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Pioneers and Recapitulation in Mormon Popular Historical Expression

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SOURCE: “Pioneers and Recapitulation in Mormon Popular Historical Expression,” in Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North America, edited by Tad Tuleja, Utah State University Press, 1997, pp. 175-211.

[In the following excerpt, Eliason examines the role of the “pioneer myth” in Mormon history, recounting the events leading to the emergence of the religion and detailing the vast exodus across the American West made by early members of the church.]

Few events serve better than a duress-induced migration to forge a people's identity and provide a defining historical touchstone for a nation. Through its representation in art and public historical displays, such a trek can galvanize generations if its drudgery is valorized, its most dramatic moments highlighted, and its embarrassing episodes forgotten. At least since the time Moses led the children of Israel to the biblical promised land, groups of individuals in various places at various times have come to see themselves as a distinct people through participation in, or shared remembrance of, a great trek.

One such group is South Africa's Boers, or Afrikaners, from whose language English acquired the word “trek.” Fleeing British encroachment in 1836, the Boers left their homes near the Cape and headed for a promised land in the Transvaal. In true romantic nationalist style,1 today's Afrikaners remember the struggles faced by their voortrekker ancestors as the ordeal that made them a people and gave them the character traits needed to build Africa's richest nation.2 Afrikaners celebrate their Great Trek in art, monument, song, pageant, and parade.

In China, the six-thousand-mile “Long March” the People's Army made to escape the Nationalists in 1936 is likewise regarded as the event that birthed modern China. Today, the route taken by the Long Marchers is memorialized by countless trail markers and thousands of nostalgic societies who meet regularly to commemorate—and for a few of the very old, to reminisce about—significant events of the march. Stories and reenactments of the Long March still constitute an important part of the official school curriculum of “character development” for Chinese children.3

North America has also produced a people whose crucible of identity formation was a romanticized migration to a promised land—the Mormons. From their 1846 expulsion from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the 1869 arrival of the transcontinental railroad in Utah, Mormon pioneers performed the largest, and most persistently revered, religious migration in the history of the Western Hemisphere. Throughout the American West, the individualistic efforts of westward-moving settlers have been an important component of popular historical consciousness.4 But in the “Mormon West,”5 commemoration of the cooperative and purposeful Mormon pioneer migration has achieved a particularly well-developed form. Like the Afrikaner Great Trek and the Chinese Long March, the memory of the Mormon Trail has been reverently enshrined and celebrated by commemorative societies and in museums, books, monuments, trail markers, art, sculpture, sermons, dramatic productions, and parades.

This essay seeks to understand the origins of the “pioneer myth” and its contemporary place within Mormon culture.6 First, it examines how the Mormon trek was understood by those who participated in it and how it continues to be understood by those who entertain a cultural memory of it—in romantic terms as part of a greater American historical drama, but more significantly as a “usable past” that constitutes a uniquely Mormon sacred history. Next, this essay explores the varieties of pioneer popular memory constructed by Mormons and the kinds of expressive traditions that have been mobilized to maintain, celebrate, and reinterpret the pioneers' saga. Last, this essay addresses the contestations and adaptations that the Mormon pioneer story has undergone as Utah has become more culturally heterogeneous and Mormonism has expanded outside of its traditional cultural region in the American West.

UNDERSTANDING THE MORMON EXODUS

To understand how pioneers came to be so significant in Mormon popular historical expression, we need to go back to the religion's beginnings in Joseph Smith's visions and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon and explain these events as Mormons view them. The purpose here is neither to proselytize on behalf of Mormonism nor to “debunk” any aspect of Mormon belief. Instead, the purpose is to allow access into the sacred history of which the pioneer experience is a continuation and into the religious worldview and culture of which the pioneers and their myth are a part.

Mormonism began in the 1820s with a series of revelations to Joseph Smith, a young religious seeker in rural upstate New York. The two most important of these revelations were (1) a visitation by God the Father and Jesus Christ, who informed Joseph that he would be the medium through which the true church and the kingdom of God on Earth would be restored to a world engulfed by religious conflict and false teachings and (2) the appearance of the angel Moroni, a resurrected prophet from an ancient American civilization established by refugees who had fled from Israel before the 600 B.C. destruction of Jerusalem. Moroni presented Joseph Smith with the famous golden plates, which, after they were translated, became the Book of Mormon—a history of Moroni's people that explained (to the satisfaction of Mormons) the origins of the American Indians and recorded that Jesus had visited the Western Hemisphere after his resurrection. Armed with a divine mandate and a new book of scripture, the young prophet quickly began attracting followers, but also a great deal of antagonism.

