If thou art merry, praise the Lord with singing, with music, with dancing, and with a prayer of praise and thanksgiving.
(Revelation of instruction given through Brigham Young to the Latter-day Saints preparing to cross the plains on January 14, 1847. Doctrine and Covenants 136:28.)
We invited all the people up here and all our children. Our dinner was quite a success. All the women folks came and part of the men. Aunt Mary . . . got disappointed and did not get her ticket to go to the great Jubilee. She was invited to Sister West’s for dinner. It was a fine dinner gotten up by the Relief Society for the old people and the pioneers.
After dinner the menfolks hitched up their teams and all the people went like they did when they crossed the plains. James Flake was the captain of the company. They went part way to Taylor and corralled like they did on the plains (then drove up to Taylor in front of the meeting house where the people was running foot races and having other sports). . . . The band we had with us . . . played and the people got out in the corral and danced.
It seemed so lively. No shooting, nothing boisterous. It was all so nice and like days gone by.
(An excerpt from Lucy Hannah White Flake’s 1897 journal account of what was likely the first Pioneer Day celebration in Snowflake, Arizona held during the Church’s 50 year Pioneer Jubilee celebration. This account displays a celebratory pattern of events followed in similar forms in Snowflake and elsewhere to this day.)
Historians and anthropologists have learned to be careful in identifying cross-cultural similarities and even more careful in suggesting reasons and providing interpretations for such similarities.1 However, an experiment in ethnographic data collection suggests a subsequent experiment in interpretation. [157] For this chapter, a side branch of the study, I propose parallels more imaginative and metaphorical than causal or genetic. The causation and structural similarities I suggest are broad and general rather than specific.
The Secular and Religious Nature of Pioneer Day
To Mormons for whom “all spirit is matter” in a “more refined form”2 and who believe God has given no temporal law that is not in essence spiritual,3 the famous sacred/profane dichotomy so often drawn by theologians and religious studies scholars is at best only crudely useful, and at worst seriously detrimental, toward understanding the Mormon experience.4 In the nineteenth century just being in Utah was itself evidence of devotion to God’s call to flee to Zion; Mormons regarded “mundane” acts such as irrigating and farming as fulfilling the biblical prophet Isaiah’s prophecy of making the desert “blossom as a rose.”5
Nevertheless, “religious” and “non-religious” as analytic concepts are somewhat useful in understanding Pioneer Day’s place in Mormon culture. Most of the things that Mormons do to mark their Mormonness are unequivocally religious—getting baptized, worshipping in the temple, wearing the temple [158] garment, serving as missionaries, reading the Book of Mormon. In this perspective, Pioneer Day celebrations constitute the most well-developed relatively non-religious aspect of Mormon culture. Even though Pioneer Day celebrations are, at certain times during their proceedings, infused with a sense of reverence and the Holy, they are for the most part revelry—a festival of Mormon regional identity and historic triumphs. While Latter-day Saint theology embraces and encourages the kind of “wholesome” entertainment found in the parades, rodeos, barbecues, dances, and fireworks displays common in Pioneer Day celebrations, it does not require them for salvation, prescribe formalistic patterns of play, or consider them an essential part of Latter-day Saint practice. So in a limited sense, one can make a distinction between “sacred” things Mormons do out of doctrinal compunction and “secular” acts performed to celebrate their heritage.6
Pioneer Day is a cultural festival more than a religious holiday. None of its events or “rituals” are essential to Latter-day Saint theology or religious life. While Judaism without Passover is unthinkable, Mormonism without Pioneer Day is already common in many parts of the world. Pioneer Day’s secularity is underscored by the fact that if the 24th falls on a Sunday, Pioneer Day is [159] invariably held on the Saturday before or the Monday after due to Mormons’ sabbatarian sentiments.
Since Pioneer Day celebrations bridge, mix, mingle, and confound the sacred and profane they serve as a prime site for examining the interface between Mormon culture and broader Euro-American cultural practices. Indeed, Pioneer Day celebrations represent, to a certain extent, a continuation of long-established and deeply rooted traditions from European folk-culture.7 In a broad sense Pioneer Day Celebrations demonstrate cultural continuities from, and parallels with, the festival cultures of Puritan New England and Medieval Europe.
