While Latter-day Saint religion is practiced all over the world, in the Mormon West, “ethnic” Mormon culture is expressed in its fullest and most complex forms. This section seeks to elucidate the many facets of one of those forms—the civic Pioneer Day celebrations that claim the public space of main street every July 24th in communities throughout the Intermountain West. With the reverencing of pioneers so much more developed in the Mormon Culture Region than in the rest of Mormondom,1 these celebrations are one of the most distinctive living signs of Latter-day Saints’ imprint on America’s regional landscape and the main site for enacting pioneer nostalgia in Mormon culture. Hence they deserve special attention in this dissertation.
This section seeks to give a broad overview of the nature and significance of civic Pioneer Day celebrations in Mormondom while also focusing in on a few key features of a few local celebrations that are especially illustrative of peculiarly Mormon practices and Mormonism’s relationship to surrounding cultures. [113]
Study Concept and Goals
As the traditional face-to-face communities that once defined the fields of anthropology and folkloristics have undergone radical transformation, scholars in these disciplines have called for a general reevaluation of how fieldwork should be done in the post-modern world of high technology and complex inter-connecting cultural matrices.2 The following chapters benefit from an “experiment in ethnography” as has been called for in this general reevaluation of fieldwork. Rather than taking an intense look at Pioneer Day practices by working with many informants in one community, I seek to cast an interpretive net over an entire cultural region to get a broad overview of the whole civic Pioneer Day phenomenon.3 I do this by identifying every city, town, and village in the West whose Mormon community asserts their cultural inheritance on the settlement’s main thoroughfare on July 24th. During a summer 1995 telephone survey funded by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, I interviewed hundreds of people with local knowledge of each Pioneer Day celebration in the American West.
This experiment was precipitated in part by the insurmountable logistical difficulties of doing traditional, prolonged fieldwork to study a celebration that happens only once a year—for only one day or weekend—in scores of towns—the actual number turned out to be about 80—within a geographic area [114] covering several states. Fieldwork in several locales augmented this telephone research, including Salt Lake City’s 1994 Days of ’47 events, Manti, Utah’s 1994 “Mormon Miracle Pageant,” and Spring City and Fairview’s 1995 Pioneer Day.
The original narrow goal of this research sought to reexamine Mormon Cultural Region scholarship in the light of the late-1990s geographic distribution of civic Pioneer Day celebrations—essentially to make a new Mormon Culture Region map based on the presence and absence of Pioneer Day celebrations.4 However, as is often the case once research begins, serendipitous opportunities expanded the scope of this project. Many opportunities to reap insights into the internal structure and patterning of civic Pioneer Days, and into the reasons behind their presence and absence in Mormon Country, presented themselves as the phone research progressed.
First, I realized that after having gone to the trouble of tracking down local Pioneer Day organizers long-distance by phone, it would be useful to gather ethnographic data about the Pioneer Day activities in the contacted towns rather than merely ask them if their town celebrated Pioneer Day or not. I developed a questionnaire (reproduced at the end of this chapter) to assist in my note-taking. In the light of recent scholarly thinking on folk festivals, Chapter Five uses data from these questionnaires and my fieldwork to uncover the common building blocks of civic Pioneer Day celebration. The shape that emerged of Mormon civic Pioneer Day celebrations suggests parallels to festive cultural forms in other times [115] and places. Chapter Six proposes some speculative interpretations of these similarities in an experiment in interpretation.
My second realization was that other factors such as climate, history, changing demographics, arrangements with other towns, and particularly the presence of other significant community events led to some “very Mormon” towns not celebrating Pioneer Day. Also, many Pioneer Day celebrations display variation due to a host of factors, mostly having to do with cultural heterogeneity within the domain of a certain celebration. Following these discoveries, the phone survey began to ask questions about the other events that displaced Pioneer Day in so many towns that, because of their mainly Mormon history and demography, were seemingly prime candidates. I also asked my telephone informants about the effect inter-cultural contact has had on specific celebration sites. Chapter Seven examines the reasons and patterns of Pioneer Day presence, absence, and variation.
