Being thus imbued with profound significance in its dual role as a recapitulation of sacred history and as the vanguard of America’s prophetic destiny, the pioneer trek was charged with the potential to become a long-lasting cultural memory and the subject of generations of commemoration. In fact, the first public celebration of the pioneer trek took place on July 24, 1849, only two years to the day after Brigham Young’s party entered the Salt Lake Valley. Events included a large outdoor dinner, parades, music, and numerous speeches and sermons that focused on the great future that lay ahead of the Saints now that they had begun to gather in Zion.1 The pioneer era was already being celebrated when it had barely even begun.
The 1849 Pioneer Day celebration was a harbinger of things to come. From this point on, the pioneer mythos grew and shot tendrils into all aspects of Mormon cultural expression. Today, several interrelated institutions and genres of activity support and recreate pioneer memories. Ten of the most visible and significant are: commemorative organizations, markers and statues, song, art, literature, museums, dramatic presentations, living history, oral tradition, and July 24th Pioneer Day celebrations. [46]
Commemorative organizations: Of course The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself is active in maintaining pioneer memories and utilizing these stories as a means of inspiring today’s Mormons to remain true to the legacy of faith bequeathed to them. Church leaders mention the pioneers in public sermons, commission works of art in their honor, support museums, and regularly use images of wagons and handcarts in their official publications. However, the Church has relinquished much its role as maintainer of popular celebrations of pioneer heritage to several voluntary organizations. The most significant of these are the Sons of the Utah Pioneers (SUP) and the generally more active and ambitious Daughters of Utah Pioneers (DUP). These groups modeled themselves after the Daughters of the American Revolution, and like the DAR they dedicate themselves to historical preservation of a particular event by collecting relics and documents, staffing museums, publishing books and pamphlets, and organizing commemorative occasions. Also in the spirit of the DAR, the DUP restricts its membership to women with pioneer ancestry. They are the self-appointed guardians of Mormonism’s pioneer heritage by virtue of their birthright. Another group, Days of ’47 Inc., grew out of the SUP in 1947 to take over the Pioneer Day festivities in Salt Lake City. They conceive themselves as a public interest organization responsible for planning civic events that serve the whole Salt Lake City community and not just LDS Church members.
Markers and monuments: The DUP, SUP, the Mormon Trail Association, the state of Utah, the National Park Service, the LDS Church, and other organizations erect and maintain monuments and plaques to the pioneers at various sites along the Mormon Trail and throughout the Mormon West. Stanley [47] B. Kimball’s Discovering Mormon Trails has been a popular guide book to these resources.2 The most impressive and famous is the “This Is the Place” Monument where Emigration Canyon empties into Salt Lake City. From atop his perch on a 60-foot-high column of granite, a bronze Brigham Young along with Mormon leaders Heber C. Kimball and Wilford Woodruff scan the Valley their people colonized and remind today’s Utahans of their legacy. A state commission made up of people from various faiths designed and built the current marker in 1937 in anticipation of the 1947 Pioneer Day centennial. In addition to Mormon leaders, seventeen bronze friezes and two smaller statues adorning the 206-foot-long base of the monument the monument honor various trappers, immigrants, Native Americans, and Spanish and U.S. government explorers.3[48]
Song: The pioneer period was the most fruitful hymn writing era in Mormon history. Most of the hymns unique to Mormonism were written at this time. These hymns dwelt on the hardships of the trail to Utah, the importance of leaving Babylon to gather in God’s kingdom, and on the religious, political, and economic deliverance the Saints expected to find in fleeing to Zion. Many of these hymns, such as “Come, Come Ye Saints,” “Israel, Israel God is Calling,” and “High on A Mountain Top” survive to this day as Mormon favorites. Through the efforts of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, “Come, Come Ye Saints” has even become a popular song in the hymnals of several other denominations. The song is Mormonism’s chief contribution to American hymnology. Others such as “Come Haste To the Valley,” “Farewell to Thee England,” and “A Word to the Saints Who are Gathering,” have faded into obscurity.
A hymn could survive if its theme could be reinterpreted as relevant in a post-Gathering Church. In the case of the “Handcart Song,” the most famous Mormon folk tune, the words of the hymn were changed to transform it from a marching song sung by the trekkers themselves to a children’s hymn that remembered their efforts.4 The song was originally sung:
Ye Saints that dwell on Europe’s shores Prepare yourselves with many more To leave behind your native land For sure God’s Judgments are at Hand
Chorus: For some must push and some must pull As we go marching up the hill, As merrily on the way we go [51] Until we reach the Valley, oh!