An Afterclap of Puritanism
In his book Selling God, an insightful treatment of the intimate interaction of commercialism and American religion, historian Laurence Moore observes that “America is not thought of as a festive country.”8 This image, and the impulse which inspires it, dates back to the Puritan’s suppression of “ungodly” pastimes, including European folk festival culture, in their attempts to establish a sober “City on a Hill” composed of “visible saints” that would stand as a witness that an uncorrupt Christian society could prosper and thrive.9 A popular view of [160] the Puritans holds them to be dour spoil-sports constantly on guard against their own and others’ pleasurable sensations. In today’s American English usage, the word “Puritan” has come to refer to exactly these qualities. The famous quip of 1920’s iconoclast social critic H. L. Mencken that Puritan philosophy is essentially “the fear that someone somewhere might be having a good time”10 persists despite decades of revised history suggesting that early colonial New Englanders were not only much more intellectually sophisticated but also had positive attitudes about a variety of wholesome recreations including sports and sex within the covenant of marriage.11 While Puritan’s eschewed theater, their “Boston game” and “town ball” gave rise to today’s American football and baseball. Puritans feared and suppressed folk festivals, not because of their entertainment value, but for their roots in pagan pre-Christian European seasonal rites celebrations.
After passing through Utah on his way to California, Ralph Waldo Emerson made an off-hand comment to a traveling companion that as far as he was concerned Mormonism was an “afterclap of Puritanism.”12 Historians have argued for years over how much to make of Emerson’s analysis of Mormonism and the ostensible theological and cultural connections between Puritans and [161] Latter-day Saints,13 but several facts suggesting a Puritan connection to Pioneer Day celebrations are clear.
The Mormon hierarchy that inaugurated Pioneer Day in 1849 and continues to fashion and interpret orthodox Mormon ideology has had deep genealogical roots in the people and places of America’s Puritan experience from its genesis in the 1830s to the present.14 Few regional populations outside Utah can trace as large of a percentage of their ancestry to New England colonists.
While Mormons’ Arminian soteriology is conceptually very distant from that of the Calvinist Puritans, Latter-day Saints’ self-conception of being a covenant and chosen people, a New Israel with a special mission of example to the world has strong Puritan reverberations. The Mormons too made an “errand into the wilderness” and fully expected the corrupt world to take notice. The nineteenth-century Mormon striving for an orderly community united under correct worship of the same God resembles Puritan’s seventeenth century efforts in the same spirit.15 [162]
The Puritans held anniversary celebrations of their own recapitulation of the Exodus, the Great Migration of the 1630s, with community events featuring processions, oratory, athletic games, and feasts of thanksgiving.
Even though Mormons rejected many Puritan theological ideas, intolerant attitudes, and negative notions about certain kinds of recreation, Mormons have recalled the Puritan experience with fondness as part of their own proto-history. Latter-day Saints recognize the Puritan endeavor as a precursor to the Latter-day Saint struggle to find religious freedom. In the war of words surrounding polygamy in Utah both its opponents and practitioners claimed legitimacy for their views in part from their genealogical roots in the Godly strivings of America’s Puritan founding fathers.16
Mormons would agree with their Puritan spiritual and genealogical progenitor Increase Mather who said, “for a Christian to use recreation is very lawful, and in some cases a great duty.”17 Mormons would expand “lawful recreation” beyond the Puritan’s feasting and baseball playing to include music, theater, and dancing. Nineteenth-century Mormon enthusiasm for social dancing was so great that Brigham Young even found it necessary to explain that while Latter-day Saints recognize the benefits of dancing, Mormons are not Shakers and do not attach any special theological significance to the practice. [163]
Still, there is in Pioneer Day celebrations a tension between a drive toward pious nostalgic remembrance of the pioneer’s faith, and an active embrace of wholesome popular entertainments to celebrate pioneer achievements. One informant in Spring City complained to me that he regarded nearby Fairview’s Pioneer Day demolition derby as an inappropriate way of honoring the pioneers, sarcastically remarking, “A demolition derby! Now, that’s a sensible way to celebrate the pioneers.”18 Others evidently felt that such a contest was not only wholly appropriate, but part of a tradition dating back to the first Pioneer Day celebration in 1849 of utilizing the popular entertainments of the time to rejoice.19
While Mormons have taken Pioneer Day celebratory activities beyond what Puritans would have allowed, there are limits to what Mormon Country villages accept as “lawful recreation” that are more “Puritan” than most contemporary American community festivals. The brewery sponsorship and wide-spread public alcohol consumption that characterize many American festivals are conspicuously absent from Pioneer Day celebrations due to Mormons’ strict religious aversion to alcohol. However, even on their own holiday, Mormons have not always been totally successful in eliminating worldly traditions that link drinking with festive occasions. The Mormons in the town of Hagerman, Idaho put an end to their Pioneer Day celebration in the early 1990s rather than let it continue down its apparent path toward becoming a drunken revelry. “There was [164] too much drinking,” according to one former participant.20 Similar concerns were one of the factors that induced the death of Moab, Utah’s civic Pioneer Day as well.21 Festive alcohol consumption on Pioneer Day has long bedeviled organizers and participants who wish a dry celebration. The July 24, 1899, diary entry of Orson Huntsman of St. George, Utah records “some must get drunk before they can get the spirit of the day and have what they think is a good time, which is hell for the rest of us.”22
As well as the incompatibility of alcohol with Pioneer Day, the lack of a well-developed regional food and non-devotional music traditions have helped keep Pioneer Days from having the potential to become a folk regional festival tourist draw like Mardi Gras in New Orleans or Cajun Country.