The third realization was that a phone survey was not only an excellent opportunity to rethink the Mormon Culture Region based on the presence or absence of Pioneer Day celebrations, but also on local perceptions of whether or not a given locality was in “Mormon Country” or not. I began asking questions like “Do you think the consensus in your area would be that your town is a Mormon town?” and “Do you and your neighbors consider yourselves to live in a Mormon area?” These questions were designed to elicit statements reflecting a sense of place rather than uncover any “objective” of statistical reality.
Demographic studies that uncover only the relative percentages of the various cultural group affiliation in a given area can miss the prevalent sense of [116] place in a region. For example, Salt Lake City is less than 50 percent Mormon but for reasons of history, architecture, city layout, continuing cultural and political influence, as well as being the headquarters of the LDS Church, few would characterize it as anything but a “Mormon town.” Chapter Eight recounts geographic data and displays maps of various ways of conceptualizing the Mormon culture region before and after using the information gleaned by this study.
As the scope of this study evolved and expanded, the central question remained: “What can looking at the nature and distribution of Pioneer Day celebrations, as a quintessential Mormon cultural performance, reveal about the current nature of the Mormon Culture Region?” This region has been traditionally defined in terms of static material culture indicators rather than ongoing activities and perceptions by the living breathing people whose presence and characteristics call the Mormon cultural region into being.
This section is, in a sense, an inversion of social historians’ use of anthropological and sociological insights to assist in their telling of historical narratives. I use community-enacted performances of local historical consciousness to get at some of the tensions and solidarities that constitute the shape, culture, and identity of “Mormon Country” in the late twentieth century.
Study Execution
Using telephone directories from Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee library and information gleaned from previous phone calls, I called towns throughout the West using telephone numbers for whatever community leaders I [117] could find—mayors, city-council men and women, city and county government workers, chamber of commerce personnel, historical society volunteers, LDS bishops and Relief Society presidents. I asked these people if their town held a civic Pioneer Day celebration. Upon hearing from two separate sources that a town did not have a Pioneer Day celebration, I proceeded no further with that town except to ask why the town did not celebrate the holiday. I began with all the towns within the traditional boundaries of the Mormon Culture Region and moved outward from there. With every person I contacted, I always asked for tips and leads as to what other towns to call next. This technique worked well since people tended to be knowledgeable about happenings in theirs’ and surrounding towns. I followed over-lapping zones of individual local knowledge to track down which communities held Pioneer Day celebrations and which did not.
If the town did have a celebration, I asked for the telephone number of someone knowledgeable of, and preferably in some way responsible for, the town’s Pioneer Day celebration. Usually only two to four calls were necessary to connect me with people “in the know.” My phone inquiries produced numerous invitations to “come on down and see for yourself.” I took up the invitation to Spring City and Fairview, Utah which share a Pioneer Day celebration and spent all day of 24 July 1995 in these two towns.
The results of this project, which took several weeks and over 500 phone calls to complete, were compiled in binders geographically organized according to the grid in Delorme Mapping’s Utah Atlas and Gazetteer for Utah and Rand [118] McNally’s 1994 Road Atlas for Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Alberta, Arizona, and Nevada.5
Definitions and Assumptions of the Study
This study infers that the traditional presence of a public, community Pioneer Day celebration in a given municipality indicates a deepness and pervasiveness of Mormon culture not indicated by private celebrations held on Church property. Only public celebrations intended for the whole community were included in this analysis. Celebration size did not figure into the selection process. For example, the large Pioneer Day celebrations in Tucson, Arizona did not indicate that Tucson is a Mormon town, only that it has a large LDS minority. The rest of Tucson paid little attention to these Mormon goings on and Tucson civic leaders were not involved in its organization. Many of the celebrations included in this study were much less elaborate than Tucson’s but involved the whole of smaller communities with much higher percentages of Mormons.