In the early years of their church, Mormons believed that to follow their mandate to establish the kingdom of God on Earth, they needed to gather together in the same communities and participate in exclusive, communitarian economic arrangements.7 These attitudes aroused the suspicion and hostility of their neighbors, who violently forced Joseph Smith and his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) along the fringe of the cresting wave of American westward expansion—always marginalized and continually persecuted. Having been driven off their land in the late 1830s by vigilante mobs in Ohio and in three different places in Missouri, Joseph Smith's flock, by then numbering in the tens of thousands, built the city of Nauvoo in western Illinois. It was here, during a brief hiatus from harassment, that Joseph Smith received his boldest and most distinctive revelations about the special mission of his people. The biblical restoration theme in his teachings began to markedly emphasize Old as well as New Testament motifs. For example, he initiated secret temple ordinances and began introducing a few close and trusted associates to the doctrine of plural marriage. Polygamy, as it is often called, drew inspiration from the familial arrangements of the biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Rumors of Joseph Smith's involvement with plural marriage began a sequence of events that led to his arrest and martyrdom in the summer of 1844 by yet another mob jealous and frightened of Mormon power.

After the prophet's death, the largest faction of the movement accepted Brigham Young's claim to church leadership and followed his lead to flee continued persecution and to search for a sanctuary in the wilderness. In 1847, Brigham Young left his followers in the temporary settlement of Winter Quarters in what is now Nebraska and led an advance company of Mormon leaders to the Rocky Mountains, where he selected the Salt Lake Valley as his people's ultimate destination. By 1848, most of Nauvoo's inhabitants who would be coming had made the trek to their promised land.

From Salt Lake City, Young immediately began sending out groups to colonize as much as they could of the Great Basin, concentrating on the valleys along the Wasatch Front of the Rocky Mountains. Highly successful Mormon proselytizing continued, especially in Great Britain and Scandinavia, where European Mormons outnumbered their American counterparts during much of the mid-nineteenth century. However, in the continuing spirit of gathering, these converts were expected to come to Zion as soon as they were able. Scores of thousands came. Most came by ship, rail, and/or riverboat to Iowa City from whence they headed to Salt Lake City by wagon. Some came by wagon from California after having rounded Cape Horn. Between 1856 and 1860, when Mormon Church money was particularly tight, some immigrants even pushed and pulled their meager belongings across the plains in handcarts.8

The use of wagons stopped after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, but immigrants continued to come by rail. What Mormons remember as “The Gathering” remained church policy until it began to be de-emphasized at the turn of the century. At about the time of the Great Depression, the Mormon Church began to encourage its new converts not to gather physically in Utah, but to gather spiritually with nearby members and to build up the church in their homelands.

The Mormon trek to Zion drew much of its symbolic potency from the fact that its participants and their descendants understood it to be a recapitulation of the biblical Exodus. As evidenced in pioneer journals, the Mormon migration to Utah was regarded from the start as sacred history in the making.9 While not necessarily a theological imperative, a grand recapitulation of sacred history fit nicely within the Mormon self-conception of their religion as being the restoration of all religious truths preached in both New and Old Testament times. Joseph Smith's reintroduction of other Old Testament ideas such as temple rituals and plural marriage undoubtedly prepared Mormons to heed Brigham Young's call to reenact the Exodus. In fact, Brigham Young earned the title “the American Moses” for leading the Mormons to their promised land and realizing Smith's visionary plans for a Mormon kingdom in the Rocky Mountains.10 Under Brigham Young's direction, the bedraggled bands of refugees that left Nauvoo at gun point in 1846 became forward looking and sacred history enacting “pioneers.”

Part of Young's strategy for accomplishing this feat was to use Moses's organizational model and organize the Saints into hierarchical groups of tens, fifties and hundreds.11 Parallels with the Exodus did not end here. Mormon oral tradition and pioneer journals record that the Mississippi froze at an opportune time to allow the first pioneer wagon trains to cross, much as the Red Sea had parted to allow Moses's followers to escape Egypt. After the Mormons crossed the Mississippi, flocks of quail miraculously wandered into pioneer camps like manna from heaven to feed the poorest of the straggling travellers. After time spent in the wilderness, the Latter-day Saints came upon a land where a river ran between a freshwater lake and a saltwater lake. It was only appropriate that the Mormons named it the Jordan River after its counterpart in Palestine. …

A factor that heightened the realism of this link with ancient Israel was that most Mormons had received “patriarchal blessings” modeled after blessings given by biblical patriarchs to their children. In these blessings, most Saints were told, by church members specially called for this purpose, that they were literal descendants of the Hebrew tribe of Ephraim through whom—according to the Bible and Joseph Smith's revelations—all the nations of the Earth would be blessed.12 “British Israelitism,” or the belief that Anglo-Saxon peoples are literal descendants of biblical Israelites, was a common notion in the mid-nineteenth century.13 For the Mormons who recapitulated the Exodus, identification with the Israelites through their own version of British Israelitism made their chosen-ness and their “living through again” of sacred history much more literal and significant than a mere reenactment.14