Medieval Carnivalesque
While July 24th is not quite “Mormon Mardi Gras,” cultural parallels exist between the Mormon Culture Region and Medieval Catholic Europe. Pioneer Day has historically displayed many features of the “carnivalesque” first identified by scholars in medieval and early modern European folk festivals. The work of [165] Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin emerged belatedly after his death to exert profound influence on thinking in the fields of socio-linguistics, literary theory, and cultural studies.23 The term “carnivalesque” in particular has come to be applied to any multi-vocalic cultural phenomena where the normal order of society is temporarily transmuted, playfully inverted, and / or parodied. In this vein, Pierre Bourdieu identifies popular forms of expressive culture that “satisfy the taste for and sense of revelry, free speaking and hearty laughter which liberate by setting the social world over heels, overturning conventions and proprieties.”24 Recent cultural critics have found the term carnivalesque particularly useful in understanding the creative expressions of marginalized groups within larger cultural contexts of domination and subordination.
Examples of Pioneer Day carnivalesque: A common expression of the carnivalesque is the temporary inversion of standard cultural dichotomies such as high/low, human/animal, man/woman, old/new, and civilized/savage. Occasionally, a local ward bishop will arrive at the parade, to the spectators’ delight, dressed as a tramp or hobo.25 Mormon bishops are usually drawn from the ranks of “solid respectable citizenry” far from the likes of hobos. Bishops are [166] ideally stable, proven managers of time, money, and people in whom the ability to be humorous and playful are not required traits. In this topsy-turvey vein, another strange appearance at the parade might be donkeys and pigs dressed as people and children dressed in animal costumes.26
As a spoof of its own Pioneer Day sporting events, and as an inversion of the traditional family roles of the day, mid-twentieth-century Snowflake held baby stroller races where men in drag would push dolls back and forth several times across a course.27 At the end of each lap of the course they would be expected to change the doll’s diaper before going on. During the 1860 Rockville, Utah Pioneer Day and the 1904 Pine Valley, Utah Pioneer Day, women drove nails and men sewed buttons in similar contests of inversion.28
Such occurrences are uncommon ways in which the Pioneer Day carnivalesque impulse is expressed today. Other incongruities are more common. Modern people donning nineteenth-century garb and assuming a pioneer personae is, of course, the most pervasive anachronistic inversion encountered on Pioneer Day. In fact, it is so common and central to Pioneer Day celebrations that its carnivalesque nature is easily forgotten.
The central place of sporting contests and general festive revelry on a religious holiday, despite Mormonism’s positive attitude toward such things in [167] moderation, is a volatile mix that can potentially evolve into situations that serious Mormons cannot tolerate. Pioneer Day celebrations by their very nature as events of simultaneous, inter-linked religiosity and worldly fun open a Pandora’s box of possibilities that Mormons are happy to open, but keep a close watch on lest they get out of hand and need to be closed in again. As in the case of Moab, Utah and Hagerman, Idaho, Mormons withdraw their support and organizational energies from Pioneer Day celebrations when they become events that fail to meet the needs of their community because they are out-of-sync with their religious standards. Lucy Flake’s exclamation of relief that there was no wild firing of guns or boisterousness displays one nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint’s recognition of the socially dangerous possibilities of Pioneer Day as well as shows her gratitude that her conception of appropriate Pioneer Day celebration was not violated.
“Playing Indian”: A once-common feature of rural Mormon pioneer celebrations was for groups of young Mormons to assume the personae of, and act out as, Native Americans.29 For a frontier people, few dichotomies were more physically threatening and psychologically troubling and than that of “savage/civilized.” Following white and red Americans’ violent frontier struggle [168] for control of the West’s resources, Mormons symbolically perpetuated this nineteenth-century tension into the first half of the twentieth century though their ritualistic reenactments dressed as Indians on Pioneer Day.
