I am he who led the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; and my arm is stretched out in the last days, to save my people Israel.
(A revelation to Brigham Young on January 14, 1847 as he prepared to lead the Latter-day Saints to their refuge in the West as it appears in the LDS book of scripture Doctrine and Covenants 136:22.)
The emergence of Mormonism as a new world religion begs the question, “Why did America serve as its cradle?” Exploring answers to this question serves to illuminate the complex historical and cultural relationship between the Mormon religion and the American experience, as well as to help explain the prominent place of pioneering in both the American and Mormon imaginations.
A common Latter-day Saint answer to this question is that considering a history of centuries of religious oppression in Europe, the relatively free and tolerant climate of the mid-nineteenth-century American frontier was the earliest possible time and place in history where the fullness of God’s restored truth had any chance of long-term survival in a world hostile to religious diversity. Gordon Wood, a leading historian of the early republic, suggests that despite the tension Mormonism’s emergence caused early on, the new religion fulfilled a need so [27] crucial to the American experience that if Mormonism did not exist, Americans would have to invent it.1
The early nineteenth-century American national experience needed a religion to match its own originality, vitality, optimism, and divinely sanctioned position of being at center stage of God’s unfolding drama on Earth. As the new nation sought to define itself after independence, Americans searched for ways to downplay and forget their European intellectual and cultural heritage. A major problem in this endeavor was Americans’ continued adherence to religious movements begun in Europe. To address this problem, nineteenth-century American romantics sought religious themes in America’s nature and their own imagined spiritual images of Indian “noble savages.”2 While little hint of nature worship exists in Mormon theology, and Richard Bushman has persuasively shown that the Book of Mormon is scarcely a Romantic or American republican document,3 Joseph Smith had his formative religious experiences, not in church buildings, but in what came to be known as “the Sacred Grove” in the woods near his home as well as on a hillside from which he took the Golden Plates that gave America and its aboriginal inhabitants a panoramic sacred history in which [28] Europeans took no part. Suddenly, in the rapidly-developing Mormon world-view, America had its own ancient footing.
In an eccentric but creative reading of the meaning of religion in America, literary critic Harold Bloom, makes Mormonism’s link with the American experience even more fundamental than does Wood. Bloom suggests that Latter-day Saint doctrine’s combination of radical insistence on every individual’s responsibility, perfectibility, and immediate accessibility to divine revelation coupled with its this-worldly communitarian imperatives make it uniquely an “American Original”—the American Religion.4 Even for non-adherents, the native-soil story of Mormonism is emblematic of Americans’ self-perceived uniqueness, and its whirlwind of cleansing new revelations provides a clean break from troubling historical continuity with European religious corruption. Because of this, and Mormonism’s ongoing optimistic vitality, Bloom predicts that Latter-day Saints will come to play a major defining role in America’s religious future.
In stark contrast to Wood and Bloom’s positive assessments stands that of anti-Mormons who likewise have claimed to act in accordance with the highest American ideals in denouncing Mormonism from its inception.5 It is not for [29] nothing, they argued, that Mormons were forcibly ejected from America in the nation’s sole instance of expelling a whole religion from its body. According to anti-Mormons, America can tolerate any religion except those patently anti-American in their very nature.
