This week, Utahns celebrate Pioneer
Day, since the first company of Mormon pioneers arrived around July 24th,
1847. The “Days of ‘47” holiday includes
parades, concerts, speeches, rodeos, and of course … fireworks! Friday night, Kay and I with friends enjoyed the Tabernacle Choir and orchestra concert, featuring Broadway singer/actor, Santino Fontana (the bad guy in Frozen, as he described it.) Inspiring!
To
learn something new about the pioneer trek, I took an old book from the library
here in our frontier house: Charles
Coulson Rich / Pioneer Builder of the
West by John Henry Evans, ©1936, The Macmillan Company, printed by Norwood
Press Linotype Inc., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
My
mother’s signature as owner of the book about her great grandfather, is
dated 1941 Toronto, where she was serving a full-time mission for The Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
I
found this little background history published by the State of Utah:
“After
a mob murdered Joseph Smith in 1844, his followers started to think about
moving somewhere where <[I'd edit] they could live peacefully. Enemies were
still attacking Mormons in different ways. Because of this persecution, in the
cold of February 1846 the Mormons began to leave Nauvoo. They journeyed to
Winter Quarters, Nebraska, and set up a temporary community.
...
the people gathered in Winter Quarters got ready to move again. Where to? It
seemed that the Great Basin would be a perfect place to go.
In
April 1847 the first group of Mormon settlers left and headed west along the
California Trail. Brigham Young led a group of two children, three women, and
143 men. ... Brigham Young himself arrived on July 24,
1847.”
The
Riches and Cannons made the trek two months after that first group of
pioneers.
“From
Winter Quarters, now Omaha, Nebraska, to what was to become Salt Lake City,
Utah, is approximately eleven hundred miles, as the pioneer companies
went. Leaving Elkhorn, the rendezvous
for the trekkers a few miles out from the river, on the twenty-first of June,
the Riches [and Cannons] arrived at their destination exactly one hundred and
three days later, on October 2, 1847.
They had bettered the time made by the pioneer company by a full
week. The company in which the Rich family
traveled to the West numbered about two thousand persons.”
(Charles Coulson Rich, p. 131)
“The
situation in which this small colony of Mormons found themselves, from the
autumn of 1847 to the summer of 1848, was extremely critical … Perhaps no group of people in pioneer America
was put so clearly and certainly on the spot.
… that the colony here did not
utterly perish was due more to the wisdom, the energy, and the forethought of
Charles C. Rich than to any other human cause.”
(Charles Coulson Rich, pages 142-143)