I quickly realized that distinguishing between an LDS Church celebration and community celebration in many Western towns is a self-defeating exercise. In reaction to the question “Is Pioneer Day a community or Church event in your town?” I received some hearty laughs and several responses of “What do you mean?” The Church is the community and the community is the Church to such an extent that on Pioneer Day in Mormon Country, Mormonism takes on some of the roles of a civic religion—even for Gentile minorities. [119]
A disproportionate amount of Utah’s Gentile population lives in the Salt Lake City and Ogden greater metropolitan areas, leaving rural Utah about 80 percent LDS. Several Utah counties have no organized congregations other than LDS wards. This is absolutely unique in America, where Christian denominational diversity is remarkable and county denominational dominance is rare. Besides Utah only Rhode Island has a simple denominational state majority.6 The confluence of religion and community in rural Mormon culture and the continuing practice of what is not only a pioneer remembrance but also a summer harvest festival recalls medieval European village life.7
The organizational bodies that take on Pioneer Day in rural Mormondom are diverse and for the most part secular—the town council, the chamber of commerce, or as is often the case, especially in larger rural towns, a special Pioneer Day committee. In a significant minority of cases, Pioneer Day is actually organized through local LDS Church ecclesiastical channels. This is especially the case in communities with less than 500 people or about the maximum size of an LDS ward. The trend seems to be away from Church organized Pioneer Day celebrations since many towns reported a recent transition from Church to secular organization.8 Even so, Church and state intertwine in Pioneer Day organization. LDS Bishops often formally call ward members to serve on the town’s Pioneer [120] Day committee. In larger towns, the committee may ask one ward to organize a carnival and another to take on the rodeo. In at least one case the town pays the local LDS ward to organize Pioneer Day.9
The variety of options for Pioneer Day organizational bodies seemed to make little difference as to the nature of the celebration they organized. This is perhaps in part due to the fact there tends to be so much overlap in community leadership with many people wearing several church and secular hats. Leadership of both varieties tends to run in families. In one town I talked to the mayor. His brother was the bishop of the LDS ward whose boundaries were virtually isomorphic with those of the town.10 Each year the mayor and the bishop “sat down together” to plan Pioneer Day.
These factors suggest that the fundamental criteria for determining whether or not a Pioneer Day celebration indicates the presence of the Mormon Culture Region are not absolute size or whether or not it was organized through Church auspices. Instead, Mormon Country Pioneer Day celebrations (or what I call “civic Pioneer Day celebrations”) are large relative to the whole community in what is in many cases the biggest town event all year.
Although I did not inquire into the religious affiliation of my informants, but instead asked questions about the demographics and attitudes of the town in [121] general, it should also noted that several of my informants volunteered that they were not LDS themselves but participated along with other Gentiles in organizing and celebrating Pioneer Day celebrations. While ethnic and religious percentages affect how towns celebrate Pioneer Day in various ways, as will be shown in subsequent chapters, for the most part the religion of my informants did not seem to affect how they described Pioneer Day in their community.11 This fact underscores the largely geographic community nature, rather than religious community nature, of contemporary Pioneer Day.
Limits of This Ethnographic Technique
“Telephone ethnography” provides several advantages over more traditional fieldwork methods. It allows for a broad outline overview of a geographically dispersed cultural phenomenon; it provides copious data for comparing various festivals; it uncovers the footprint of Pioneer Day on the American West; and it displays the internal diversity of this widespread cultural practice.
However, limits inherent in this experiment should temper and qualify any analysis and conclusions. Foremost among these is the lack of deep ethnographic penetration into the complexities of any one municipal community’s symbolic activity. This lack emerges from several factors: the impossibility of participating in every Pioneer Day celebration; the limited interaction with a small number of [122] informants associated with each celebration; The problem of a necessarily limited number of informants exacerbates a problem common to all ethnographic enterprises—informants’ variability in perception, knowledge, and “talkativeness.” Not that variability in perception and reporting somehow clouds “the real,” rather this variability is what is real and therefore requires drawing on multiple informants for analyzing any complex cultural activity.
This study’s reliance on only a few informants per festival can provide only a few peoples’ understanding of what Pioneer Day celebrations represent and accomplish. The kinds of people I called tended to be proficient in “people skills,” knowledgeable about their local traditions and eager to inform. However, I suspect that a drawback to relying on community leaders and their staffs is that I may have missed critical and disapproving views of Pioneer Day celebrations since these informants, as event organizers and town promoters, may have had vested interests in putting a positive spin on community activities.