In the rhetoric of anti-Mormons who used American republicanism in defense of their activities, Mormon secrecy, polygamy, and hierarchical theocracy (like the sexual and social “aberrations” of Catholicism and freemasonry) represented a dangerous barbaric throw-back to the days before the rise of enlightened Christian democracy in America.6 These concerns crystallized into the mob violence and vigilante activity that brought about several prelude Mormon exoduses from Ohio and Missouri and the final exodus from Illinois to the Rocky Mountains. Eventually the attention of an increasingly sophisticated and nationally respectable anti-Mormonism would follow the Latter-day Saints to Utah and deem what was occurring there to be perhaps the biggest threat to America after the slavocratic South. In 1856, the newly-formed Republican Party’s platform proclaimed its unyielding opposition to the “twin relics of barbarism” slavery and polygamy. Despite the then current political philosophy of [30] popular sovereignty, the federal government deemed Mormons unfit for self-rule and dismantled, in the name of Americanism, Latter-day Saints’ political autonomy in the post–Civil War “Reconstruction of Utah.”7
Laurence Moore suggests Mormons’ history of persecution and “outsiderness” gave Latter-day Saints rhetorical resources for claiming to be more rather than less American. Even considering the stigma and vilification they have endured, who has benefited more than the Mormons—and other unpopular religions shut off from power—from the uniquely American religious freedoms provided by the Constitution? Latter-day Saints recognize their religion’s prelude in, and debt to, revolutionary Americanist ideals. American Mormons hold the United States Constitution in near-canonical esteem and regard the founding fathers as near Saints.8
Perhaps what divided Latter-day Saints from their detractors was not the “reality” of which group was more “truly” American, but rather differing conceptions of what it means to be American, or different levels of emphases [31] placed on shared (sometimes paradoxical) touchstones of Americanism. Highlighting one’s own outsiderness as a dissenter, a radical, a revolutionary, or marginalized minority has perennially been a way of positioning one’s self as truly American. In Laurence Moore’s view, the religious counter-currents rather than mainstreams have been the most American of religions.9
Outsiderness as Americaness is perhaps the case as a beginning at least. But virtuous outsiders in American ideology and mythology can “make it” in the American dream. What could be more emblematic of America’s mythic opportunities than the rags-to-riches success story of Mormondom’s on-going transformation from a despised sect-on-the-run to a major American religious subculture and an increasingly respected world-wide faith?
A central reason for the Mormon celebration of Pioneer Day is that, in popular Mormon conceptions of history at least, the Saints’ arrival in the Salt Lake Valley marked an easily-identifiable turning point—late nineteenth-century setbacks not withstanding—in this transformation. This understanding of July 24th in the Mormon celebratory calendar was articulated early on in an 1851 general conference address given in Salt Lake City by Brigham Young’s counselor Daniel H. Wells who proclaimed:
Among all the anniversaries that might be celebrated . . . the 24th Day of July, the anniversary of the arrival of the pioneers in this valley, has been selected as the dawning of a brighter day, as [32] an era in the history of this people upon which turned the axis of their destiny.10
As subsequent chapters will show, Mormon pioneer nostalgia in general, and Pioneer Day in particular, have been volatile symbols signifying both Mormon Americanness and the lack thereof to various interpreters of their meaning.
Understanding the Mormon Exodus
To understand how these symbols came to be and to approach an understanding of the complex depth of the pioneers’ significance in Mormon popular history we need to more closely examine the religion’s beginnings in Joseph Smith’s visions and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, and explain these events as Mormons view them. The purpose here is neither to proselytize on behalf of Mormonism nor to “debunk” any aspect of Mormon belief. Instead, the purpose is to allow access into the sacred history of which the pioneer experience is a continuation, and into the religious world view and culture of which the pioneers and their commemorative tradition are a part.
Mormonism began in the 1820s with a series of revelations to Joseph Smith, a young religious seeker in rural upstate New York.11 The two [33] manifestations that came to be the most important to Latter-day Saints are a visitation by God the Father and Jesus Christ, who informed Joseph that he would be the medium through which the true church and the kingdom of God on Earth would be restored to a world engulfed by religious conflict and false teachings, and the appearance of the angel Moroni, a resurrected prophet from an ancient American civilization established by refugees who had fled from Israel before the 600 B.C. destruction of Jerusalem. Moroni presented Joseph Smith with the famous Golden Plates which, after they were translated, became The Book of Mormon—a history of Moroni’s people that explained (to the satisfaction of its believing readers) the origins of the American Indians and recorded that Jesus had visited the Western Hemisphere after his resurrection.