Today the hymn goes:
When pioneers moved to the West With courage strong they met the test They pushed their handcarts all day long And as they pushed they sang this song: Chorus.5
Art: In the later part of the nineteenth century the Church sent some of Mormondom’s most promising painters to Paris with the purpose of training them as official artists for the Church painting portraits, decorating temples, and visually honoring Mormon history. While relatively few of the artists who have contributed to the Latter-day Saint artistic “canon” went to Paris, the Paris Art mission was an important early milestone in establishing a lasting tradition of Mormon art and a relationship of patronage between the LDS Church and Mormon artists. As might be expected, much of this art has focused on the pioneer experience. Pioneer “high art” invariably depicts scenes of tragedy, e.g. burying of those who succumbed to the elements on the trail; heroism, e.g. young men carrying the aged, the young, and the sick across rivers; or triumph, e.g. groups of pioneers entering the valley. In Mormon art one rarely sees depictions of the pioneers stopping for a rest or enjoying themselves around a campfire. [52]
Some of the most frequently reproduced Mormon historical images come from Danish convert C. C. A. Christensen’s “Mormon Panorama”—a series of 22 eight-by-ten foot paintings on one long canvas that recount dramatic episodes in the history of the Restoration. During the nineteenth century the Panorama was scrolled on two long poles and each painting was shown individually and sequentially accompanied by a dramatic narration often performed by Christensen himself. In an era before movies and television, the panorama toured Mormon settlements and was used in proselytizing illiterate Native Americans. Panoramas were common throughout America in the nineteenth century and the “Mormon Panorama” may be the last surviving example of this genre.6 The first panel of the Panorama (now lost unfortunately) depicted Joseph Smith’s first vision and the Panorama climaxed with the last few panels depicting the exodus and arrival of the pioneers in Utah. In culminating with the arrival in Utah the Panorama helped contribute to a sense among Mormons that this event constituted the “end of sacred history,” or at least the end of the heroic era of Mormon history.7
Pioneer themes are also a distinctive feature of Utah folk, commercial, and tourist art. Covered wagons and handcarts adorn products ranging from quilts to refrigerator magnets and help peddle products as diverse as condominium time-shares and t-shirts celebrating the International Olympic committee’s awarding the 2002 Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City (fig. 7 & 8). [53]
Figure 7. A Salt Lake Tribune Advertisement, 15 July 1995. [57]
Figure 8. A Salt Lake Tribune Advertisement, 15 July 1995. [57]
Literature: The pioneer trek-memorializing book and pamphlet series published by the DUP under the long and vigorous leadership of Kate B. Carter were widely read in the past but are lesser known today.8 However, the internationally read official Church magazines regularly recount faith-promoting episodes from 1847–1869 pioneer history. Bookstores catering to LDS clientele throughout the American West sell historical novels and children’s books featuring pioneer themes. In high-brow Mormon literary circles, many critics consider Virginia Sorensen’s 1949 novel The Evening and the Morning to be the best Mormon novel yet published. Its plot unfolds in the context of six days of reminiscing around and during a 1920s July 24th Pioneer Day celebration in rural Sanpete County, Utah.9 Author Gerald Lund’s series of historical novels, The Work and the Glory, has achieved the greatest popular and financial success in the 1990s, and perhaps ever, for Mormon literature. As with the “Mormon Panorama” these novels climax and end with the pioneer’s arrival in the Salt Lake Valley reflecting a common cut-off point of popular interest in Mormon history. The introduction to the first book of popular Mormon author Dean Hughes’s Children of the Promise series set in 1940s Salt Lake City self-consciously states that it sets out [59] to explore an important era in Church history whose events are not often recounted.10
Museums: The LDS Church’s Museum of Church History and Art houses hundreds of paintings on pioneer themes and displays pioneer artifacts in a walk-through exhibit that recapitulates pioneer chronology. The DUP’s far less polished but even more well-stocked Pioneer Memorial Museum in Salt Lake City bills itself as the “world’s largest collection of pioneer artifacts”11 and has enshrined not only such notable antiquarian items as Brigham Young’s wagon but numerous pistols, blankets, toothbrushes, and other items brought by the pioneers to Utah. Scores of smaller DUP “relic halls” scattered throughout the Mormon West have similar collections of local history artifacts.
Dramatic presentations: Mormons have long used theater as a means of transferring the memory of significant historical occurrences to those who did not live through them. Since their earliest arrival in Utah, Mormons have commemorated their trek in various dramatic productions. Since its composition in conjunction with the 1947 pioneer centennial, playwright Crawford Gates’s musical Promised Valley has been a favorite of professional and community theater companies throughout the Mormon West. In honor of the 1997 [60] sesquicentennial of the pioneer’s arrival in Utah, the Church commissioned a new play with the intention that it be performed in local congregations worldwide.12
In a cultural expression similar to theater but on a grander scale, Mormon-sponsored historical pageants draw tens of thousands of Mormons and Gentiles alike to Hill Cumorah, New York; Nauvoo, Illinois; Independence, Missouri (all places with historical significance to Mormons); the temple grounds in Manti, Utah, and Oakland, California; and most recently at the country music Mecca of Branson, Missouri. These extravagant spectacles employ hundreds of young Mormon volunteers as cast members and utilize spectacular pyrotechnics and visual effects. They recreate and celebrate historical episodes from the founding of America, the Book of Mormon, and especially in the case of the Nauvoo, Manti, Oakland, and Branson pageants, the trek of Utah’s pioneers.13 Recently, the pioneer trek worked its way into film when it served as the climax of a big-budget, 70-millimeter film, Legacy, that has become a major tourist attraction in Salt Lake City.
