer Day Celebrations Outside of the Mormon Culture Region
Non-civic Pioneer Day celebrations are not the focus of this chapter but their prevalence in the international Church and usefulness for comparison to the more elaborate whole-community civic celebrations of the Mormon Culture Region warrants at least a brief mention. I remember celebrating Pioneer Day in church units large and small in Dayton, Ohio; Lexington Park, Maryland; Sleaford, England; Ft. Walton Beach, Florida; Mesa, Arizona; and Rotterdam, The Netherlands. My experiences match observations made by Susan Tabor in [154] her ethnography and oral history of one year in the community life the Elkton, Maryland Ward.29 LDS ward-sponsored Pioneer Day celebrations in America resemble church socials of any other denomination in that they are opened and closed with prayer, held in or near the Church building, and focus on the social relations and recreation of a community of believers rather than their joint religious worship as is the case on Sunday meetings.
As Mormons brought their religion outside of the Mountain West through emigration and proselytizing, they also brought aspects of their culture’s harvest festival. Many wards hold special events such as camp outs, morning flag raising, barbecues, and / or pancake breakfasts. As in Utah, church services the week before Pioneer Day often focus on the heritage of faith bequeathed by the pioneers. In Elkton’s celebration, a children’s parade of junior pioneers with toy wagons made its way around the outside of the chapel. Signs on the side of church building marked the kids’ arrival in such pioneer trek landmarks as Nauvoo, Mt. Pisgah, Winter Quarters, Chimney Rock, and the Salt Lake Valley. The official LDS children’s hymnbook has no shortage of hymns for such occasions with songs such as “The Hand Cart Song,” “The Ox-cart Song,” and “Pioneer Children Sang as They Walked.”
Modern urban and suburban Pioneer Day celebrations outside Mormon country might treat ward members to demonstrations of pioneer life such as whittling, butter churning, quilting, or Dutch oven cooking by pioneer [155] aficionados. “Pioneer games” such as sack races and watermelon seed spitting contests are also common.
Some wards embrace “playing pioneer”; others have little use for it and do not see its relevance. In Holland in 1987, I observed a Pioneer Day celebration organized by the mostly American, and predominantly “Deseret Mormon,” contingent of 19 to 23 year old missionaries. Native Dutch Mormons participated with a bemused detached sort of enthusiasm, having a good time humoring the Americans in “their thing.” Were it not for American missionary initiative, it is likely that no Pioneer Day would have taken place at all.
In Siberia where pioneering resonates deeply in local history, Russian Mormons have taken pioneer reenactment to the point of building an authentic replica handcart based on plans from the 1850s and trekking across Russia to catch a ship to link up with the 1997 sesquicentennial reenactors on July 24th in Salt Lake City.30
Most wards in the United States have at least a few members whose genealogical roots extend through the Utah pioneers and many “non-ethnic” Mormons enjoy traditional Pioneer Day activities. This helps ensure that at least pared-down traditional forms of Pioneer Day celebration continue among Mormons in Elkton, Maryland and elsewhere. [156]
1. Beverly Stoeltje, “Festival,” in Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments: A Communications-Centered Handbook, ed. Richard Bauman (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 261–271. Beverly Stoeltje, “Festival in America,” in Handbook of American Folklore, ed. Richard Dorson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 239–246. On “keywords” in general see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Revised Edition (New York, Oxford University Press, 1983).
2. The results of, or propensity toward, conscious out-of-context appropriation and confabulation of “authentic” folk culture by popular media or for political purposes (often as a means of maintaining hegemony) by persons of no, or only pretended, organic relationship to the community is often called folklorismus. The term “fakelore” coined by Richard Dorson also applies especially to culture that frames itself as “folk” but has no genuine organic relationship to face-to-face community tradition. However, the border between “fakelore” and “folklore” is porous and blurry and the whole relevance of this distinction has increasingly been called into question. Perhaps the goal should not be to pass judgment and divide events between “genuine” and “spurious” but to understand and elucidate the cultural poetics behind using or ignoring a word like “festival” in promoting one’s event. See Alan Dundes, “The Fabrication of Fakelore,” in Folklore Matters (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 40–56.