Bands of war-paint and loin-cloth clad tricksters galloped whooping and hollering through town on bareback horses terrorizing the citizenry, stealing food, and even “abducting” people on occasion. Sometimes such exploits were orchestrated to serve the purposes of official Pioneer Day activities. They woke up the town for community breakfasts as fire departments do today for example. On other occasions, Pioneer Day provided an excuse for unrehearsed tom-foolery by impromptu troops of mischief makers.30
For the most part those who dressed as Indians were also cast members in the local historical pageant where the most serious and structured “playing Indian” took place.31 The pageants staged abductions, wagon train attacks, and settler versus Indian battles in the style of Buffalo Bill’s famous wild west show. However, in Mormon pageants, it was common to portray Brigham Young as the great peacemaker and friend to the Indians who settled hostilities without violence. The time warp created by the pageant would close with a Brigham Young impersonator parlaying with the Indians and the smoking by all of a cedar bark peace pipe. Thus the savage/civilized dichotomy was resolved in favor of [169] civilization in Mormon popular historical expression. Such activities celebrated and maintained Mormons’ conception of themselves as less hostile to Native Americans than other whites—a conception backed up by the historical record.32
Rural village Mormons actively welcomed actual Native Americans who came to Pioneer Day to participate in pageants, compete in rodeos, ride in parades, and perform traditional dances. Sometimes local Native Americans obliged Mormon requests that they come “dressed as Indians” to add to the historical flavor of their Pioneer Day spectacle. Some Native Americans who came were Latter-day Saints themselves.33 Native Americans occasionally participated in Mormons’ raucous “playing Indian” but usually did not. Apparently, some Apaches near Snowflake found white peoples’ stereotypic interpretation of Indians’ recently abandoned way of life to be uproariously funny buffoonery.34 In 1910, a group of “highly decorated” Banock Indians from Idaho came as special invited guests to Salt Lake City’s Pioneer Day celebration. Upon someone’s suggestion, they took off after a Mr. Davis—who was dressed as a [170] Chinaman for the festival—with the mock intention of scalping him. Mr. Davis, however, escaped.35
Despite Pioneer Day’s pageantry of violence, Latter-day Saints have felt a special affinity for Native Americans. This is in part because after Native Americans, Mormons have the longest history of inhabitation in many parts of the West, and Mormons recognize Native Americans as a people who have suffered persecution, brutality, and violence greater even than their own.
The greatest reason for Mormons’ interest in Native Americans is theological. The Book of Mormon indicates that America’s aboriginal inhabitants are descended from a lost branch of the house of Israel making them a chosen people like the Mormons. Joseph Smith’s first major organized missionary effort was directed at Trail of Tears refugees camped on the Western bank of the Mississippi. Other revelations suggest to Latter-day Saints that Native Americans have a central role to play in preparing the Earth for the Second Coming of Christ.36 [171]
Frontier Mormons entertained a split consciousness about Native Americans. On one hand they were Lost Israel, allies, and spiritual brothers and sisters. On the other hand, Indians stole their horses, occasionally waged war against the Saints, and otherwise competed for scarce resources. Both aspects of the “Indian of the Mormon imagination” were on display on Pioneer Day. Most of the excitement came from depictions of the Indians as dangerous enemies but the pageants usually ritualistically reconciled “Indians” into their role as fellow Israelite friends of the Mormons. [172]
Why dress as Indians?: The question of why Mormons dressed as Indians was partially addressed in the previous section. However, the dynamics of members of one group adopting the personae of another antagonistic group partakes of a historical and cultural stream that runs longer and deeper than simply through the immediate interaction of Mormons and Indians in the American West.
In an essay about African Americans donning stylized Indian garb during New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, George Lipsitz suggests that the practice of non-Indians dressing as Native Americans to create festive public spectacle emerged from the immensely popular “Wild West” shows of Buffalo Bill Cody and others in the late nineteenth century.37 There is perhaps some influence from this popular culture tradition on Mormons’ dressing as Indians for Pioneer Day. However, Buffalo Bill for the most part employed real Native Americans in his shows, and the practice of “playing Indian” has deep roots and special symbolic potency in American culture that predates Buffalo Bill. Groups as diverse as the perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party, southern lynch mobs, and Joseph Smith’s assassins donned Indian garb not only to disguise their identity but to symbolically step outside the law and normal society.38 The ritual assumption of Indian identity by non-Native Americans had at least two major seemingly contradictory meanings [177] in American culture. Nothing better symbolized outsiderness and antagonism to “normal” white society than ritualistically assuming a Native American persona, yet nothing was more “American” than acting out as original Americans, “the children of nature” the “noble savages.” In so doing one entered a realm where real or mock violence was expected, but that violence was purifying and recalled visions of a mythical Edenic past. There is a magical, liberating, and dangerous power in becoming “the other.”39
The End of Pioneer Day carnivalesque?: Many of the carnivalesque aspects of mid-century Pioneer Days have disappeared today. Women hammering nails and men changing diapers do not invert social norms in the shocking ways they once did. In the late twentieth century, “play Indians” have all but disappeared from Mormon Country Pioneer Day celebrations as well. The need of Mormons to reduce anxiety over the close historical memory of the real threat of Indians has evaporated with time. Also, developing sensitivities since the 1960s about co-opting stereotyped features of another culture’s dress and customs for self-serving ends have contributed to the decline of Mormon impersonations of [178] Indians. After most others had disappeared, tiny isolated Flowell, Utah’s mock Indian raid tradition continued into the late twentieth century. Teenagers loved the excitement of it but parents had become increasingly embarrassed about, and sensitive to, its negative racial stereotypes, so they put a stop to it.40 Chapter Seven looks in more detail at the effect changing ethnic sensitivities in the late twentieth century have had on individual towns’ Pioneer Day celebrations.
