I’m a convert. And not having grown up in the church I didn’t see the point in Pioneer Day. It just seemed like a relic of the church’s Utah centric years that seemed so disconnected to my identity as a convert. But as I’ve matured and as my knowledge of who those early Saints were and what they went through has grown. As I’ve identified more as a Latter-day Saint first and not just as someone who happens to be “Mormon” or even as a “convert,” I’ve come to identify with those early Saints as being my spiritual progenitors, if not my actual ancestors, and come to treasure their stories and examples. Consequently, Pioneer Day has taken on more importance in my life as well as one of the few times we as members celebrate our own history and spiritual (if not literal) forbearers.
In honor of the truths that I have discovered while studying them, I have tried to share their history with my fellow Latter-day Saints. By learning about their trials and their triumphs we discover examples of sacrifice, dedication, and love of God that can inspire us today as we face our own challenges and a pattern of faith for our lives. To this end, I’ve written about the true identity and history of LDS pioneers and the dangers of believing the Pioneer Myth in the past. To summarize those articles in order to set the stage for today’s article on Winter Quarters, though the early Saints absolutely referred to themselves as “pioneers,” they were not pioneers in the way we mean that word today. They were not embarking upon a western expansion of the United States as part of its Manifest Destiny to spread American political and cultural hegemony from coast to coast across the continent of North America. In reality, the Saints were refugees being forced once more from their homes in the most recent of a series of anti-Mormon pogroms that had occurred throughout the 1830s and 1840s. The Saints were fleeing into Northern Mexico, settling as illegal immigrants in the desolate Great Basin Region in order to escape the genocidal ethnic cleansing they were being subjected to by Americans.
With this better understanding of those early Saints, we can better understand the hellish situation they found themselves in after being driven from Nauvoo in early 1846, With nowhere else to go, the Saints created Winter Quarters out on the frozen plains of Iowa. A true refugee camp in every sense of the word, Winter Quarters was a place of starvation, impoverishment, disease, suffering, and death. Of the 2,500 to 3,000 Saints that lived in Winter Quarters, at least 600 of them died as a result. That means 20-24% of the Saints in Winter Quarters, approximately 1 in 5, died in Winter Quarters. While malaria ravaged Winter Quarters during warmer months (pg. 41), scurvy was the most common killer (pdf pg. 11) and Horace Kimball Whitney described its symptoms and causes in Winter Quarters vividly:
It would commence with dark streaks and pains in the ends of the fingers or toes, which increased and spread till the limbs were inflamed and became almost black, causing such intense agony that death would be welcomed as a release from their suffering. It was caused by the want of vegetable food and living so long on salt meat without it.
Saints and Sickness: Medicine in Nauvoo and Winter Quarters, pg. 12
The living conditions were wretched. “Most of the Saints occupied cabins made from logs or sod, but some lived in tents, wagons, or cave-like dwellings called dugouts.” (Saints, Vol 2.) Note that calling a sod cabin a cabin is stretching the idea of a cabin pretty thin. Sodhouses, or “soddies,” were generally homes made out of mudbricks with a mud roof and mud floors. Still, they were better than dugouts, literal holes in the ground or in the sides of hills that people were forced to live within. Often soddies and dugouts only had a blanket for a door to separate you from the brutal Iowa winter, as was the case for Louisa Pratt and her daughters. (pg. 40) Lucy Meserve Smith record her brutal experience in Winter Quarters during the winter of 1846 to 1847:
We moved down to Winter Quarters when my babe was two weeks old. There we lived in a cloth tent until December, then we moved into a log cabin, ten feet square with sod roof, chimney and only the soft ground for a floor and poor worn cattle beef and corn cracked on a hand mill, for our food.
Here I got scurvy, not having any vegetables to eat. I got so low I had to wean my baby and he had to be fed on that coarse cracked corn bread when he was only five months old. We had no milk for a while till we could send to the herd and then he did very well till I got better.
…My dear baby used to cry till It seemed as tho I would jump off my bed when it came night. I would get so nervous, but I could not even speak to him. I was so helpless I could not move myself in bed or speak out loud. . . . When I got better I had not a morsel in the house I could eat, as my mouth was so sore. I could not eat corn bread and I have cried hours for a morsel to put in my mouth.
Then my companion would take a plate and go around among the neighbors and find some one cooking maybe a calf’s pluck. He would beg a bit to keep me from starving. I would taste it and then I would say oh do feed my baby. My appetite would leave me when I would think of my dear child. My stomach was hardening from the want of food.
The next July my darling boy took sick and on the 22nd, the same day that his father and Orson Pratt came into the valley of the great Salt lake my only child died. I felt so overcome in my feelings. I was afraid I would loose my mind, as I had not fully recovered from my sickness the previous winter
Winter Quarters: Journal Entries
This sharply demonstrates the poverty of the Saints as men, women, and children were forced by a corrupt and uncaring American people to abandon the city they had built from scratch and live in muddy holes in the frozen Earth while trying to avoid starving to death by begging other starving people for food as their babies died in their arms all because this was a better alternative than the immediate mass extermination that faced them if they had stayed in Nauvoo. Of course, by driving the Saints into the middle of the plains with no homes, no jobs, very little food, and nothing else the American people were trying to destroy the Church of Jesus Christ, whether by breaking the wills of the Saints to continue in faith or by killing all the members.