There was no way to ensure the completeness and accuracy of this project. Some people may have been wrong about the details of Pioneer Day celebrations in their town and even whether or not a celebration was held. For a few towns that seemed likely to have civic Pioneer Day celebrations, I was simply not able to procure a phone number for anyone who could answer my questions and / or would return calls. In making a map of Pioneer Day celebrations, I included Kirtland, New Mexico. The best information available was the word of a librarian in a nearby town that assumed that since she had pictures of the celebration from several years ago that it was still going on. This is of course a problematic determination because of the dynamic nature of the celebration. In Trenton, Utah I [123] was likewise unable to contact anyone but several people in nearby towns attested to its annual celebration. These are the two most marginal cases included in the map. All others are based on actual discussion with someone in town.
Despite the reliance on the telephone, this experiment is not a sociological survey. Questions were formulated to elicit open-ended response and discussion, not just yes or no answers. This experiment purposely blurs the distinction between qualitative and quantitative social science research. It seeks both to quantitatively map Pioneer Day on the American landscape and also interrogate meanings and structures out of the collective experience of Pioneer Day celebration.
Below is a map showing the location of all the civic-sponsored Pioneer Day celebrations in the American West. Chapter Eight takes a closer look what this information says about the nature and shape of the Mormon Culture region today. [124]
Figure 11. Map of all civic-sponsored Pioneer Day parades in the American West. [125]
Pioneer Day Questionnaire and Town Information
Town:
Population:
Person interviewed:
Telephone number:
• Do you have a July 24th Pioneer Day celebration in your town?
• How many people usually show up? (Do non-LDS come?)
• Does your celebration include a Parade? (on main street?)
• How many floats does it regularly have?
• Do non-LDS churches and organizations participate in your parade?
• Who is the organizer? person? organization? (DUP, CoC? the Church?)
• Is it more a church event or more a community event?
• About what percent of your community is LDS?
• When did your town start having pioneer day? Has it ever not had it? Why?
• Are there traditional things to do such as:
Brigham Young Impersonator?
Covered Wagons?
People in Pioneer Costume?
Handcarts?
Sports tournaments?
Lectures?
Dances?
Pageant/Play?
Rodeo?
Crafts/Food Fair?
Family Reunions?
Fireworks?
Other? [127]
• What other towns do people come from to participate in your Pioneer Day celebration?
• Are there any other towns close by that might celebrate Pioneer Day?
Such as . . . (suggest names of possible towns)
• Can you give me the phone number of someone (in that town) who might know more details about celebrations in your town and nearby towns?
• Do you have any other yearly festivals or other town holidays in your town?
The colonization day of the town? (Is this celebrated in conjunction with Pioneer Day?)
Priesthood restoration?
Relief Society organization?
4th of July?
Memorial Day?
• How does your town’s celebration reflect the cultural diversity of your area?
• (If no Pioneer Day) Where do people in your town go for Pioneer Day?
• Do you think the consensus in your area would be that your town is a Mormon town?
• Do you and your neighbors consider yourselves to live in a Mormon area? [128]
Notes
1. Mormon Country is unique in the American West in that so much of its population has old and deep roots in the West. All other western states are made up of much more recent move-ins. This ancestral connection, almost as much as the special religious significance of Mormon pioneers, may explain the popularity of the “cult of the pioneers” in the Mormon Culture Region.
2. This argument is well documented in John D. Dorst, The Written Suburb: An American Site, an Ethnographic Dilemma (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).
3. A similar “broadcast” approach to cultural phenomena that has many local manifestations can be found in Richard R. Flores, Los Pastores: History and Performance in the Mexican Shepherd’s Play of South Texas (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).
4. This reevaluation of Mormon cultural geography is presented in Chapter Eight.
6. See Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman, One Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society (New York: Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1993).
7. See John Bossy, Christianity in the West: 1400–1700 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
8. Informants in a dozen towns reported transitions to non-Church organization in June 1995 telephone interviews.
9. Unless, they specifically gave me permission to mention them by name I have chosen to let all my informants remain anonymous. I have also chosen to keep anonymous the names of any community whose celebratory practices might be construed as controversial. While no informants expressed any particular fear, I can see no interpretive advantage or greater good that justifies exposing them to even the slight possibility of trouble.
10. This kind of ward and town isomorphism is not uncommon in rural Utah.
11. While my informant in Hagerman, Idaho was a Gentile and my informant in Moab, Utah was Mormon this seemed to make little difference in how they described the reasons behind the decline of Pioneer Day celebrations in their town except that the informant in Moab seemed more personally saddened.