Living history: Historian Jay Anderson explains that living history is people employing the clothing, tools, and manner of a bygone era to “time travel” (or create the experiential impression of going back in time) from the mundane present to a reverenced past.14 Time travel through living historic reenactment is a [61] particularly attractive prospect to Mormons, whose past is not only reverenced but sacred. Not long after the end of the pioneer period, Mormons began celebrating Pioneer Day by donning gingham dresses and sun bonnets, or straw hats and boots, in emulation of their ancestors. This practice had already begun while many trek participants were still living. While pioneer garb—often of dubious similarity to actual pioneer fashions—is sometimes worn for a party at the local church meetinghouse, in other cases it is a facet of participation in a pageant or parade where the participant also pulls a handcart, rides in a wagon or delivers an oration in pioneer persona.
The State of Utah also honors pioneers through its maintenance of Pioneer Trail State Park, which houses a model pioneer village staffed by living history enactors. “Old Deseret” is a composite historic settlement, representing Utah life from 1847 to 1869. In a major park renewal project that took place in the late 1990s, the park’s curators debated about whether “generic” or markedly Mormon pioneers would be depicted in the living historical displays modeled after similar enterprises at Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg and Massachusetts’ Plimouth Plantation. While detractors feared that actors portraying Mormon pioneers would put-off certain prejudiced potential visitors, the winning faction maintained that tourists would be shocked not to find Mormon pioneers at a Utah historic theme park.15 A similar enterprise, “Sons of the Utah Pioneers Village,” is an attraction at Lagoon—Utah’s chief amusement park. [62]
In modern Mormon country, youth and young adult groups often load bare necessities onto handcarts and rough it in the wilderness for several days seeking reform, self-awareness, increased teamwork, and / or challenging escapism from the banalities of suburban living. Organizations ranging from rehabilitation efforts for delinquent teenagers such as the Utah-based “Challenger” and “Anasazi” programs, to the decidedly sober and ambitious Brigham Young University student government use this strategy.16 People often return from these “dude pioneering” struggles with feelings of renewal and betterment not unlike those reported by returnees from dude ranches.
BYU student association president Wesley McDougal said the main purpose of the 1995 “Leadership Trek” he organized was to train new leaders and bond the disparate student service organizations of the university more closely together. Historians of Mormonism suggest that developing leadership and creating a sense of unity and identity through shared experience is exactly what the 1847–69 trek accomplished for the whole of the Church. Surely, McDougal hoped that his efforts would recapitulate this effect for the smaller world of BYU student government using a particularly resonant symbol (the handcart) with which all the participants would be familiar. [63]
Until 1997, the most ambitious assumption of pioneer personae took place during the SUP’s 1947 centennial recreation of the advance party’s journey from Nauvoo to the Salt Lake Valley. Great care was taken to include the same number of participants in the right male-to-female and child-to-adult ratios, to travel the same number of miles per day, and to camp in the same sites as Brigham Young’s party did. Unfortunately, the disruption caused by World War II scuttled plans to travel in real covered wagons, so canvas-covered automobiles adorned with plywood oxen jutting from their hoods served as substitutes.17
For the 1997 sesquicentennial, thousands of Mormons and Western history buffs recapitulated the trek again in a way that strove not to exactly recapitulate any particular one of the nineteenth-century pioneer companies, but to capture the “spirit and purpose” of the whole 1847–1869 plains crossing experience.18 This time real wagons and handcarts were used and a core group of participants strove for authenticity down to the last detail of costume and cooking while others came as they were. Some walked or rode wagons the whole way from Nauvoo to Salt Lake City, other signed up to walk or ride for only a few days. Regional newspapers, Church magazines, and Internet sites and news groups followed the progress of this endeavor. Church public relations work focused on raising positive national awareness through news coverage of sesquicentennial activities [65] including the trek recapitulation. By the end of the trek, it had become a minor world-wide media phenomenon.19
Oral tradition: Perhaps the practice most responsible for keeping the pioneer memory alive is talking about them. It happens formally and informally at church and on special occasions such as Pioneer Day. For many Mormons, pioneer stories are part of their oral family history and shared stories of heroic ancestors help bind together extended families whose filial piety focuses on the pioneer era of their ancestry. Traditionally, in talking about pioneers, Mormons express respect and gratitude for their accomplishments and remind themselves of their duty to live true to their memory and carry on the work they began.20 These stories are also provide humorous release and are used by storytellers to illustrate principles of faith, dedication, and commitment that Mormons still find relevant today.