Because the early Mormons made new sacred history by recapitulating old sacred history, they have bequeathed to today's Mormons a “usable past” that sets them apart as a new religious tradition distinct and different from the American Christian milieu out of which they emerged. This occurred in much the same way that early Christians created a new religious tradition by incorporating and reworking themes from the Hebrew religious tradition out of which they grew. Jan Shipps, a perceptive scholar of Mormonism whose interpretations of Mormon history have been highly influential in recent years, explains how the pioneers' story stands next to the sacred history of the Israelites in the Old Testament and that of Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament as a “third sacred text” to which Mormons look for guidance, instruction, and inspiration.15

Another key to understanding Mormon reverence for the pioneers is to place their saga within the broader context of the Romanticism that permeated American culture at the time. Several historians suggest that the content of the Mormon gospel and the trek to establish a Godly kingdom in the West (initially outside the boundaries of the United States) constituted a rejection of the romantic “age of boundlessness,” of American democratic and capitalist mores, and of what the Mormons viewed as the increasing disorder of ante-bellum America.16

However, the Mormons' self-conception of their destiny did reflect many aspects of American Romanticism. For example, the ancient history of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith's personal religious history, and the pioneer trek together provided for Mormons—and they hoped for the entire nation—a grand unifying sacred history for an American culture “cursed” with a troubling ahistoricity by its newness and its cultural pluralism.17 Also, reflecting the Romantic notion that “primitive” civilizations must give way to “advanced” ones,18 Mormons fully believed—especially during the Civil War—that America would eventually turn to them for guidance and leadership.19 Mormons shared with the Romantics the vision of a great, untamed wilderness waiting to be conquered by a growing nation that God had chosen as his own. The sense of drama this imparted to all of America's westward expansion was shared by the Mormons, but they experienced it primarily in terms of their own history only.

Another important contribution of Romanticism that still reverberates with modern Mormons is the era's historiographic approach. At the time of the pioneer trek, historians depicted America's past as a grand unfolding drama of the progressive triumph of superior civilization and good over ignorance and evil. If a historian wrote detached or dispassionately and failed to convey these truths, peers would have deemed his work as slighting the significance of the past. Truth according to popular historiography in the nineteenth century was best illuminated through “glowing pictures” that highlighted heroism and sacrifice.20 Mormons viewed the telling of their own history in a similar light. In this view, God caused the United States to be established so his true church could be restored in a country constitutionally committed to religious freedom. These historiographic ideas continue, in tempered form, in Mormon circles today and inform modern Mormon celebrations and artistic depictions of the pioneer era as a glorious achievement wrought by self-sacrificing heroes. …

THE CONSTRUCTION OF A MEMORY

Pioneer Day celebrations and Mormon historical pageants periodically emerge and dissipate in cyclical fashion; and pioneer art, museums, and monuments steadily and consistently provide inspirational touchstones for historically minded Mormons. But these genres of pioneer remembrance are by no means straightforward representations of historical events—nor are they intended as such. They are the products of a selective combing through history that has chosen certain aspects for highlighting while omitting and downplaying others. The genres of what David Glassberg calls “public historical imagery” and what Michael Kammen calls the “social production of memory” described in the previous section have been the central arenas for articulating, maintaining, and reshaping Mormon historical consciousness.21 This section examines the content of that consciousness and the “combing process” that created it.

In discussing this process, University of Utah historian Davis Bitton draws a distinction between “history by historians,” whose purpose is to instruct and “tell it all,” and popular history, whose purpose is to revere, celebrate, display, and transfer cultural values. According to Bitton, ritualized popular history such as pageants, plays, and parades serve the Durkheimian function of “upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and collective ideas which make [a society's] unity and personality.”22 In performing this role, Bitton says, history is “simplified” to be made easily memorable, and it is presented in an impressive and entertaining way.23

Simplification implies a selective elision and highlighting of past events. It is a process with political implications and ramifications. The construction of the pioneer myth is no exception. Simplification raises questions such as Whose experience qualifies them for being reverenced as pioneers? Which parts of the pioneer past have been forgotten, and which events become draped in sacred significance for later remembrance and why? What has been the end result of nearly a hundred and fifty years of pioneer reverencing? In short, what kind of cultural memory has been produced by the interwoven activities of pioneer-honoring institutions and genres, and what does it tell us about today's Mormon and Utah communities?

