Recalling
“The Rich Trek” I posted 20 July 2014: “This week, Utahns celebrate Pioneer
Day ...”
The
Riches and Cannons made the trek a few 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.
…” (Charles Coulson Rich, pages 142-143)
Relating
to the purpose of the 1847 pioneer treks, George Q. Cannon wrote 36 years later,
“I was much impressed by a remark made to me lately by an eminent man. ‘It is very wonderful,’ said he, speaking of
the Latter-day Saints, ‘that a colony of religious exiles in the heart of the
continent should be contending to-day for precisely the same principles of
liberty that the men of our American revolution battled for.’ He could see our true position. …”
(April 1, 1883, Juvenile Instructor 18:99)
–
Gospel Truth - Volume 2, Discourses and Writings of President
George Q. Cannon, compiled by Jerreld L. Newquist, p. 347.