Since the 1950s, folklorists and their students at Utah State University and Brigham Young University have amassed in the folklore archives of both institutions a prodigious collection of transcribed folklore about pioneers from the Mormon oral narrative tradition. The living dean of Mormon folklore, William A. Wilson, considers the large body of pioneer narratives to be the Latter-day Saints’ “most gripping cycle of stories.”21[66]
Below are three examples drawn from Brigham Young University’s archive that give a sense of how late twentieth-century Mormons of pioneer descent maintain a living connection to the sacred past of their family and their faith.22 The theme of carrying on with the Saints toward Zion despite families torn apart by conversion and death dominates these stories. Mormon folklore touches repeatedly on this theme highlighting a central value of Mormon culture. Story #1 shows a striking way in which material objects link Mormons to the pioneer stories of their ancestors. Stories such as #3 show that while humor is absent in pioneer art, it laces oral narratives accounts of the trek. This story also deals with tension between genders over the value of religion and personal belongings set against the need to gather.
#1
My great grandmother was a member of one of the numerous pioneer companies that came across the plains to Utah. One night, when the company was within the region of Wyoming, my great grandmother slept next to a little girl. The weather was especially bad and the temperature that night went far below zero. When they awoke the next morning, they found that the little girl had frozen to death and my great grandmother’s long hair was frozen to the stiff body. The only way they could get them separated was to cut my great grandmother’s hair. The pair of scissors they used have been passed on from generation to generation since that time and are now in the possession of my aunt.
(Collected December 1965 by Mary Strong in Springville, Utah. The narrator is a woman.) [67]
#2
The McCareys were among the several thousand Mormons who lost all their worldly possessions in the tragic mid-winter exodus from their beloved homes in Nauvoo, [Illinois]. With little food and scant protection from the elements, they suffered greatly from hunger and disease at Winter Quarters, [Iowa], and during their long migration to Salt Lake City. Yet on reaching the Platte River crossing, they were still in sufficiently good condition to kneel together and thank the Lord for getting them through the worst part of the journey.
During the river crossing, cholera broke out among the members of the company. The terrible disease raged throughout the camp. Dozens died. It was necessary for James McCarey to assist in digging graves for the victims. James was a willing worker and finished three graves that October morning, even though he began to feel a little ill as he started the third. A short time after the last grave was completed, James was dead from the effects of cholera. His young daughters Victoria and Mary helped their mother wrap him in an old blanket, place him in the grave, and cover him with the dirt he had spaded up two hours earlier.
(Collected December 1964 by Steven C. Walker from his mother in Spanish Fork, Utah. Walker is the great-great-grandson of one of the little girls who helped bury her father.)
#3
Some ancestor of mine, I don’t know exactly who it was, but it was some lady, was coming across the plains in a covered wagon she was sharing with some other folks. Well, they got so far and the wagon wouldn’t go any further, it was too heavy, so they told the folks that they’d have to leave behind some of their belongings. They went a little farther and it still got to be too heavy, so the folks had to eliminate some more of their personal belongings. When they finally reached the Salt Lake Valley, they unloaded the wagon. What did they find then, with many of their belongings gone, but a whole collection of big rocks that my ancestor had been collecting all along the way.
(Collected by Peggy Hansen in July 1971 in Provo, Utah. Told by Judy Bentley who learned this story from her own father. He related the story in a Mormon gathering some time ago, when [68] different members were requested to relate pioneer tales of their ancestors crossing the plains.)
The number of family pioneer stories such as these turned in to the BYU folklore archive have steadily declined since the 1960s.23 This may be the result of changing emphasis among different folklore professors at BYU and / or the increasing percentage of students whose parents were converts to Mormonism. It may also simply reflect the fading significance of pioneers and the increased number of generations between story-tellers and those who experienced the events. Whether or not the 1997 sesquicentennial prompts a long-term revival of the pioneer stories genre of Mormon folklore remains to be seen.
Pioneer Day parades: The most well-developed expressions of the pioneers’ importance in Mormon cultural memory are the annual July 24th “Pioneer Day” celebrations. In honor of the pioneers, costumed recreations of pioneer events, commemorative lectures at local Church buildings, and especially parades are held on this day in over 80 towns and cities throughout the Mormon West. Sociologist Thomas O’Dea has called Pioneer Day “the greatest Mormon Holiday.”24 In most communities where it is observed, Pioneer Day functions outstrip in participation and significance even those surrounding the Fourth of July. The saga of the pioneers is especially well suited to commemoration in a parade format. As trek reenactors parade down various main streets, they perform “micro-treks” that recapitulate in miniature the events that they honor. [69]
Being the end point of the Mormon trail and the geographic center of Mormondom, Salt Lake City hosts the largest celebration of pioneer heritage in North America—the annual month-long Days of ’47 civic celebration. After Pasadena, California’s Rose Bowl Parade and New York City’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Salt Lake City’s Days of ’47 celebration boasts the third largest annual parade in the United States, with 150,000 to 300,000 spectators lining the streets and simultaneous telecasts in seven states.25 Floats with pioneer themes and pioneer reenactors riding wagons and pushing handcarts are central features of this event.
