“Of logs we built our houses, of shakes we made the doors, of sod we made the chimneys, dirt we had for floors.” Joel William White wrote that in his journal. He was my wife’s 2nd great grandfather and one of the early Mormon pioneers. Another one stated that “We swept our dirt floors with a sagebrush and when we were done, we threw it in the fireplace to heat our home.” On the 24th of July, we will again be celebrating “Pioneer Days” with a parade, rodeo and fireworks It is primarily a Utah holiday and rightly so. That is the day, in 1847, that our first Utah pioneer forefathers drove their covered wagons down into the Salt Lake Valley after a thousand mile trek across the dusty plains. They had been driven out of their homes in Illinois because of religious persecution. They came here looking for peace and safety from the intolerance of the so-called civilized areas of our then-young nation, a nation that had recently instituted a constitution that guaranteed religious freedom.
Each year on this celebration day, do our minds ever leave the parade, the rodeo and the fireworks long enough to contemplate what those early pioneers went through to get here? Do we try to understand on that day, the 24th, the many things they had to do in August, September and October in order to survive their first year? They had to plant crops late in the summer so they would have food to eat through the coming winter or they would actually starve to death. For them, it wasn’t a matter of, well, if the corn doesn’t mature, we’ll have to run down to Albertsons and buy some. Theirs was a matter of, if the corn doesn’t mature, we won’t have any. It was a very difficult life for them; unlike us, they had very few choices in terms of what they could do. And when you don’t have choices, what you have to do must be done with energy, hope and a prayer in your heart that it will be a successful effort. One interesting way of trying to put ourselves back then was stated by an unknown author this way: “If we were put back in that time, we would not be ourselves.” We would be put into an entirely different dimension, a dimension not unlike the popular TV series of several years ago, called the Twilight Zone. Some of the first settlers in this country made a pilgrimage from Europe where they were persecuted for their religious beliefs. They, too, struggled to prepare for their first winter, and many did not make it. They were referred to as pilgrims. The early members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also made a pilgrimage to the Salt Lake Valley and for the same reason, religious persecution. They, too, arrived at an awkward time of year, and they, too, could be referred to as pilgrims, but pioneers is the name that stuck.
When I was a young person, I read “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a story about Christian, a young man who supposedly was representing all Christians. While venturing through life, he ran into one moral obstacle after another, each having to be overcome, before he could move on toward his goal of eternal life. From that perspective, we are all pilgrims with the same challenges.
Those of us who have embarked on a search for our ancestral families are also pilgrims. We are often required to seek information from distant lands, like a quest, seeking old records from places and languages that we may have had no previous experience with. Searching here and there for clues that will lead us to a name, a place, a time, with the hopes that to find one ancestor we will be lead to another. Do we not wander through time and to new places, even cyberspace? We are truly pilgrims. We, too, are on a sacred quest with a prayer in our hearts that we might weather the storms of failure until we find success.