Today, the time between 1847 and 1869 is understood as the pioneer period in Mormon history. This has not always been the case. According to late Mormon historian Eugene Campbell the “time window” in which one might be classified as a pioneer expanded in the following manner: “In the Great Basin they [the Mormons] were no longer outcasts but ‘pioneers.’ Although the term initially referred to members of the 1847 advance company, Mormons who made the journey later the same year also came to be known as the ‘Pioneers of ’47.’ And by the 1870s, virtually everyone who had ‘gathered to Zion’ before the completion of the transcontinental railroad could lay claim to the title ‘pioneer.’”24

The completion of the railroad in 1869 shut the time window for pioneer romance. Nevertheless, between 1869 and about 1900, tens of thousands of Mormon immigrants continued to make great sacrifices to “gather” to Utah and join their fellow Saints.25 Because the 1869-1900 immigrants took the train, their experience does not carry the same valence for succeeding generations, and descent from them does not qualify one for membership in any special organization. (Many Mormon rail immigrants would step off the train and walk for a small portion of the journey just so they could say in jest that they too had “walked across the plains to Zion.”) During the Great Depression, church leaders made a permanent policy change and encouraged Mormon converts not to come to Utah. Today, in fact, Mormons who have recently immigrated to Utah—far from being honored as pioneers—often feel a slight stigma associated with failing to stay abroad and help “build up the church” in places where it is new and struggling.

It should be remembered that even before the extension of rail service to Utah, many Mormon converts travelled by rail for at least part of the way to their destination. Many also took ships from Europe or steamers up the Mississippi before reaching the destination from whence they would “walk across the plains” to Zion. The rail and waterborne stages of Mormon immigrant journeys are little celebrated and rarely appear in popular historical expression. Only the final stage of Mormon pioneer journeys has inspired much reenactment and celebration.

Of the groups that came to Utah during the 1847-1869 period, two in particular emerged as stereotypical in the Mormon imagination—Brigham Young's 1847 advance party and the handcart companies of 1856-60. Both account for only a small fraction of all immigrants during the pioneer period. The advance party numbered only 147, and the handcart pioneers accounted for fewer than 3,000 out of an estimated 85,000 pre-railroad immigrants, yet these two groups, especially the latter, are disproportionally represented in art, sculpture, and eulogy.26 The advance company was of course important because it was first, and the handcarts stick out because of their uniqueness in American history. Two of the handcart companies became stranded in winter blizzards and were rescued only after many had perished. This tragedy, coupled with the presumed difficulty of all handcart travel, made the handcart companies ripe for romantic remembrance.27 Yet only in the case of the first Saints expelled from Nauvoo and the two stranded handcart companies did deaths occur in uncommon numbers. Moreover, Mormon pioneers on the whole probably suffered less angst and hardship on their journeys than did their Gentile counterparts due to the atypically well organized and corporate nature of their migratory enterprise and the fact that a community of fellow believers awaited their arrival.28 Nevertheless, the stereotype of pioneers burying their kindred dead on the trail to Zion is a particularly enduring one in Mormon popular consciousness. Because the saga of the Mormon pioneers serves as heroic, sacred history that exemplifies the spirit of sacrifice that Mormons still regard as being expected of them by God, the experiences of the least typical groups form the basis of many Mormons' mental constructions of pioneer reality.29

While the processes of constructing Mormon popular historical consciousness have highlighted certain parts of the pioneer experience, other episodes in Mormon history have been almost studiously forgotten. Drama and biblical parallel alone do not explain the inclusion of past events into celebrated public history. To constitute a usable past for Mormons, drama and historical recapitulation must conclude triumphantly. For example, Mormons do not commemorate their brave and resilient struggle against the United States government during the polygamy raids of the 1880s. During this time, the government confiscated all of the LDS Church's property and froze its assets; the church leadership went underground for years, and hundreds were thrown in jail for practicing plural marriage. Thousands endured hardship and ridicule to protect a way of life they felt God had required of them until, under extreme duress, the church officially discontinued the practice by revelation in 1890. Jan Shipps suggests that the polygamy raids and the eventual abandonment of the practice complete the parallel with Israelite history by providing Mormons with a “Babylonian captivity phase” and a “restitution phase.”30 However, Mormons do not exploit this potential parallel in constructing their popular historical consciousness. The martyrological potential inherent in these events, which arguably caused the Saints more suffering than the westward migration, was lost when the church officially curtailed plural marriage. To celebrate resistance now would be to memorialize a lost cause that is embarrassing to many modern Mormons—a struggle for a principle that the LDS Church now vehemently opposes. Also, Mormons have always regarded themselves as the consummate patriots, and the fact that Mormons once practiced radical civil disobedience to what they regarded as unconstitutional antipolygamy legislation is difficult to square on a popular historical level with the image Mormons hold of themselves as a people who regard obedience to civil authority as a serious religious principle. As a result, the polygamy raids, in spite of their tempting biblical parallel and heroic underdog drama, have virtually vanished from Mormon popular memory.

Traditional historical and anthropological analyses of Mormonism have interpreted public celebration of the pioneers as an expression of shared cultural values and concerns.31 Such characterizations annoy the 230,000-member Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints based in Independence, Missouri. RLDS historians point out that between one-third and one-half of the Mormon population of Nauvoo (some of whom later joined the RLDS Church when it was founded in 1860) chose not to follow Brigham Young to Utah.32 In this light, the trek of the pioneers of ’47 was at first not a unifier at all, but an aspect of the greatest schism and the beginning of the worst era of cultural disintegration ever faced by the Mormon people.