To provide historical background for making sense of the contemporary Pioneer Day celebrations analyzed in later chapters, it is useful to examine the origin and evolution of Pioneer Day celebrations. Unlike other holiday traditions whose antecedents and influences are often multiple and ancient, the origin of Pioneer Day celebrations can be pin-pointed in time. This is not to say that the forms of Pioneer Day celebratory practice were not influenced by preceding and surrounding cultural patterns, but these forms were given their current meaning and set on their current course of development on July 24th, 1849 when the first Mormon Pioneer Day was celebrated.
To a remarkable degree, the first Pioneer Day etched grooves along which celebratory activity has flowed to this day. The general conception and types of activities that characterize Pioneer Day remain surprisingly similar even though some forms and sensibilities have changed with the times. [70]
The features of the first “Pioneer Day” were strongly influenced by the concerns of Mormondom in the late 1840s. As the years progressed, the shape of participation in Pioneer Day manifested the evolving, often tense, relationship between Mormondom and the United States government. In March of 1849, the Mormons petitioned Congress for a territorial government. The request Dr. John M. Bernhisel carried to Washington D.C. proposed Brigham Young as territorial governor and included an endorsement by Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois as well as the supporting signatures of numerous Latter-day Saints.26
After this petition left for Washington, the provisional government of Deseret held its first session in Salt Lake City on July 2, 1849. Full of enthusiasm about their new society and eager to enjoy greater autonomy than that which would be provided by territorial administration, the Deseret legislature decided to supersede the territorial petition with a memorial proposing Deseret’s admittance to the Union as a state. They quickly drafted a state constitution and elected Almon W. Babbitt as a delegate to congress and sent him to Washington to plead their case.27
No resolution on either measure was announced until September 9, 1850, when President Millard Fillmore signed legislation making Utah a territory. News of this decision did not reach Utah until January of 1851. During the summer and fall of 1849, in the absence of information, Mormondom bristled with optimism, entertained grand visions of its potential, and reveled in the power of [71] self-determination and government-making. Minds were turned to romantic nationalist plans and ideas. Full of confidence, the Provisional Government of Deseret went ahead and made laws and passed measures—most of which were later adopted by the Territorial Legislature.28
This is the political climate in which the first Pioneer Day took place so close to 1849’s 4th of July. Edward H. Anderson identifies three issues that were uppermost in the minds of the organizers and participants of the first Pioneer Day celebration: (1) American patriotism surrounding Independence Day that was reinforced by the fact that Utah now lay within the boundaries of the United States of America since the victorious 1848 end of the Mexican War in which Mormons participated one year before; (2) the second anniversary of the Latter-day Saints’ entrance into the Great Salt Lake Valley; and (3) the hope of entering the Union with the autonomous rights and privileges of a full-fledged state.29
At 7:00 a.m. on July 24th, 1849, cannon fire and martial music awakened Salt Lake City’s inhabitants for the first “July 24th Celebration.”30 (It was not known as Pioneer Day until all of the Nauvoo’s inhabitants who were coming had by about 1850.) In the brush and timber provisional tabernacle called “the Bowery” on Temple Square, the Saints gathered to enjoy “music, firing of musketry and artillery, shouts and hurrahs, the unfolding and hoisting on a large [72] liberty pole of an immense national flag made by the ‘Mormon women.’”31 A procession followed consisting of such features a brass band, 24 bishops carrying banners of their respective wards, twenty-four young women each carrying a Bible and Book of Mormon with one carrying a banner proclaiming “Hail to Our Chief.” One young man in the procession, Richard Ballantyne, carried a copy of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States which he solemnly presented to Brigham Young with a prepared speech reaffirming the sacredness of these founding American documents, Latter-day Saint loyalty to their ideals, and Latter-day Saint fealty to Brigham Young as “our future governor and defender of our rights.” This was followed by three cheers of “Long live the Governor of the State of Deseret.”32
Mormon Apostle Erastus Snow then read the Declaration of Independence to the assembled crowd and led them in a “Hosanna Shout”—a Mormon practice recapitulating ancient Israel—reserved for only the holiest and happiest of occasions such as temple dedications. Feasting, games, and contests followed the procession and presentations. Sixty Indians as well as hundreds of Gentile immigrants on their way to California celebrated together with the Saints.33
The Mormons’ sense of Americanness and their association of the first Pioneer Day with Independence Day can be seen in Richard Ballantyne’s calling July 24, 1849, a “celebration of our Independence.”34 Brigham Young underscored [73] this parallel, as well as displayed his practical-minded sense of humor, by remarking on the first Pioneer Day, “The reason we are celebrating the twenty-fourth instead of the Fourth of July is that twenty more days were needed for some of our vegetables to mature. We waited so that we could have beets and cucumbers for our feast today.”35
On the first Pioneer Day, martial bands, veterans groups, and general militaristic participation were established as appropriate features. The especially patriotic and Americanist tone surrounding the special circumstances of 1849 have not been as pronounced in subsequent celebrations, except during war-years.36 Still, a flag raising ceremony is standard on any year for any Pioneer Day celebration in the United States.