The world view and sociality brought about by Joseph Smith’s restoration was so all-encompassing and transformative that it has defied, or perhaps even exploded, usual categories for understanding social and religious phenomenon. Not fully understanding the deeply typological nature of Mormonism, American religious historian Sydney Ahlstrom points out the difficulty of sociologically classifying Mormonism in his seminal A Religious History of the American People, “One cannot even be sure if the object of our consideration is a sect, a mystery cult, a new religion, a church, a people, a nation, or an American subculture; indeed, at different times and places it is all of these.”12[34]
Unlike Finneyites who believed that preachers through their own initiative could ferment revival and unlike Campbellites who believed the original Church could be reconjured through excruciatingly close reading of the New Testament alone, Latter-day Saints believed that true Christianity came just as it did in the primitive Church—only by revelation from Christ himself to his authorized representatives on earth.13
As far as Mormons were concerned, “The Restoration”—as Latter-day Saints collectively refer to the visions and ecclesiastical accomplishments of Joseph Smith—was also a sign to Mormons that the Biblically prophesied “dispensation of the fullness of times” and the era for the “restitution of all things” had arrived—the time when all truths ever preached and correct principles ever practiced would emerge again together in a great summing up of history in preparation for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
In this spirit of all things gathering together, Old Testament themes such as temple worship and polygamy naturally coexisted with New Testament themes such as the centrality of Jesus Christ’s atonement and Church leadership by twelve apostles. Early Mormons expected to be involved in restorative and recapitulative activity.
While not a theological imperative, recapitulating the Exodus fit into the spirit of the times. In their sensitive ethnographic reconstruction of the world view of early Mormonism, Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen describe the spirit [35] of awe and wonder early Saints had at being the beneficiaries of the angelic visitations that were establishing God’s Kingdom on Earth.14 Early Mormons expected the marvelous to unfold before their eyes and were astounded but not surprised to experience miraculous outpourings like those experienced by the Children of Israel and the Early Christians. The Latter-day Saint’s Restoration collapsed ancientness and newness into an American timelessness in which Mormons could literally see themselves as modern Israel and figuratively reenact ancient Israel’s attainment of their promised land.
Armed with a divine mandate and a new book of scripture, the young prophet quickly began attracting followers but also a great deal of antagonism.
In the early years of the Church, Mormons believed that to follow their mandate to establish the kingdom of God on Earth they needed to “gather” together in the same communities and participate in exclusive, communitarian economic arrangements.15 These attitudes aroused the suspicion and hostility of their neighbors, who violently forced Joseph Smith and his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints along the fringe of the cresting wave of American westward expansion—always marginalized and continually persecuted. Having been driven off their land in the late 1830s by vigilante mobs in Ohio and three different places in Missouri, Joseph Smith’s flock, by then numbering in the tens of thousands, built the city of Nauvoo in western Illinois. It was here, during a brief [36] hiatus from harassment, that Joseph Smith received his boldest and most distinctive revelations about the special mission of his people.
In Nauvoo, the Biblical restoration theme of Joseph Smith’s teachings began to markedly emphasize Old as well as New Testament motifs. For example, he introduced secret temple ordinances and began introducing a few close and trusted associates to the doctrine of plural marriage. Polygamy, as it later came to be called by detractors, drew inspiration from the familial arrangements of the Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Rumors of Joseph Smith’s involvement with plural marriage began a sequence of events that led to his arrest and martyrdom in the summer of 1844 by yet another mob jealous and frightened of Mormon power.
After the Prophet’s death, the largest faction of the movement accepted Brigham Young’s claim to church leadership and followed his lead to flee continued persecution and search for sanctuary in the wilderness. In 1847, Brigham Young left his followers in the temporary settlement of Winter Quarters in what is now Nebraska, and led an advance company of Mormon leaders to the Rocky Mountains where he selected the Salt Lake Valley as his people’s ultimate destination. By 1848, most of Nauvoo’s inhabitants who would be coming had made the trek to their promised land.