To say that pioneer nostalgia unifies the Salt Lake City headquartered church is problematic as well. The most significant challenge to the unifying potential of traditional modes of pioneer commemoration has been the breakdown of the isomorphism between Mormondom's cultural region and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At one time, regional history and identity and church history and identity were virtually inseparable. This is no longer the case. Today, due to emigration and convert growth, only about twenty percent of LDS Church members reside in Utah. Most of today's nine million Mormons, particularly those in the fast growing international church, are not descendants of Utah pioneers. Also, Utah is no longer a functionally independent theocracy, but a state in a religiously pluralistic America. Today, over forty percent of Salt Lake City's population is not Mormon, with more Gentiles moving in all the time. These situations provide the multiple challenge of finding ways of celebrating the pioneer story that make it a community-building experience both for all Mormons (in and out of Utah) and for all Utahans (Mormon and non-Mormon). This has been difficult, but has resulted in creative reinterpretations of how “pioneers” should be understood in a heterogeneous Utah and a multinational diasporic Mormondom. The following sections examine how the pioneer myth has weathered these challenges.

PIONEERS FOR ALL UTAHANS: THE “DAYS OF ’47” IN SALT LAKE CITY

In her book Parades and Power, Susan Davis points out the inadequacy of the “common sense” way of viewing parades as “straight forward reflections” of consensual notions held by all performers and observers. What she says about Philadelphia's 1832 parade in honor of George Washington's birthday could also be said about Salt Lake City's “Days of ’47” parade. “Upon closer examination … the procession's meanings for performers and audience seem less unified. This performance was a selective version of local social relationships that hardly represented all communities [and] all points of view.”33 In Salt Lake City as well, some do not share hegemonic interpretations of the pioneer story and feel that Pioneer Day is lacking as a community event because it has featured only the dominant group's collective historical memory.34

In the “Days of ’47” parade, notions not only about social relationships but also about the sacredness of certain historical events and the divine destiny of Utah's dominant culture have been literally paraded in public. But as Salt Lake City's Gentile population has increased along with Mormon sensitivity to others who call Utah home, the “tone” of the parade has changed. Mormon themes still dominate the Pioneer Day parade, but parade entries in recent years have employed symbols that bridge the Mormon/Gentile divide or are specifically non-Mormon in character.

One theme that has emerged as a “bridge” is the completion of the transcontinental railroad.35 As the railroad closed off the time window of the romantic pioneer era, it opened the possibility for a new “progressive romanticism” celebrating the modern world coming to Utah. Today the railroad is remembered as ushering in a new age of Mormon/Gentile cooperation in Utah—a memory open for appreciation by a larger percentage of Utahans.

The inclusion of floats that celebrate the transcontinental railroad is, of course, antithetical to older understandings of what “Pioneer Day” was designed to celebrate, and it is a sign that the parade is being secularized and broadened to allow for the inclusion of more non-Mormon participants. Other signs of the breakdown of Mormon exclusiveness have been the inclusion of floats honoring the establishment of Salt Lake City's Catholic cathedral and Jewish synagogue. When speaking to the gathered crowds at the 1992 “Days of ’47” celebration, LDS Church leader Loren C. Dunn acknowledged the contributions of “pioneers of other faiths” who also came to Utah.36 The official theme of 1994's “Days of ’47” celebration was “All Are Welcome Here.” Certainly this theme was chosen, in part at least, as a corrective to the parade's past exclusivity and Mormon-centeredness. Religious themes—while still important—have lost their dominance in Salt Lake City's “Days of ’47” celebration. Floats that promote business establishments and bear corporate logos have become more prominent as well. Reasons other than the remembrance of sacred history, including fun in and of itself, are beginning to undergird the “Days of ’47” celebration.37

These changes have coincided with shifts in responsibility for organizing the parade. In pioneer Utah, relationships between public events and authority were intimate. Mormon leaders initiated and delegated the planning and performance of Pioneer Day celebrations. Gradually, responsibility for the parade passed into the hands of the SUP and DUP, even though the church continued to provide financial support. In 1936, “Days of ’47 Inc.” grew out of the SUP as a nonprofit, unaffiliated organization responsible for organizing the Pioneer Day festivities. Today, church leaders no longer overtly direct Pioneer Day affairs but participate as honored guests in their important symbolic function as the living heirs and continuing administrators of Brigham Young's kingdom. Thus, even though the Pioneer Day Queen must still be a descendant of the 1847-69 pioneers and Brigham Young impersonators and representatives of the current LDS leadership still occupy important positions in the parade, community organizations have been allowed to take control of a tradition of public historical celebration once centrally controlled by the church. Mormon leaders, realizing Pioneer Day's expanded significance, have willingly released control and have encouraged inclusiveness.