As later chapters will show, the principle of community inclusion, especially of Native Americans, continued and grew in importance over the years. The nature of this inclusion, and in many communities, the nature of the celebration itself, responded to the broad systematic rethinking of American race-relations that happened during the 1960s. Feasting, sports, contests, and games continue to dominate Pioneer Day celebrations while the procession has evolved into a parade as the central focused event in most communities. In many smaller communities, cannon firing, anvil blasting, fire engine racing, or some other raucous enterprise still wakes the community for the day’s festivities. [74]
The hosanna shout has disappeared as have the features of Pioneer Day that focus on Mormon hopes for immanent endowment of autonomy. Today, the holiday is much more retrospective than forward looking and Mormons no longer hope for an immediate attainment of political self-determination for their geographic Kingdom.
In the nineteenth century, Mormons and antagonistic Gentiles held very different views about the significance of Pioneer Day. To Mormons, July 24th was an extension and reaffirmation of their exceptionally strong patriotism as loyal citizens especially protected in their unpopular beliefs and practices by uniquely American constitutional liberties. To their Gentile detractors, Pioneer Day seemed clear evidence of Mormons’ split allegiance between the United States and Deseret that favored Mormon theocracy over American democracy. The “Hail to Our Chief” banner marched in the 1849 procession could have just as easily referred to Brigham Young as President Fillmore. To Mormons, such expressions made patriotic sense; to the Gentiles such expressions were highly worrisome and eventually contributed to U.S. government punitive intervention in Utah.
On July 24th 1857, while celebrating Pioneer Day in Big Cottonwood Canyon with an encampment of Saints, a rider brought word to Brigham Young that the United States Army was on its way to Utah to “put down rebellion” and remove Brigham from office as Territorial governor.37 It struck Brigham Young and the Latter-day Saints as particularly ironic that the Mormons would learn of [75] the U.S. Army’s imminent invasion of Utah on a day its citizens devoted to celebrating their patriotism. According to Mormon leader Orson F. Whitney, on this day “the stars and stripes were unfurled from the summits of two of the loftiest peaks surrounding the encampment; also from the tops of two of the tallest trees.”38
To Col. Albert Sidney Johnston who led the occupational force, it was appropriate that his Army’s arrival should spoil the Mormons’ celebration of their foundation of a political domain incompatible with, and outside the pale of, American civilization. While his expedition turned out to be an embarrassing fiasco for President Buchanan, and while many of its long term goals were sidetracked by the Civil War, The “Mormon War” did remove Brigham Young as governor and signaled the beginning of the federal government’s successful campaign against Mormon polygamy and theocracy.39[76]
In the later nineteenth century, invitation to, and participation in, July 24th celebrations were litmus tests of the tensions of the day. After the failure of Reconstruction in the South, the federal government took up the more manageable task of “reconstructing” Utah. It made no ham-handed use of federal troops this time, but relied instead on legislation, federal marshals to arrest polygamists, and forced receivership of the territory under a five-man Utah commission selected by congress to run the territory and disenfranchise the Church.
In the 1880 Jubilee celebration of the organization of the Church, while Mormons prepared for an especially extravagant Pioneer Day, Salt Lake City Gentiles under the direction of Utah’s Governor Eli H. Murray planned a counter-celebration on the 4th of July. There was a small parade with a large group of spectators. Murray conspicuously snubbed Brigham Young and no Mormons were invited to participate. To the Latter-day Saints, the Gentiles’ message about Mormon unworthiness to participate in Independence Day celebrations was made clear.