From Salt Lake City, Young immediately began sending out groups to colonize as much as they could of the Great Basin, concentrating on the valleys along the Wasatch Front of the Rocky Mountains. Highly successful Mormon proselytizing continued, especially in Great Britain and Scandinavia where European Mormons outnumbered their American counterparts during much of the [37] mid-nineteenth century. However, in the continuing spirit of gathering, these converts were expected to come to Zion as soon as they were able. Scores of thousands came. Most came by ship, rail, and / or riverboat to Iowa City from whence they headed to Salt Lake City by wagon. Some came by wagon from California after having rounded Cape Horn. Between 1856 and 1860, when Church money was particularly tight, some immigrants even pushed and pulled their meager belongings across the plains in handcarts.16
The use of wagons stopped after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, but immigrants continued to come by rail. What Mormons remember as “The Gathering” remained Church policy until it began to be de-emphasized near the turn of the century. In the 1920s, the Church began to encourage its new converts not to gather physically in Utah, but to gather spiritually with nearby Mormons and to build up the Church in their own homelands. By 1955 the Church had built a temple in Switzerland, its first outside of traditional gathering areas and a sure sign of its shift in emphasis from Western Gathering to long-term world-wide growth.17
The Mormon trek to Zion drew much of its symbolic potency from the fact that its participants, and their descendants, understood it to be a recapitulation of the Biblical exodus. As evidenced in pioneer journals, the Mormon migration to Utah was regarded from the start as sacred history in the making.18 While not [38] necessarily a theological imperative, a grand recapitulation of sacred history fit nicely within the Mormon typological self-conception of their religion as being the restoration of all religious truths preached in both New and Old Testament times. Joseph Smith’s reintroduction of other Old Testament ideas such as temple rituals and plural marriage undoubtedly prepared Mormons to heed Brigham Young’s call to reenact the Exodus. In fact, Brigham Young earned the title “the American Moses” for leading the Mormons to their promised land and realizing Smith’s visionary plans for a Mormon kingdom in the Rocky Mountains.19 Under Brigham Young’s direction, the bedraggled bands of refugees that left Nauvoo at gun point in 1846 became forward-looking and sacred-history enacting “pioneers.”
Part of Young’s strategy for accomplishing this feat was to use Moses’s organizational model and organize the Saints into hierarchical groups of 10s, 50s and 100s.20 Parallels with the Exodus did not end here. Mormon oral tradition and pioneer journals record that the Mississippi froze at an opportune time to allow the first pioneer wagon trains to cross, much as the Red Sea had parted to allow Moses’s followers to escape Egypt. After the Mormons crossed the Mississippi, flocks of quail miraculously wandered into pioneer camps like manna from heaven to feed the poorest of the straggling travelers. After time spent in the wilderness, the Latter-day Saints came upon a land where a river ran between a [39] fresh water lake and a salt water lake. It was only appropriate that the Mormons named it the Jordan River after its counterpart in Palestine. (See fig. 1.) [40]
Figure 1. Map showing the similarity between Palestine and Salt Lake valley, Utah. This Rio Grande Western Railroad map was published in William E. Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (1899). [41]
A factor that heightened the realism of this link with ancient Israel was that most Mormons had received “patriarchal blessings” modeled after blessings given by Biblical patriarchs to their children. In these blessings, most Saints were told, by church members specially called for this purpose, that they were literal descendants of the Hebrew tribe of Ephraim through whom—according to the Bible and Joseph Smith’s revelations—all the nations of the earth would be blessed.21 “British Israelitism” or the belief that Anglo-Saxon peoples are literal descendants of Biblical Israelites was a common idea in the lands of the British diaspora in mid-nineteenth century.22 For the Mormons who recapitulated the Exodus, identification with the Israelites through their own version of British Israelitism made their chosenness and their “living through again” of sacred history much more literal and significant than a mere reenactment.23