Antecedents of Pioneer Day carnivalesque: In his book Singing the Master, an ethnographic reconstruction of corn-shucking harvest festivals in America’s plantation South, folklorist Roger Abrahams traces the roots of this cultural form back to harvest festivals in England. In medieval and early modern British harvest festivals, people paraded through the streets, displayed and consumed the fruits of the harvest, built bonfires, let their children run amok, and donned costumes to impersonate cultural outsiders such as Gypsies, Moors, or Mongol raiders.41 In an American Mormon context much of this would be the same except medieval Moorish impersonators would be Indian impersonators. Mormons as an emergent American sub-culture with genealogical roots in England re-fashioned the venerable British harvest festival tradition to serve a new people in a new context in new ways.
In the larger context of the United States, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Independence Day are America’s major holidays with harvest festival roots.42 [179] With similar origins and having experienced convergent evolution, Pioneer Day and Independence Day are close cousins as will be seen more fully in the next chapter. Pioneer Day, Independence Day, and Southern plantation harvest festivals (now extinct) are evolutionary branches from the same tree that still display some of the same cultural “genetic material” but have each adapted to the particular situations of their respective culture environments and ideological imperatives.
Regional Mormons and Catholicism: Civic Pioneer Day celebrations have displayed elements of the carnivalesque not so much because Mormon Country’s denizens are a post-colonial people upon whom the hegemony of the government, laws, and culture of the United States of America have been imposed—although this is certainly the case. Rather, Mormon like medieval Catholic carnivalesque expressions can be read as dual manifestations of the kind of activity that emerges from communities which conflate social, political, and religious meaning and powers. While some areas in the South have their “Baptist towns” and “Methodist towns” nowhere in America even approaches the religious homogeneity of the many contiguously-settled valleys of rural Mormon Country.
As one can draw useful interpretive parallels from the suggestion that Mormonism is an afterclap of Puritanism, one can do likewise with the suggestion that Mormonism, particularly in its regional homeland, is an afterclap of Medieval Christianity. The deep all pervasive Mormonness of the history, city planning, material landscape, religious climate, demographics (and in the nineteenth century and to some extent still today the hierarchical political, and communitarian economic, influence of the Church) in rural Mormon areas in [180] some ways even exceeds the Catholicity of Medieval Europe. In Europe, cultural links to the land extended far back into the pagan era and maintained much of the meaning from those times, whereas Utah’s dominant culture was already Mormon when it arrived to fashion connections to the land in Mormon ways from the start. Whatever residue of pagan culture Mormons brought with them to Utah had no pre-established connection with the physical environment and was just as imported as the people.
Mormons, Medieval Catholics, and Puritans shared the ideal of a religiously homogenous society. The Mormon Culture Region could make a case for being the most Medieval region in America. Pioneer Day is Mormondom’s Feast of Fools, and its rodeos carry on what cowboy ballad collector John Lomax calls the knightly tournament spirit of the “last cavaliers.”
Spanish Fork Pioneer Day: Pioneer Day in Spanish Fork, Utah presents a special case of Mormon/Catholic affinity as well as a special case of carnivalesque. Spanish Fork’s town holiday is called “Fiesta Days” in honor of wandering Franciscan padres Fray Francisco Anastanio Domíngues and Fray Silvestre Vélez de Escalante—the first white explorers into the regions eventually settled by the Mormons.43 According to local tradition, the town of Spanish Fork, named in honor of the Catholic fathers, is near the site of Domíngues and Escalante’s northernmost penetration during their travels in Utah.44 [181]
Even though Catholics never established a mission within the present boundaries of Mormon Country, Spanish Fork citizens honor their Spanish Catholic “heritage.” Spanish Fork’s overwhelmingly Anglo-Scandinavian Mormon citizens celebrate Pioneer Day in a stereotyped Spanish-themed manner with occasional Flamenco performances, and by naming their 10K run the “Speedy Spaniard” race. To celebrate their Catholic “heritage,” each year a group of Spanish Fork Mormons make a procession to the site where Domíngues and Escalante became the first people of European descent to view Utah Lake. There they erect a cross and hold a devotional program in honor of the exploring fathers.45 This is an especially curious cultural expression since Latter-day Saints scrupulously avoid using crosses as symbols of their own religious devotion.46 [182]
In its outward forms of creative cultural expression, Pioneer Day in Spanish Fork is multiply interpretable as signifying local historical consciousness, inter-religious respect, and boundary-switching inverted behavior of Anglo-Scandinavians “playing” Spaniards and Mormons “playing” Catholics. But in this case, unlike most mocking or irreverent carnivalesque, serious honor more than transgressive escape is enacted in a carnivalesque of respect.