For their celebration on the 24th, the Mormons sent invitations to Governor Murray and other federal officials. Most accepted their invitations. Governor Murray’s acceptance letter was especially gracious. He said he would be delighted to honor “the Pioneers, [for their role] in opening up the great west and this beautiful valley.” However, apparently after some consultation, Governor Murray and all the federal officials decided to stay away from the Mormon [78] celebration lest their presence aid Mormons in their efforts in presenting a respectable public image before the country.40
By 1880, Pioneer Day parades included 1847–50 pioneers as honored participants in the parade.41 Also, the practice of floats creating scenes of American history beginning with Plymouth Rock and leading up to representations of Mormon pioneers “attired in old fashioned style and surrounded with rude furniture and implements” had been established.42
Pioneer Day became a showcase for what we today might call cultural diversity—such as it existed in Utah. In 1883 members of the Chinese community in the town of Bountiful carried a dragon in the Pioneer Day Parade. According to observer Annie C. Carr “The din of pans . . . could be heard for blocks.”43 Mormons prided Deseret as a mini-melting pot and the Church as an umbrella under which people from all cultures could find refuge. During the 1880 Salt Lake City Pioneer Day celebration, the aged Apostle Orson Pratt organized an event designed to show the varied backgrounds of the Latter-day Saints gathered in Zion. While Elder Pratt spoke, 25 Mormons in national costume arranged themselves on a platform before the assembled Pioneer Day celebrants. They represented their lands of origin and all 25 “countries in which the mission work of the church had been introduced.”44[79]
In most communities, Mormons were especially eager to ensure Indian participation by inviting nearby Native American communities to feast, march in the parade “in Indian regalia,” and participate in historical recreations. Many late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century accounts tell of Indians, and / or whites dressed as such, abducting parade participants, willing and unwilling, who were later released after parlaying with the Brigham Young impersonator. In other instances, as was often the case, the abductee would be burned at the stake and later be found out to be made of straw.
Over half of the accounts of various towns’ late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Pioneer Days collected by Kate Carter for Heart Throbs of the West relate this apparently very popular practice of faux attacks and abductions perpetrated in front of surprised audiences by Indian impersonators and sometimes real Native Americans. These raids seem to have been similar to Santa Claus stories in that children were led to believe that they were real but by adulthood people realized they were a sham. The place of Native Americans in Pioneer Day celebrations is treated in more detail in chapter six.
The 1890 manifesto announcing that the Church would cease sanctioning plural marriage marked the beginning of a new era in Church policy and heralded the beginning of reconciliation between the Church’s hierarchy and the United States’ Government, as well as between Mormons and Gentiles in Utah.
At the Semi-Centennial Pioneer Day Celebration in 1897, one enthusiastic observer proclaimed, [80]
The Mardi Gras festival and fiestas of other cities . . . are not to be compared with the splendors of the past five days in this city. Gorgeous floats, which were never equaled in number or in effect, thousands of marching children, a band of pioneers who, 50 years ago, first turned their eyes upon this valley in all the beauty of its barrenness; the richest products of the field, the mine and the factory, and above all, an American manhood and womanhood which are the crowning glories of the state—.45
The positive mention of mining in the same sentence as “products of the field” would have been odd in Brigham Young’s day when the Church encouraged agriculture and strongly discouraged the development of Utah’s mineral wealth while influential Gentile developers encouraged just the opposite.46
As tensions eased, Pioneer Day lost its meaning as a shibboleth dividing Mormons and Gentiles and quickly began to serve again as a community celebration in the various municipalities where it was held. The Salt Lake City parade of 1910 highlighted the degree of rapprochement that had occurred in the twenty years since 1890. In 1857, Mormon guerrillas were burning U.S. Army supply trains and in 1880 federal appointees in Salt Lake City thought it best to steer clear of Pioneer Day. But in 1910 Mormons responded enthusiastically to the War Department’s authorization for troops from Ft. Douglas to march a full brigade in the Pioneer Day parade.47 Long forgotten were the tense days of Ft. [81] Douglas’ founding when Col. Patrick O’Connor moved his garrison north from Camp Floyd 50 miles south of Salt Lake to give his artillery immediate command of Brigham Young’s house and Temple Square from Ft. Douglas’ perch in the hills east of the Salt Lake Valley.48
Pioneer Day’s spread across the West closely followed the general pattern of Mormon colonization. With little resources and other more pressing concerns, a new village’s first Pioneer Day or two was often little more than a religious service. Soon after its founding however, each new community would begin celebrating Pioneer Day following established patterns. Mormon villagers saw being able to put on a decent Pioneer Day celebration as a sign of successful colonization. For example, Jennie Walker Johnson records that the Pioneer Day celebration during Pleasant Grove, Utah’s founding year of 1850 was “in the nature of a religious meeting. The program consisted of songs and speeches and experiences of the founders of the community. A little later parades were instituted as part of the enjoyment” and the celebration took on more of the tone of revelry.49
With its large Gentile population, as the Church’s headquarters, and as the capital of the Territory of Utah, Salt Lake City’s Pioneer Day celebration reflected the tightening and releasing of grand tensions between Mormondom and the American government. In the isolated villages of Deseret, Pioneer Day was relatively unaffected by such issues and reflected the more local concerns of each [82] specific community. The challenges encountered by latter-twentieth-century Pioneer Day celebrations, and the special concerns some of them have faced will be dealt with in later chapters.