3. Victor Turner was a founding scholar in ritual studies. See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969). Ronald L. Grimes provides an excellent bibliography and explores various directions ritual studies have taken in Ritual Criticism: Case Studies in Its Practice, Essays on Its Theory (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990). For a collection of case studies in ritual see Michael B. Aune and Valerie DeMarinis, eds., Religious and Social Ritual: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).
4. Roger D. Abrahams, “An American Vocabulary of Celebrations,” in Time out of Time: Essays on the Festival, ed. Allasandro Falassi (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 173–83.
5. Olsen, “Celebrating Cultural Identity.”
6. The major exception to this generalization is the Salt Lake Valley. See chapter seven.
7. Howard W. Odum, Folk, Region, and Society: Selected Papers, ed. Catherine Jocher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964).
8. Robert Redfield, The Little Community and Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
9. Don Yoder, ed., American Folklife (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1976).
10. John Michael Vlach, “The Concept of Community and Folklife Study,” in American Material Culture and Folklife, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), 63–76.
11. See Alan Dundes’s 1977 essay “Who Are the Folk?” reprinted in his Interpreting Folklore (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1980), 1–12.
12. For more on “normal form” see Robert A. Georges and Michael Owens Jones, Folkloristics: an Introduction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 127–132.
13. Municipalities that do this include Spring City, Monroe, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, Utah and St. Johns and Snowflake, Arizona.
14. Stoeltje, “Festival,” 264.
15. Almost every informant in every town less than 1000 people indicated having a community breakfast (telephone interviews, June 1995).
16. Spring City’s volunteer fire department is particularly enthusiastic about this tradition. Spring City telephone informant, interview by author, June 1995.
17. Snowflake, Arizona telephone informant, interview by author, July 1995. Blasting an anvil into the air is an old, almost vanished Independence Day tradition known to be practiced in Appalachia and elsewhere. See Emyl Jenkins, The Book of American Traditions: Stories, Customs, and Rites of Passage to Celebrate Our Cultural Heritage (New York: Crown Publishers, 1996). How it came to be practiced in Snowflake’s Pioneer Day celebration is undetermined. On the similarities between July 24th and July 4th, see chapter seven.
18. Mack Larson, “Pioneer Day July 24, 1993,” speech manuscript in author’s possession. Marilyn Larson, “July 24th Celebration . . . . . . . . . July 1993,” speech manuscript in author’s possession. Mack and Marilyn Larson, who now live in the greater Phoenix city of Mesa, Arizona, were invited guest speakers for Snowflake’s 1993 Pioneer Day Celebration.
19. Holden, Panguitch, and Orderville, Utah as well as Snowflake and Benson, Arizona telephone informants, interviews by author, June 1995.
20. For treatments of American festivals in general see Emyl Jenkins, The Book of American Traditions: Stories, Customs, and Rites of Passage to Celebrate our Cultural Heritage (New York: Crown Publishers, 1996).
21. Afton, Wyoming telephone informant, interview by author, June 1995.
22. Flowell, Utah telephone informant, interview by author, June 1995.
23. Beaver, Utah Pioneer Day organizer and telephone informant, interview by author, June 1995. Spanish Fork, Utah Pioneer Day organizer and telephone informant, interview by author, June 1995.
24. Spring City, Utah Pioneer Day organizer and telephone informant, interview by author, June 1995.
25. Snowflake, Arizona Pioneer Day organizer and telephone informant, interview by author, June 1995.
26. Joseph City, Arizona Pioneer Day organizer and telephone informant, interview by author, June 1995.
27. The most elaborate and well-attended pageant with over one hundred and fifty thousand spectators per season is held in Manti, Utah in San Pete County. Manti, Utah pageant organizer and telephone informant, interview by author, June 1995.
28. My informant in Weston, Idaho made a special effort to point out that while her town had a parade, the real show was the fireworks. Weston, Idaho telephone informant, interview by author, June 1995.
29. Susan Buhler Taber, Mormon Lives: A Year in the Elkton Ward (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 284–286.
30. Michael S. von Rosen, “Russian Handcart Reaches New York,” Church News, 28 June 1997, 3–7.
