Growing up, I didn't think much about Pioneer Day. It's not one of the eight holidays I formally celebrate. The time around Pioneer Day just meant fireworks, images of wagons and handcarts, and singing about pioneer children walking and walking and walking and walking and walking.
But recently I've come to realize just how incredible the Mormon pioneers were, and I am lucky enough to have pioneer heritage. I have had the opportunity to work for a scholarly religious journal, which has given me greater appreciation of the pioneers.
Regardless of your opinion of the religion, think of how amazing they are. There's this group of people whose leader is put in jail on false and trumped-up charges, over and over, and ultimately a mob breaks in the jail and kills him. Even after his death, this group of people faces intense hardships. Eventually they have to leave behind everything--their homes, their neighbors, the beautiful temple they worked so hard to build.
(And lest you think they deserved it, as some antagonists tend to believe, I have seen a letter written by non-Mormon government officials in 1844 to anti-Mormon mobs, in which they basically said, "Even if the Mormons are as bad as you say they are, they still aren't as bad as you are.")
Then they had to make their way across the country. But they couldn't fly in a plane, ride on a train, drive a car, or even ride a bicycle. They walked. Day after day, they walked, pushing and pulling handcarts over pebbles and mud and dirt. There were no rest stops, no convenience stores, no hotels. The hard travel meant that many of them had to bury their family members. They couldn't put fancy tombstones on these graves, and they would never come back to visit these graves again.
And then they come to this barren wasteland where the largest body of water is four times saltier than the oceans.
And it was the right place.
They made this little desert blossom as a rose. They made towns and settlements all over the place. Some of them, such as Pariah in southern Utah, didn't last. But lots of them did.
Great Salt Lake City (later dropping the "Great" part). Bountiful. Provo. St. George, named for Apostle George A. Smith. Not only are these places still around today, they're really big!
It baffles me that there are people who live here who want to eradicate Mormons or destroy the LDS Church or think that nothing good ever came out of Mormonism. I can understand not believing or disagreeing with the doctrines, but don't you realize that Mormons are the reason this place even exists?!
I am fascinated by all the places in Utah that still bear significant pioneer influences, where the residents are largely pioneer descendants. My dad is from the small town of Fillmore, UT, which was originally meant to be Utah's capital. The Fillmore cemetery is full of old pioneer graves. It has the grave of Amasa Lyman, who is mentioned in the Doctrine and Covenants and who is one of my ancestors. It has graves of the wives of Edward Partridge, who was the first bishop of the Church. Some of the pioneers were members of Zion's Camp, a group that went out with Joseph Smith. My grandparents are buried in this very cemetery, and my parents will be too.
In the very back of the yard that belonged to my grandparents is a tree called a Pottawattamie tree that grows special plums. I can never recall eating any, although I think I remember seeing they were orange. Pottawatamie was the name of a county in Iowa where the Mormons set up a temporary settlement (several years) for people to prepare to cross the plains. When I Google Pottawatamie, I can find plenty about the county in Iowa and about the Indians, but I find hardly anything about the plant. Therefore, this is my hypothesis about the tree: It was named by Mormons who had lived in Pottawatamie. Then when my dad and his family call it a Pottawatamie plant, they are calling it by the pioneer term that has been passed down through generations, not by a name they read in a textbook or a name they heard on TV.
Our Utah accent has a lot of Scottish influences in it from the Scottish pioneers.
Non-Utahns often make fun of us for our use of the word sluff to refer to skipping school. What I learned from my phonetics class this year is that sluff is a Utah term that came from slough, which meant something like discard. Sluff therefore comes from Mormon pioneers from the British Isles.
I think it is so fascinating that more than a century and a half later, we are still influenced greatly by the pioneers, both in large things and small things. Utah's state symbol is the beehive (a manmade beehive, mind you; bees don't make structures like that), a relict from pioneer days, when the place was called Deseret. We still have the Deseret News and Deseret Book. The state's two big universities, the University of Utah and Brigham Young University, were started by pioneers. (Today the U seems to be the one that anti-Mormons prefer--but again, don't they realize it exists because of Mormons?) So many place names are named after places and names in Mormon scriptures: Bountiful, Nephi, Lehi, Moroni, Ephraim, Manti, Goshen, and so on.
Thank you, pioneers.
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