SOAPBOX

     I'm driven by the notion that divine revelation to the children of the earth is occuring daily, that "well might a man raise his puny arm to halt the Missouri River in its decreed course as to hinder the Almighty from raining down knowledge upon the heads of the Latter-day Saints." I'm way shy of claiming any authority to represent the Heavens, or angels, or even better mortals than I. But I am, in fact, the only person who can report with any authority on what I believe about it all. So here you'll find thoughts from talks in church, lessons to little kids, ruminations from old journal entries. Who knows? Maybe I'll write something for just here!  Thanks for listening.

PIONEERS

(Notes for a Sacrament Meeting talk I gave to the Alpine 1st Ward on 7/13/08)

It’s a universal principle that if humans aren’t permitted to breathe, they will die. It’s true across the globe, and we ought not to have to say any more about it than that--you should just believe it. But the way to get this universal principle to become very important in your lives would be for me to pinch your nose and put my hand over your mouth for a minute or two. It’s by exploring very specific situations that we really come to learn very general truths. Some folks don’t feel that the experience of the pioneers is particularly relevant to their lives, because they’re not related to any. And it was a long time ago. And they dressed unattractively. Nineteenth-century pioneering appears to be a situation that isn’t specific to everybody. I want this to be relevant, and I want to speak to a situation in which each of us, specifically, finds ourselves.

In 1842, two years before the martyrdom of Joseph Smith, four years before the departure of the saints from Nauvoo, one year after the temple was begun, the prophet gathered a council of fifty leaders of the church to discuss where the saints should settle in the Rocky Mountains. He made particular mention of “The Valley of the Tampanogos.” The spelling was wrong, but the meaning was obvious. In 1776, the Catholic fathers Dominguez and Escalante had come to this valley and considered it, hands-down, the high point of their lengthy expedition. They were in the valley for two days and made it as far north as Lindon. The Indians here were called Timpanogotzis, named after their mountain, Timpanogos, an Aztec word meaning “stone person.” In the first hours of the fathers’ visit, the Indians were taught the rudiments of the gospel and, almost as one, wanted passionately to be baptized. Dominguez said that priests would be sent back to the valley within the year, along with Spanish settlers intent on building four large communities, one each along the four rivers flowing out of the Wasatch mountains above us, and that the Indians would be baptized and cared for then. Political trouble in New Mexico prevented that return, and the next Europeans they saw in any numbers were the Mormons, 71 years later.

The records and maps made by the Catholic expedition were accurate and extremely well detailed. But in 1842, they were not widely known. Still, Joseph knew. He saw this place.

On a spring morning in 1820, the boy prophet may not have been thinking of monumental migrations of Christians at all, but on that morning a stone was cut from the mountains without hands, to roll forth and expand and fill the earth. Well, fill it with what? Not rock. I think the substance of that planet-sized stone is dreams--a dream of zion, a dream of living forever with the kind of beauty and love that our Father enjoys, a dream of angels speaking again to the children of the earth. It was in pursuit of dreams, not of gold or of richer soil, that a few adventurous souls 162 years ago became pioneers.

How big a deal was it? By the numbers:

The number of Mormon pioneers? Men, women, and children? 70,000.
Number of pioneers who walked the entire trail? Certainly the vast majority.
Number of pioneers who came by handcart? 3,000, or 4%. (There are reasons why the handcart pioneers loom large in our imaginations. We’ll talk about them in a moment.)
Frequency of deaths on the trail? One in eighteen. (One in maybe 23 would have died had they stayed home.)
Period of the exodus? Twenty-two years.
Number of companies? Two hundred.
Number of companies a giant eagle high above the planet might see, stretched out along the trail, all at once, in an average September? Nine, averaging 350 souls in each.
Number of pioneers born as Americans? One in every four.
Number of pioneers who began the trail immediately after crossing the Atlantic Ocean? Two of every three.
Now these Mormons did not arrange to meet in small groups at the docks and buy tickets on ships that were bound for America, hoping they might meet another nice Latter-day Saint family to pal around with on deck. No. They chartered whole ships and filled them–-every soul a Latter-day Saint, except the captain and crew. And more often than not, when the ship finally landed, every soul was a Latter-day Saint.
How many ships? Ninety-seven. Eighty-seven from Liverpool, six from Hamburg, four from London.
Among them were The Argo, The Olympus, The Ellen Maria, The Forest Monarch, The Golconda, The Old England, The Germanicus, The Rockaway, The Emerald Isle, The Chimborazo, The Caravan, The Enoch Train, The Horizon, The Tuscarora, The William Tappscott, The Monarch Of The Sea, The Antarctic, The Amazon, The Caroline, The Arkwright, The S. Curling.
Average number of saints per ship? 434.
Distance from Liverpool to New Orleans, where more than half landed? 5,000 miles.
New Orleans to St. Louis? 1,173 miles up the Mississippi River.
St. Louis to the trailhead at Kanesville or Florence, where Winter Quarters stood? 620 miles.
Winter Quarters to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake? 1,035  miles.
Length of the journey for most? 7,828 miles.
Minor interruptions in the flow of pioneers:
     1846, war between the United States and Mexico.
     1854, war between the United States and the Sioux Nation,
     1858, war between the United States and the Mormons,
     1862, war between the United States . . . and itself.    