One of the Prophet Joseph’s last recorded acts as he left Nauvoo on the path to a martyr’s crown in Carthage Jail was to look on the Temple and city of Nauvoo and remark, “This is the loveliest place and the best people under the heavens; little do they know the trials that await them.” (History of the Church, Vol. 6, pg. 554) Apostle John Taylor later recalled the Prophet Joseph saying to him, “You will have all kinds of trials to pass through. And it is quite as necessary for you to be tried as it was for Abraham and other men of God, and God will feel after you, and He will take hold of you and wrench your very heart strings, and if you cannot stand it you will not be fit for an inheritance in the Celestial Kingdom of God.” Winter Quarters was just the start of proving the truth of these prophetic words as God wrenched at the heart strings of the Saints through the trials they would now face to make them fit for His Celestial Kingdom.
I wouldn’t have blamed those Saints if they had given up. Many of them certainly had no idea what kind of trials they were signing up for when they joined the church. Their suffering is largely incomprehensible to us today when so many of us have larders full of food, comfortable beds, vehicles that allow us to travel in hours what took them weeks, and homes with indoor plumbing, central heating, and air conditioning to defeat the heat and cold so completely. We, in our near universal wealth, cannot truly understand the extremities they faced starving and freezing out on the plains of Iowa. Many of us can’t even deal with it when people say things we don’t like in church about politics. I imagine many of us would absolutely shatter if we had to actually suffer for the Kingdom.
The wonder of it all is that the Saints didn’t shatter. Though individuals certainly did, if anything the resolve of the church, of God’s covenant people, of Israel, grew stronger than ever before. Though forced into squalor by the evil men of the world, they rose in majesty and spiritual power. And they had a mission that neither Earth nor Hell could deter them from accomplishing. The vanguard party of settlers left Winter Quarters on April 16, 1847. In addition to 143 men, there were three women – Harriet Young (Lorenzo Young’s wife), Clara Young (Brigham Young’s wife), and Ellen Kimball (plural wife of Heber C. Kimball) – and at least two young boys (Harriet and Lorenzo’s sons) were part of the group. (pg. 50) On the day that they left, the Apostles issued a general church epistle to those who were at or would gather to Winter Quarters which illustrates just how powerful their dedication had become:
Beloved Brethren: We have now completed the organization of the pioneer company, of which we are members, and whom we are about to lead to the mountains, or over the mountains, as we shall be commanded by our leader, in search of a resting place for ourselves, our families and all who desire to follow us and work righteousness, and by doing this we prove to you and all the world, that we do not wish to be a whit behind the first of you, in leaving our wives, children, friends, or any of the enjoyments of social life; and that we are willing to take our full share of trouble, trials, losses and crosses, hardships and fatigues, warning and watching for the kingdom of heaven’s sake, and we feel to say: Come, calm or strife, turmoil or peace, life or death, in the name of Israel’s God we mean to conquer or die trying. We mean to open up the way for the salvation of the honest in heart from all nations, or sacrifice every thing in our stewardship; and if we fail in the attempt, having done all we could, our Father will not leave His flock without a shepherd.”
Journal History of the Church, 1830-2008 / 1840-1849 / 1847 January-June, 16, April 1847 entry, pg. 630
Let me excerpt my favorite part:
We are willing to take our full share of trouble, trials, losses and crosses, hardships and fatigues, warning and watching for the kingdom of heaven’s sake, and we feel to say: Come, calm or strife, turmoil or peace, life or death, in the name of Israel’s God we mean to conquer or die trying.
Doesn’t that just give you chills? I get goosebumps every time that I read it. At the same time it thrills me. These are not my lineal ancestors. If anything, my family history suggests most of my lineal ancestors were responsible for helping to drive the Saints out onto the plains to begin with. Yet, my personal history shows how the past does not determine the future. My lineal ancestors likely would not imagine that their descendants would join the Saints. Whatever the vagaries of blood, those brave men and women on the plains are my spiritual ancestors. And they were willing to do everything imaginable, to suffer starvation, disease, poverty and even death for the Kingdom of God. Their blood, their sweat, their tears, their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, everything they had and everything they were and everything they ever would be was laid upon the altars of God. Well could they honestly and joyfully sing:
‘Tis better far for us to strive
Our useless cares from us to drive;
Do this, and joy your hearts will swell—
All is well! All is well!And should we die before our journey’s through
The Story of “Come, Come, Ye Saints.”
Happy day! All is well!
We then are free from toil and sorrow too;
With the just we shall dwell.
This is what I have come to love and celebrate on Pioneer Day. It has nothing to do with the gauche and gaudy parades and flag-waving that so often makes Pioneer Day ironically feel like Fourth of July, Part Duex. I love the unwillingness to submit, the tenacity of faith, and the dogged determination to never break no matter what Hell and Earth arrayed against them that the Saints had. I love that they climbed out of the gutter, out of the grave that the people of the United States of America repeatedly tried to put the Saints into, and established the Kingdom of God ever more firmly and powerfully. While I knew what sacred geography was intellectually I did not understand it emotionally until I walked Temple Square. There I saw how those refugees, those illegal immigrants, those targets for extermination had transformed the arid mountain desert they discovered and in fulfillment of the ancient Prophet Isaiah’s words, through their dedication and hard work, caused that desert to “rejoice, and blossom as the rose.” (Isaiah 35:1-10)
How could I not love these people? How could I not love what they built?
It is upon the shoulders and in the shadows of these giants that we stand today. They would not bend, not would not budge, they would not break. In the immortal words of President John Taylor, for them it was, “The Kingdom of God or Nothing!” We not only continue their legacy, we continue their work in building the Kingdom of God upon the Earth. The stone rolls forth until it shall fill the whole Earth and we all have our part to play in moving it forward. With Brigham, I proclaim, “Come, calm or strife, turmoil or peace, life or death, in the name of Israel’s God I mean to conquer or die trying.” And, if I should die before the work of God is finished, I pray that I will be able to honorably echo the last words of “Wee Granny” Mary Murray Murdoch and justly claim that, “I died with my face toward Zion.”