Conclusion
People slip into carnivalesque modes of expression to let off steam, to loosen the tension inherent in any system of social organization, to experience history from the other side, and to escape the behavioral bounds cultures set for themselves. The idea of enactment and role-play enjoys a special place in Mormon culture and religion. In temple worship, Latter-day Saints participate in a sacred drama not only as observers of an enacted narrative of the Earth’s creative period, but also by symbolically playing the role of religious seekers with whom temple ceremony performers interact.47
While temples are the pinnacle of Latter-day Saint religious experience and taboo for temple endowed Mormons to discuss in detail, Pioneer Day in the Mormon Country is the most developed means of Mormon cultural expression. Like temples, but without their seriousness or religious imperatives, Pioneer Day is characterized by role playing, personae adoption, and reliving earlier times. [183] Unlike the temple ceremony which is the same in all the temples of the world, Pioneer Day, because it carries no theological significance, is highly adaptable to different local circumstances, as we will discover more fully in chapter seven.
In the light of Pioneer Day’s Puritan and Catholic European antecedents, the 24th of July is what might be called a festival of “restrained carnivalesque.” Community gatekeepers see that revelry is kept within bounds acceptable to the Lord. Pioneer Day, while honoring a sacred migration, is not in and of itself a religious event but a festive celebration. However, any distinction between the sacred and profane must be made carefully when describing Mormon cultural forms since Latter-day Saint cosmology does not acknowledge this distinction in the way other religions do, and Latter-day Saint religion emphatically encourages many festive activities other Christians only tolerate or even proscribe. [184]
1. Richard Bushman discusses a Mormon example of the problematic nature of tracing the “origins” of ideas and doctrines in his Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 3.
2. Doctrine and Covenants 131:7.
3. Doctrine and Covenants 29:34.
4. Seminal works making use of this distinction include Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1915); Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959); Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1969); and Rollo May, The Cry for Myth (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1991).
5. Isaiah 35:1; Doctrine and Covenants 117:7.
6. The issue of how rightly to celebrate religious festivals, or whether to celebrate them at all, has plagued Christendom since its earliest days when the celebration of Christ’s birth conflated with the festive and ribald Roman Saturnalia. The winter celebration of Christmas is a legacy of this blending. Competing, overlapping, frequently changing calendars and the lack of reliable information regarding the date of Jesus’ birth has led to Christendom finding no fully satisfactory solution to the “problem” of the pagan origins of Christmas to this day. Puritans in England and America legally proscribed the celebration of Christmas both for reasons having to do with its origins in Roman religion and for the way it was celebrated in folkways with “drinking, fighting, revelry, and squandering money.” The Puritans reasoned that to indeed celebrate Christ’s birth, it should be with prayer and pious contemplation. The Mormon incorporation of re-creation into the holy has made the question of how to celebrate Pioneer Day less problematic. See Penne L. Restad, Christmas in America: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1–19.
7. Restad, Christmas in America, 1–28. Restad’s study examines the extent to which celebratory traditions survived and refashioned themselves in trans-Atlantic European migrations.
8. R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 46. This image can also be traced to American revolutionary leaders’ abolishment of British national holidays and failure to institute American counterparts. Restad, Christmas in America, 20.
9. The carefully reasoned place of recreation in Puritan New England life is discussed in David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 146–51.
10. Thomas A. Underwood, “Mencken, H[enry] L[ouis],” in A Companion to American Thought, eds. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg (Oxford, and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), 447–48.
11. Beginning with Perry Miller in the 1950s, a renaissance of Puritan studies continues. See Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954) and T. Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
12. James B. Thayer, A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson (1884) as excerpted in William Mulder and A. Russell Mortensen, eds., Among the Mormons: Historic Accounts by Contemporary Observers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), 382–84.