Because the early Mormons made new sacred history by recapitulating old sacred history, they have bequeathed to today’s Mormons a “usable past” that sets them apart as a new religious tradition distinct and different from the American Christian milieu out of which they emerged. This occurred in much the same way that early Christians created a new religious tradition by incorporating [42] and reworking themes from the Hebrew religious tradition out of which they grew. Jan Shipps, a perceptive scholar of Mormonism whose interpretations of Mormon history have been highly influential in recent years, suggests the pioneers’ story stands next to the sacred history of the Israelites in the Old Testament and that of Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament as a “third sacred text” to which Mormons look for guidance, instruction, and inspiration.24
Another key to understanding Mormon reverence for the pioneers is to place their saga within the broader context of the Romanticism that permeated American culture at the time. Several historians suggest that the content of the Mormon gospel and the trek to establish a Godly kingdom in the West (initially outside the boundaries of the United States) constituted a rejection of the romantic “age of boundlessness,” and of American democratic and capitalist mores, and of what the Mormons viewed as the increasing disorder of ante-bellum America.25
However, the Mormons’ self-conception of their destiny also reflected many aspects of American Romanticism. For example: The ancient history of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith’s personal religious history, and the pioneer trek together provided for Mormons—and they hoped for the entire nation—a grand unifying sacred history for an American culture “cursed” with a troubling a-historicity by its newness and its cultural pluralism.26 Also, reflecting the [43] contemporary notion that “primitive” civilizations must give way to “advanced” ones,27 Mormons fully believed—especially during the Civil War—that America would eventually turn to them for guidance and leadership.28 Latter-day Saints shared with the Romantics the vision of a great untamed wilderness waiting to be harnessed, tamed, and made fruitful by a growing nation that God had chosen as his own. The sense of drama this endowed to all of America’s westward expansion was shared by the Mormons, but they experienced it primarily in terms of their own history only.
Another important contribution of Romanticism that reverberates still with modern Mormons is the era’s historiographic approach. At the time of the pioneer trek, historians depicted America’s past as a grand unfolding drama of the progressive triumph of superior civilization and good over ignorance and evil. If a historian wrote detached or dispassionately and failed to convey these truths, peers would have deemed his work as slighting the significance of the past. Truth according to popular historiography in the nineteenth century was best illuminated through “glowing pictures” that highlighted heroism and sacrifice.29 Mormons viewed the telling of their own history in a similar light. In this view, God caused the United States to be established so his revealed religion could be restored in a country constitutionally committed to religious freedom. These historiographic [44] ideas continue, in tempered form, in Mormon circles today and inform modern Mormon celebrations and artistic depictions of the pioneer era as a glorious achievement wrought by self-sacrificing heroes.30[45]
Notes
1. Gordon S. Wood, “Evangelical America and Early Mormonism,” New York History 61 (October 1980): 359–386.
2. While American Romantics looked to “things American” for inspiration, the Romantic era ironically represented a high point in American intellectual linkage with Europe since it borrowed heavily from German thinkers, Coleridge, and Rousseau for the concept of “noble savage.”
3. See Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984).
4. Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 77–112.
5. No comprehensive history of anti-Mormonism has yet been written. The visual images of America’s homegrown bigotry to match its homegrown religion are discussed in Gary L. Bunker and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Graphic Image, 1834–1914: Cartoons, Caricatures, and Illustrations (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983); and Terryl L. Givens, Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). David Brion Davis discusses the similarities between various nineteenth-century Nativist concerns in David Brion Davis, “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (September 1960): 205–24. He interprets what this means about the nature of American political thought and self-conception in the nineteenth century. Also see Leonard J. Arrington and John Haupt, “Intolerable Zion: The Image of Mormonism in Nineteenth Century American Literature,” Western Humanities Review 22 (Summer 1968): 243–60.