Conclusion: Through these genres of pioneer remembrance, modern Mormons appropriate their sacred past into their own experience in the present. This is important because many of today’s Mormons suspect that despite the fact the LDS scriptural canon remains open and the Church is led by a living prophet of God, their heroic “living through” of sacred history peaked in the nineteenth century, making their own lives rather mundane when compared to the cosmically significant pioneer endeavor. However, through recapitulations and renditions of an idealized pioneer past, modern Mormons can return to sacred time and space.50 Mormon pioneer reverence and recapitulation are examples of the process described by Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return where communities remember and contact an idealized “age of the Gods” through the enactment of myths.51 The pioneer era is part of the Mormon “age of the gods” and the gathering to Zion is one of its central stories. [83]
Notes
1. Eugene E. Campbell, Establishing Zion: The Mormon Church in the American West 1847–1869 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1988). Steven Olsen, “Community Celebrations and Mormon Ideology of Place,” Sunstone (May–June 1980): 40–45. Ronald W. Walker, “‘A Banner is Unfurled’: Mormonism’s Ensign Peak,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 26, no. 4 (1993): 71–91.
2. Stanley B. Kimball, Discovering Mormon Trails (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1979).
3. Edgar T. Lyon, This is the Place Monument, Story and History (Salt Lake City, 1955).
4. Hafen, Handcarts to Zion, 257–76. Thomas E. Cheney, Mormon Songs from the Rocky Mountains (Austin and London: The University of Texas Press, 1968).
5. “The Handcart Song,” Children’s Songbook (Salt Lake City: Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1989), 220.
6. Private conversation with Ron Tyler, professor of art history at the University of Texas at Austin, 1997.
8. Kate B. Carter, Heart Throbs of the West, 12 vols. (Salt Lake City: Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, various years). Kate B. Carter, Treasures of Pioneer History, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City: Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, various years). Kate B. Carter, Our Pioneer Heritage, 17 vols. (Salt Lake City: Daughters of the Utah Pioneers).
9. Virginia Sorensen, The Evening and the Morning (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949).
10. Dean L. Hughes, Children of the Promise, vol. 1: Rumors of War (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1997), ix.
11. Magazine advertisement for the DUP museum in This is the Place: Salt Lake City Visitors Guide, 1993–94 (no publication information).
12. Telephone interview by author with a Church administrator in the Office of the Presiding Bishopric, Salt Lake City, Utah, January 1994.
13. Interestingly, Mormon pageants thrive today despite David Glassberg’s assertion in his seminal work on American historical pageantry that such events had all disappeared by World War II. David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry.
14. Jay Anderson, Time Machines: The World of Living History (Nashville: The American Association for State and Local History, 1984).
15. Telephone interview by author with Pioneer Trail State Park employee, February 1997.
16. Rebecca Broadbent, “BYUSA officers, student leaders participate in pioneer trek,” The Daily Universe, 11 July 1995, 3.
17. James D. Cannon, ed., Centennial Caravan: Story of the 1947 Centennial Reenactment of the Original Mormon Trek from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Salt Lake Valley July 14 to 22, 1947 (Salt Lake City: The Sons of the Utah Pioneers, 1948).
18. Interview with Brian Hill, president of the 1997 Mormon Pioneer Trek conducted at the Mormon History Association Meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, 23 May 1997.
19. Matthew Brown, “World Media Shine Spotlight on Wagon Train Hoopla,” Salt Lake Tribune website, 21 July 1997.
21. William A. Wilson, “Mormon Narratives: The Lore of Faith,” Western Folklore 54, no. 4 (October 1995): 307.
22. Special thanks is due to William A. Wilson and BYU folklore archivist Kristi Bell for their help in assembling these stories.
23. Personal conversation with William A. Wilson, March 1997.
24. Thomas O’Dea, The Mormons (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1957).
25. “Saints Celebrate Pioneer Day,” The Ensign of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 23 (October 1993): 75. A Days of ’47 Inc. flyer in my possession (no publication information).
26. Edward H. Anderson, “How the First Pioneer Day Was Celebrated,” Improvement Era 12 (July 1909): 693.
30. Grand Scribe of the July 24th, 1849 celebration as quoted in Tullidge’s History of Utah, as quoted in Carter, Heart Throbs of the West, vol. 7, 90.
45.The Millenial Star as quoted in Carter, Heart Throbs of the West, vol. 7, 98.
46. See Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz Y. Fox, and Dean L. May, Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation Among the Mormons (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1976).
47. H. B. Folsom as quoted in Carter, Heart Throbs of the West, vol. 7, 100.
48. Dean L. May, Utah: A People’s History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987).
49. Jennie Walker Johnson as quoted in Carter, Heart Throbs of the West, vol. 7, 120.
50. In all forms of Mormon pioneer memorialization, it is the pioneer sacred story that is the focus of the celebration—not the Israelites whose history had been recapitulated. After the Mormon arrival in Salt Lake City, the focus of recapitulative remembrance almost immediately shifted from ancient Israel to the pioneers themselves. Thus, pioneer celebrations recapitulate an event that was itself a recapitulation. This raises the interesting question of whether recapitulations of recapitulations can be fully sustained by any culture or if one degree of removal in (re)creating sacred history is the maximum limit.
51. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954).