13. David Brion Davis, “The New England Origins of Mormonism,” New England Quarterly 26 (1953): 147–68. Davis argues for a strong recapitulative connection. Grant Underwood, “The New England Origins of Mormonism Revisited,” The Journal of Mormon History 15 (1989): 15–25. Underwood argues that in the light of recent advances in Mormon historical scholarship, many of Davis’s conclusions are untenable.
14. D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: The Origins of Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1994). D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997). Quinn’s work clearly shows the New England ancestral makeup of the Mormon leadership from 1830 to the 1990s. For an alternate view see John Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3–59. Brooke shows that many Puritan-era Mormon ancestors were religious dissenters or otherwise on the fringes of society. But these discoveries do not change the fact that the stream of Mormon leadership genealogy runs squarely and almost exclusively through the heart of the New England Puritan cultural experience.
15. For a detailed treatment to this argument see Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience.
16. Jana K. Riess, “A Battle to be Won with the Bible and the School Book: Presbyterian Women Missionary Teachers in Utah, 1870–1890,” unpublished paper presented at the 1997 Mormon History Association meeting in Omaha, Nebraska.
17. Increase Mather, A Testimony against Several Profane and Superstitious Customs (Boston, 1688), 37.
18. Spring City, Utah community leader and telephone informant, interview by author, June 1995.
19. Steven L. Olsen, “Celebrating Cultural Identity,” 159–77.
20. Hagerman, Idaho non-LDS telephone informant, interview by author, June 1995. This informant suggested that some people were disappointed that the Mormons decided to stop putting on Pioneer Day since no other community celebration emerged to take its place. “I understand why the Mormons did what they did, and I don’t blame them,” she said.
21. Moab, Utah former Pioneer Day organizer and telephone informant, interview by author, June 1995. This informant expressed her displeasure that people would be so insensitive to Mormon culture that “we just had to stop.”
22. Diary of Orson S. Huntsman as copied by Thressia C. Huntsman as quoted in Carter, Heart Throbs of the West, vol. 7, 127.
23. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968). Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Principal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Susan Pendergast Shoelwer, “The Absent Other: Women in the Land and Art of the Mountain Men,” in Discovered Lands, Invented Places: Transforming Visions of the American West, eds. Jules David Prown, et. al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 135–65.
24. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Aristocracy of Culture,” Media, Culture, and Society 2 (1980): 237.
25. Snowflake, Arizona telephone informant, interview by author, June 1995. Spring City, Utah telephone informant, interview by author, July 1995.
26. Snowflake, Arizona telephone informant, interview by author, June 1995. Spring City, Utah telephone informant, interview by author, July 1995.
27. Several Snowflake, Arizona telephone informants, interviews by author, June 1995.
28. Edna Langston Pratt and Isabell Laub Curl as quoted in Carter, Heart Throbs of the West, vol. 7, 127–28.
29. Interviews with informants in several towns substantiate this as do the numerous newspaper accounts and journal entries from 1849 to the mid-1940s collected in Kate Carter’s “Celebrating the 24th of July,” Heart Throbs of the West, vol. 7, 89–136. Most picture and documentary evidence used here comes from Snowflake, Arizona and can be found in local historian Albert Levine’s works. See Albert J. Levine, From Indian Trails to Jet Trails: Snowflake’s Centennial History (Snowflake, Arizona: Snowflake Historical Society, 1977). Albert J. Levine, “Reminiscences of a Dude at the Snowflake Pioneer Celebration in the 1930s,” in Snowflake Historical Society Wagon Trails, 17 December 1976. Albert J. Levine, ed., Snowflake: A Pictorial Review 1878–1964 (no publication information).
30. The propriety of this sort of activity was questioned by some at the time, not so much because it might offend Native Americans to impersonate them (these concerns would come later and spell the end of most Mormon playings of “wild Indian”), but because some Mormons perceived a danger in letting young men run too free with their “savage” and disruptive impulses. Perhaps Lucy Flake’s concern about shooting comes from her unpleasant experiences at other celebrations where revelry got out of hand.
31. Levine, From Indian Trails to Jet Trails: Snowflake’s Centennial History.
32. See Dean L. May, Utah a People’s History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987).
33. Native American converts with enduring commitments to the Church have not yet come in the numbers Mormons have hoped for due to their millennial expectations. Most Native Americans living near Mormons have largely not been Latter-day Saint, but Native Americans have long been proportionately over-represented on Church membership rolls. Tim B. Heaton, “Vital Statistics,” in The Church and Society: Selections from the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1995), 526–52.
34. Levine, “Reminiscences of a Dude at the Snowflake Pioneer Celebration in the 1930s,” 3. Levine describes an Apache observer so overcome with laughter that he fell out of the tree from which he was watching the Mormons.