6. Kenneth H. Winn, Exiles in a Land of Liberty: Mormons in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). Winn suggests, somewhat deductivistically, that a fundamental difference of conception about the meaning of American republicanism lay at the heart of Mormon/Gentile violence in Missouri. Howard Lamar suggests that this same argument about what American values should take precedence (religious liberty vs. separation of church and state) formed the core of the government campaign against polygamy and the delay of Utah’s admission to the union as a state. Howard R. Lamar, “Statehood for Utah: A Different Path,” in Mormonism and American Culture, eds. Marvin S. Hill and James B. Allen (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 127–141.
7. Terryl L. Givens, The Viper on the Hearth, 121–152. Givens describes the literary processes by which Mormons were constructed as “others” not worthy of participation in American governmental institutions or inclusion within national borders. See also Howard Lamar’s discussion of the “Americanization of Utah.” Lamar, “Statehood for Utah,” 127–141.
8. The Mormon scripture The Doctrine and Covenants 101:80 declares that the framers of the constitution were “wise men . . . raised up unto this very purpose” of establishing a free country in which the gospel could thrive.
According the late Mormon apostle Ezra Taft Benson who viewed the records of the St. George Temple, the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence and other dignitaries appeared in 1877 to LDS Church president Wilford Woodruff who said, “Before I left St. George, the spirits of the dead gathered around me, wanting to know why we did not redeem them. Said they, ‘You have had the use of the Endowment House for a number of years, and yet nothing has ever been done for us. We laid the foundation of the government you now enjoy, and we never apostatized from it, but we remained true to it and were faithful to God.’” The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1988), 603. These events helped incorporate Americanism as part of Mormonism. This story is widely known in American Mormon folk-history.
9. Perhaps this partially explains the phenomenon that sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark notice—that the mainstream in American religiosity is always in decline in the face of up-and-coming religions. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
11. In understanding the emergence of Mormonism, in the context of America’s intellectual environment and on America’s geographic landscape, it is important to consider two things in relation to the topic of pioneers in Mormon popular historical expression. While Joseph Smith’s revelations form the core and starting place of what is unique about the Latter-day Saint theology, the pioneers’ trek and the colonization of the Intermountain West served as Mormons’ historical epiphany of a regional cultural identity. The place of this epiphany in the diverse sectors that make up “the Mormon imagination” continues to be rethought.
12. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1975), 613.
13. For an examination of various forms of American primitivism and revivalism see Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630–1875 (The University of Chicago Press, 1988).
14. An insightful, rich, and sensitive treatment of Joseph Smith’s far ranging and inclusive understanding of the Restoration that Christ was bringing about through him can be found in Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen, Illusions of Innocence, 133–152.
15. William Mulder, “The Mormon Gathering,” 87–89.
19. “American Moses” is the subtitle of the seminal scholarly biography of Brigham Young. Leonard J. Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985).
20. The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints records this in Brigham Young’s only canonized revelation, comprising Doctrine and Covenants 136:1–42.
21. Irene Bates, “Patriarchal Blessings and the Routinization of Charisma,” Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought 26, no. 3 (1993): 1–29. Melodie Moench, “Nineteenth Century Mormons: the New Israel,” Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought 12 (Spring 1979): 42–56.
22. John Wilson, Our Iraelitish Origin (Philadelphia: Daniels and Smith, 1850). Stephen Epperson, Mormons and Jews: Early Mormon Theologies of Israel (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992).
23. The parallels between the Mormon pioneers and the Biblical Exodus were so compelling that there are even unorthodox Mormon splinter groups who maintain that the pioneers of ’47 were the literal reincarnation of Moses’s followers. See Steven L. Shields, Divergent Paths of the Restoration (Los Angeles: Restoration Research, 1990).
25. Klaus Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 214. Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 1984), 139.
26. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Vintage Books 1993), 50–52.
28. Klaus Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience, 210.
29. Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 242. David Levin, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Moteley, and Parkman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959).
30. For a treatment of Mormon historiographic approaches to Mormon historic sites in general see Paul L. Anderson, “Heroic Nostalgia: Enshrining the Mormon Past,” Sunstone 5 (July–August 1980): 47–55.