Despite these developments, and much to the chagrin of the ACLU, it will probably always be impossible to completely separate church from state in public functions in Utah. Popular public expressions of significant events in Utah's history will always face the problem of Mormon dominance in that history, and Mormons will probably always see sacred significance in Utah's pioneer heritage. Also, even with a continued influx of Gentiles, demographic trends indicate that Utah will likely retain its Mormon majority (the only state with a majority of any denomination) for many years to come. There is, and will continue to be, a high correlation between prominence in Utah society and leadership in the LDS Church. For these reasons, attempts to provide public displays of history that meet the spiritual needs of Mormons as well as the community-building needs of Utah's increasingly Gentile urban areas will continue to be challenging.

PIONEERS FOR ALL MORMONS

The pioneer myth faces challenges abroad as well. Borne by ever-increasing legions of Mormon missionaries, the pioneer myth has escaped the bounds of the Mountain West and has become a part of a belief system that engages the members of a fast-growing, worldwide religious tradition.38 Today, Mormonism's traditional heartland in the American West contains only about thirty percent of total church membership, and over half of all Mormons live outside the United States.39 The increased cultural and national diversity of Mormonism has placed heavy demands upon the pioneer symbology that sprang from, and is specific to, the American West. In the worldwide Mormon community of faith, the place of the pioneers has become problematic. As many Mormons begin to question and reconceptualize the hagiographic status of the Utah pioneers, it is increasingly difficult to claim that “group consciousness” is unambiguously being maintained by honoring, celebrating, and reenacting pioneer history.

Thanks to missionary effort, the pioneer myth and its accompanying celebratory cultural practices are spreading around the world. However, intimate knowledge of pioneer history and especially elaborate forms of public pioneer reverence have not spread as fast as the Mormon gospel, and a very small percentage of today's Mormons participate in Pioneer Day festivities; some have never even heard of the celebration at all. One hundred years ago, when pioneer-honoring events formed the centerpiece expression of Mormon community identity, nonparticipation in, and unfamiliarity with, pioneer stories and celebrations would have been unthinkable for faithful Mormons. Today, as living in a nearly exclusively Mormon agricultural village in the Mountain West has become the exceptional rather than typical Mormon experience, pioneer-honoring cultural expressions have necessarily taken on new forms and new meanings for Mormons.

Part of this “pioneer problem” springs from the Mormon heartland itself and from changing perceptions of Utah in Mormon popular consciousness. Once upon a time, Utah was Zion—the place where Mormons gathered to build their social and spiritual utopia in preparation for Christ's imminent Second Coming. The land and its people were the supreme object of desire for the converts who streamed to it. Today, Utah Mormons, and pioneer descendants in general, are rightly or wrongly sometimes seen by Mormons outside of Utah not as examples of righteousness, but of self-righteousness—as too often lazily resting on the laurels of their impressive genealogy. Utah is also perceived by some as provincial and embarrassingly narrow-minded for being the center of a worldwide religion. On the other hand, others are shocked that liquor is sold in the state and that many stores are open on Sunday like anywhere else in America. Utah is still a central point of attention and all faithful Mormon eyes turn there when the prophet speaks at the tabernacle in Temple Square, but the region is by no means regarded as the idealized place of piety it once was.

The problematization of Utah and its people in the Mormon imagination has caused many to question what they regard as the overly sentimentalized, unrealistic, and “tacky” reverencing of pioneers often displayed by those whose roots in Mormonism go back generations. As the pioneer era retreats further into the past, as new generations of Mormons emerge, and as the number of people who knew pioneer grandparents diminishes, this sentiment is growing—even in Utah. Many younger Mormons view the trappings of “the cult of the pioneers” as “kitsch,” “old-timey,” and irrelevant. Some adults call for a more “realistic” treatment of the pioneers in Mormon discourse and historical writing. They fear that Utah's colonizers have come to represent a false ideal—superhuman paragons of a pious perfection never attainable by modern Mormons.

To some, another problem with the pioneer legacy is the fact that the honor acquired by participants in great migrations often passes on to succeeding generations of their offspring—especially in the minds of those who are themselves descendants of migrating cultural heroes. This tends to create a social distinction between those descended from cultural-historical figures and everyone else. This is certainly the case in Mormondom. In Utah especially there exists a quasi-caste system that distinguishes between (1) post-pioneer era converted Mormons and their descendants, (2) families descended from pioneers, and (3) families descended from pioneers who were also church leaders. The continued insistence by the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers on biological descent as a requisite for membership contributes to this system.40 In prestigious social circles in Utah, the question “Who did you say your ancestors were?” occasionally serves the same function as “What do you do for a living?” would serve elsewhere. Richard Gomez, a former Catholic who converted to the LDS Church and who is the bishop of a Spanish-speaking congregation in the Salt Lake City area, feels left out “when church leaders open a ‘Pioneer Day’ celebration in Salt Lake City … by asking who among the assembled people was descended from one of the original (Anglo) founders [of Utah].”41