So what is the appeal of handcarts? Were the hardships stiffer or the sacrifices greater for them than for the others? Generally not. Brigham Young, who got the idea from seeing street merchants selling things from carts in the cities of the east--carts that were never meant to travel farther than the few blocks between the merchant’s home, the source of his supply, and his spot on the sidewalk--promised the handcart pioneers that they would come to the valley cheaper, faster, and be more healthy when they got there than the wagon companies. He was right. It was obviously cheaper. The handcart companies averaged 25 miles a day to the wagon companies’ 20. And the travellers were not only stronger by the end, but a whole lot more of their children survived the trail, not having been run over by wagons--the leading cause of death among pioneer children.

There were ten companies over the years of 1856 and 1857. Eight were hugely successful. Two were not. A company led by James Willie began their trek in the latter half of August, 1856, followed shortly by a company led by Edward Martin. It was a bad idea. Everybody voted in favor but one. Levi Savage boldly objected, saying that he thought it the height of foolishness to set out that late in the season with so many untrained pioneers. But then he went on to say that if they went, he would go with them, help them, suffer with them, and even die with them, should it become necessary.

John Watkins, a mason from Britain, had a strange dream just before the day of decision. He dreamed that all six hundred saints were gathered in a room about 40 feet square (in a dream, that’s possible), and an angel turned a crank on a rotating cage in which were six hundred slips of paper. Then, one by one, each of the six hundred drew out a slip, and on the slip was written whether or not that pioneer would live or die. When John Watkins drew out his slip of paper, he folded it over without reading it and said, “I am willing to take my chances with the rest.” He was bugler for the company.

They set out. The weather was fine. They were in a hurry. They did what they thought was wise. To lighten their loads, they tossed out heavy blankets, heavy coats, extra boots. Barely into September, the deepest, earliest, harshest winter in anyone’s memory hit them like a freight train. They weakened. They slowed. They stopped. The Willie company stopped at a point on the wide Wyoming highlands later called St. Mary’s Station. The Martin company, in no communication with the Willie company, fatally stalled at about the same time, seventy miles behind on the alkali plain east of Devil’s Gate, a plain called by the pioneers “the valley of the shadow of death.”

Food was virtually gone, and there was no shelter at all. All of them would have perished, every one, were it not for the fact that some weeks earlier they had been passed by a party of returning missionaries in a fast horse-drawn carriage, who themselves shortly experienced the rigors of the winter.

The missionaries got to Salt Lake just in time for Brigham Young to stand up in the Saturday session of General Conference and require a rescue. On Tuesday, the wagons were rolling eastward through deep snow. The Willie company was found on the open Wyoming highlands and driven over Rocky Ridge to a more sheltered camp at Rock Creek, where 11 died the first night. Their mass grave was dug by two men whose own graves are only a few yards away. The 15-mile march took 27 hours, killing many and saving many more. The Martin company was taken to Martin’s Cove, where their dead were buried in the snow and ravaged by wolves. At Echo Canyon, a rescued Martin company pioneer named Squires gave birth to a baby girl, who was kept alive by being wrapped in the still-warm temple garments of one of the rescuers. Sister Squires, perhaps wanting her baby to appreciate the horrific and triumphant circumstances surrounding her birth, named the child, “Echo.” Margaret Dalglish, a 29-year-old single Scottish sister somehow showed up at the brink of the descent into the Salt Lake Valley with her handcart intact--most others’ had disintegrated or been burned for firewood or simply been left behind much earlier. She thrust her cart into the ravine beside the trail, sending the earthly treasures she had brought from the British Isles and pushed across the plains crashing end over end into the stones and snow. Then she stuck out her chin and threw back her shoulders and, with nothing but the rags on her back and the faith in her heart, marched down into her new home. That’s what eyewitnesses saw. But I see her as a treasure galleon, with banners waving and a hold rich with gold and spices and silk. I imagine her having learned, through unutterable trial, the poverty of material things relative to spiritual wealth.

Some of us have the notion that the Mormon pioneers saw the world in bold strokes of black or white, while we moderns squint through myriad shades of gray. If you read the pioneers’ journals, those blacks and whites  are bold and clear, but the surprise is what arched in between--not “shades of gray” at all, but a rainbow of passions and fears, dares and enormous presumptions. Their “trail of dreams” paralleled, often at a stone’s throw, two rivers that have taken on mythic proportions--the Platte and the Sweetwater--and along each of them the pioneers traveled upstream. 

By the side of the Sweetwater today lie countless dull stones. Toss them into that bracing current and suddenly they are the deep blue of the night sky, the gold of sunset through clouds of dust, or the pink-white of snow, or stars. So it was with the lives of common souls who plunged into the river of pioneers and walked their thousand miles upstream into the valleys of the Wasatch to make us a home.

The Spirit has helped me imagine that the pioneers would plead with us that these valleys (very much including the valley of the “Tampanogos”) not become ordinary. The “valleys of the saints,” be they shaded by the Wasatch, the Appalachians, the Andes, or just very tall Iowa corn, should never become ordinary.

The whole idea of pioneering was (is) to leave Babylon behind. The trail along the south bank of the Platte was crowded with travelers pursuing richer soil and gold. The trail along the north bank, the rougher trail, was blazed by Latter-day Saints pursuing the dream of spiritual bounty and beauty. The south-bank trail ended in the rich Willamette Valley of Oregon and the gold fields of California. The north-bank trail ended in a desert waiting to blossom as a rose. To allow any stretch of real estate that has been consecrated as Zion to become ordinary, be its borders as tight as four walls and a door, is a betrayal of the dreams that drove Pioneers to pay extraordinary prices to get there.

To get here. To get wherever Zion is. Or to wherever it was imagined or commanded to be.