35. H. B. Folsom as quoted in Carter, Heart Throbs of the West, vol. 7, 100.
36. The following statement by Wilford Woodruff is often quoted as a clear summation of this idea: “I am looking for the fulfillment [sic] of all things that the Lord has spoken, and they will come to pass as the Lord God lives. Zion is bound to rise and flourish. The Lamanites will blossom as the rose on the mountains. I am willing to say here that, though I believe this, when I see the power of the nation destroying them from the face of the earth, the fulfillment [sic] of that prophecy is perhaps harder for me to believe than any revelation of God that I ever read. It looks as though there would not be enough left to receive the gospel; but notwithstanding this dark picture, every word that God has ever said of them will have its fulfillment, and they, by and by, will receive the gospel. It will be a day of God’s power among them, and a nation will be born in a day. Their chiefs will be filled with the power of God and receive the gospel, and they will go forth and build the new Jerusalem, and we shall help them. They are branches of the house of Israel, and when the fullness of the Gentiles has come in and the work ceases among them, then it will go in power to the seed of Abraham” (JD, 15:272, January 12, 1873). See also D&C 49:24–25: “But before the great day of the Lord shall come, Jacob shall flourish in the wilderness, and the Lamanites shall blossom as the rose. Zion shall flourish upon the hills and rejoice upon the mountains, and shall be assembled together unto the place which I have appointed.”
37. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 237.
38. Another item of dress used to symbolize outsiderness or the temporary revocation of usual order of things are the conical hats once worn by unruly schoolchildren, and still worn by Cajun Mardi Gras participants and the Ku Klux Klan. This kind of headwear seems to have antecedents in Medieval Europe in festival and court jester attire, both of which enjoyed a certain amount of special exemption from established norms of behavior and the reach of authority.
39. During the Cold War, when Americans’ chief antagonists had shifted to being the Soviet Empire, one of the most prestigious Air Force pilot assignments was to be in an “aggressor squadron” that for training purposes learned to think and fly like Soviet pilots. American aggressor pilots sang the Soviet Union’s anthem, adorned their briefing rooms with Soviet flags and other paraphernalia, and “acted Russian” as much as they could. Despite their deep assumption of Russian pilots’ personae they did not threaten the American institutions and culture they served, but validated it. Like Mormons dressing as Indians, aggressor squadrons ritualistically resolved the dichotomy of friend/enemy in favor of friends by becoming the enemy in ways that served the purposes of friends.
40. Flowell, Utah Pioneer Day organizer and telephone informant, interview by author, June 1995.
41. Roger D. Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South (New York: Penguin, 1992).
42. Restad, Christmas in America, 1–28.
43. Domíngues and Escalante were the first white explorers of the regions eventually settled by the Mormons. During their 1776 expedition from Santa Fe, they were the first Europeans to see Utah Lake and heard reports of the great Salt Lake. See Felipe Fernández-Armesto, ed., The Times Atlas of World Exploration (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 90–93, 254.
44. Spanish Fork, Utah Fiesta Days festival organizer and telephone informant, interview by author, June, 1995.
Actually, the fathers went further north to the latitude of present day Provo along the Wasatch front. Earlier in their expedition, they crossed the Green River even further north near present day Vernal.
Even though it was shown in 1940 that Coronado’s lieutenant don García Lopez de Cárdenas’ 1540 expedition never entered the present day boundaries of Utah, Domíngues and Escalante were still apparently not the first Europeans to “discover” Utah. Donald C. Cutter shows that Juan María Antonio Rivera turned back to Santa Fe near present day Moab making him the first known European to enter the present day boundaries of Utah. See Donald C. Cutter, “Prelude to a Pageant in the Wilderness,” Western Historical Quarterly 8 (January 1977): 5–14. See also Ted J. Warner, “The Domíngues-Escalante Expedition,” in Atlas of Utah, project director, Deon C. Greer (Ogden and Provo: Weber State College and Brigham Young University, 1981), 78–79.
Domíngues and Escalante themselves described seeing Utah Lake from the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon as the emotional high point of their journey. See Dean L. May, Utah: A People’s History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987), 28.
45. Spanish Fork, Utah Fiesta Days festival organizer and telephone informant, interview by author, June 1995.
46. Latter-day Saints avoid using the cross for two main reasons: (1) They prefer to remember Christ’s resurrection as more significant than his death, and (2) they regard it as a material symbol introduced by Emperor Constantine for political reasons after the primitive Church had fallen into apostasy.
47. For a treatment by Latter-day Saint authorities on the meaning of the temple, see Boyd K. Packer, The Holy Temple (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1980); and James E. Talmage, The House of the Lord (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1971).