Officially, the LDS Church has sought to down-play these kinds of distinctions in recent years and has emphasized that salvation comes through faith in Jesus Christ's atonement and correct individual choices—not lineage. Nevertheless, efforts at building egalitarian sentiments on this topic are difficult to achieve without diminishing the importance of what the pioneers did in bequeathing a legacy of faith to the modern LDS Church. …

CONCLUSIONS

In the last decade or so, analyzing the relationship between collective memory and group identity in large-scale societies such as nations, ethnic communities, and religious institutions has been a matter of intense interest among scholars. The temptation has existed among many to be overly cynical in their debunking of invented traditions, and they thereby perhaps damage the societies to whom they are obligated in the reciprocal ethical relationship that arises in scholar-subject interaction.42 Historian Michael Kammen warns against cynical analyses of popular history and states that the “invention of tradition” is often done for benign reasons.43 I would add that even in cases where we may suspect the “foisting of false consciousness,” our analysis can be critical and charitable at the same time. Rather than regarding invented traditions and identities as pathological false consciousness, we can view them as creative cultural responses to new situations. I would suggest too that in painting sinister and manipulative portraits of the inventors of tradition, we may be applying historiographic assumptions and patterns of social analysis to groups whose goals and truth claims are of little relevance to those held by the observing culture. In the environment of mutual hostility that has long existed between the academy and conservative religious bodies like the Mormon Church, it is especially tempting to exploit the story of the invention of popular Mormon historical consciousness to stoke the fires of existing antagonisms and strengthen the walls of academic self-righteousness. This mistake would blind us to numerous insights attainable only through humbly trying to grasp the Mormon version of their pioneer heritage on their own terms and occasionally letting Mormons speak for themselves.

In so doing, we find that because it recapitulated biblical history and occurred in the context of America's romanticized westward expansion, the trek of the Mormon pioneers became the defining historical motif of the Mormon experience in America. As in other societies, Mormon highlighting and romanticizing of the pioneer story provided a mythic historical “rallying point” for a newly emerging cultural identity. Pioneer mythology, as it has been passed on to modern Mormons, has been shown to be a construction created, reinforced, and maintained by popular public displays and celebrations. Changing conditions in Utah and worldwide Mormonism have demonstrated that the usefulness of traditional renditions of the pioneer story are showing some wear, and its associated rituals are no longer quite—and perhaps never really were—the unifying principles some scholars have described them as being. The significance, meaning, and worth of the pioneer myth will continue to be matters of reinterpretation and discussion among members of an expanding worldwide religion and a diversifying Mormon geographic region. While the myth has slipped somewhat from its once illustrious position in Mormon thought and practice, the Mormon pioneer concept is being innovatively reworked and is showing continued vitality in the face of its challenges.

Notes

  1. William A. Wilson, “Herder, Folklore, and Romantic Nationalism,” in Folk Groups and Folklore Genres, ed. Elliot Oring (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1978).

  2. Vernon February, The Afrikaners of South Africa (London and New York: Kegan Paul International, 1991); Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990).

  3. Jean Fritz, China's Long March: 6000 Miles of Danger (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1988).

  4. John Bodnar's Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) examines the place of pioneers in the popular history of western states as part of a general analysis of American commemorative events and shows the centrality of the pioneer as a symbol of local historical consciousness.

  5. The Mormon West, Mormon Culture Region, or “the Book of Mormon Belt” includes all of Utah, most of southeastern Idaho, the southwestern tip and western edge of Wyoming, and significant sections of eastern Nevada and northern and eastern Arizona. These areas are the legacy of Brigham Young's colonizing efforts and are still dominated and defined by Mormon culture. Through later migration and conversion, significant Mormon minorities have appeared in California (which contains the most Mormons of any state besides Utah), Colorado, and the Pacific Northwest. See especially D. W. Meinig, “The Mormon Cultural Region: Strategies and Patterns in the Geography of the American West, 1847-1964,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 55, no. 2 (1965).

  6. Throughout this essay, I use the term “myth” not in its popular meaning as a bogus story or a widely held misconception, but in the manner common among scholars of religion. In this tradition, myths are stories defined not by their lack of credibility to outside observers or by the ostensible failure of their truth claims to withstand critical analysis, but by the sacred and ontological significance attributed to them by the cultures from which they emerge.

  7. William Mulder, “The Mormon Gathering,” in Mormonism and American Culture, ed. Marvin S. Hill and James B. Allen (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

  8. LeRoy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen, Handcarts to Zion: The Story of a Unique Westward Migration, 1856-1860 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992 [1960]).

  9. Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books, 1992 [1964]).

  10. Leonard J. Arrington's biography Brigham Young: American Moses (New York: Knopf, 1985) uses this moniker as its subtitle.

  11. The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, section 136.

  12. Irene Bates, “Patriarchal Blessings and the Routinization of Charisma,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 26, no. 3 (1993); Melodie Moench, “Nineteenth Century Mormons: The New Israel,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 12 (Spring 1979).

  13. John Wilson, Our Iraelitish Origin (Philadelphia: Daniels and Smith, 1850); Stephen Epperson, Mormons and Jews: Early Mormon Theologies of Israel (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992).

  14. The parallels between the Mormon pioneers and the biblical Exodus were so compelling that there are even unorthodox Mormon splinter groups who maintain that the pioneers of ’47 were the literal reincarnation of Moses's followers. Steven L. Shields, Divergent Paths of the Restoration (Los Angeles: Restoration Research, 1990).

  15. Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985).

  16. Klaus Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 214; Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 139.

  17. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 50-52.

  18. Ibid., 46-47.

  19. Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience, 210.

  20. Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 242; David Levin, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Moteley, and Parkman (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959). …

  21. “Public historical imagery” is a term coined by David Glassberg to refer to popular mobilizations of historic or traditional themes in public performative events. David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry, 2. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 9.

  22. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1965), 474-75.

  23. Davis Bitton, “The Ritualization of Mormon History,” Utah Historical Quarterly 43 (1975).

  24. Campbell, Establishing Zion.

  25. Figures from Robert W. Sloan's Utah Gazetteer and Directory of Logan, Ogden, Provo, and Salt Lake City for 1884 (Salt Lake City: Herald Printing, 1884) show only a slight drop in the numbers of immigrants after the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad.

  26. Richard D. Poll, History and Faith: Reflections of a Mormon Historian (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989).

  27. Handcart nostalgia, as one might imagine, benefits from the assumption that handcart travel must have been extremely difficult compared to ox-drawn wagons. This is a debatable point; one of Brigham Young's justification for the handcart idea is that it would be easier because it eliminated the difficulties of using animals.

  28. For a general examination of the myth of a perilous Mormon pioneer journey, see Richard H. Jackson's “The Overland Journey to Zion,” in The Mormon Role in the Settlement of the West, ed. Richard H. Jackson (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1978). Jackson points out that most pioneer journals relate their crossing of the plains as a mixture of monotonous walking with moments of adventure and discovery, not unlike a pleasure trip or one-way family vacation.

  29. The various groups of pioneers can be put into a “hagiographic hierarchy” of importance. Such a list would descend roughly as follows: handcart pioneers who died, anyone who died, handcart company members who survived, the advance company of 1847 pioneers, all 1847 pioneers, and finally anyone who crossed the plains before the railroad.

  30. Shipps, Mormonism.

  31. Especially well thought out are the works of Bitton, “Ritualization of Mormon History”; Olsen, “Community Celebrations”; Shipps, Mormonism; and Stegner, The Gathering of Zion.

  32. Alma R. Blair, “The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints: Moderate Mormons,” in The Restoration Movement: Essays in Mormon History, by F. Mark McKiernan, Alma R. Blair, Paul M. Edwards (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1973).

  33. Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 4.

  34. I once had a discussion with a non-Mormon former professor at a Utah university who claimed to have hidden in his room during the whole week of Pioneer Day because Mormon cultural displays disgusted him. Unfortunately, this man's reluctance to appreciate Utah's cultural life made his stay in Utah short and unpleasant.

  35. “Saints Celebrate Pioneer Day,” The Ensign.

  36. “Pioneer Day Activities Celebrate the Heritage of Early Saints,” The Ensign of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 10 (1992).

  37. Mirroring the changes made in Pioneer Day celebrations, Pioneer Trail State Park's “Old Deseret” model pioneer village and Lagoon's “Sons of the Utah Pioneers Village” downplay the “Mormonness” of the history they seek to recreate by enacting generic frontier community scenes. The perceived “secularization” of Pioneer Day celebrations is not uncontroversial to some. A community leader in San Pete County, Utah, complained to me that he regarded the demolition derby and ATC tractor pull that had become the premier Pioneer Day activities in his community as inappropriate modes of Pioneer Day celebration. His sentiment is understandable, but it ignores the long history (and still current practice) of holding rodeos and baseball tournaments on Pioneer Day. Demolition derbies are a modern version of the kind of recreational activities Mormons have always regarded as wholesome and appropriate even, and perhaps especially, when done in conjunction with pioneer remembrance.

  38. Jan Shipps, Mormonism.

  39. Church Almanac 1993-1994 (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1993).

  40. The kind of relationship the DUP has to Utah society is not unique to that state. In Texas, the social prestige associated with being a descendant from the former republic's first Anglo families is fostered in an aggressive manner by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT). The DUP and the DRT and their philosophy of history can be seen as regional versions of the nativism and historical “preservationism” of the national organization of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

  41. Emily Gurnon, “Latinos and Latter-day Saints: Minority Mormons,” Christian Century, Feb. 16, 1994, p. 159. …

  42. Richard Handler's excellent but needlessly unkind and insensitive treatment of nationalism in Quebec typifies this cynical approach to the cultural creativity expressed through “invented traditions.” Richard Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).

  43. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 31.

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