When I was growing up in Southern California, the child of active converts to Mormonism, I dressed up as a pioneer (usually a girl pioneer, much to my tomboy dismay) every July 24th and went with my family to a local park to participate in my congregation's "Pioneer Day" picnic and parade (featuring Radio Flyer wagons decorated to look like Conestoga wagons). It has been a very long time since I last celebrated Pioneer Day, and for good reason(s).
Many Mormons all over the world still celebrate Pioneer Day — the day when Brigham Young, very ill and lying in a wagon, looked out upon the Valley of the Great Salt Lake and declared, "This is the place. Drive on!" … and thus the Mormon pioneers wended their way down through the mountain pass at Emigration Canyon and immediately began to make the desert blossom like the rose. — Or so the official narrative goes.
This narrative has stuck in my head for all of the usual reasons associated with having grown up Mormon at a particular point in time and in a particularly Mormon-dense area, but also because of my mother. When I was extremely young — kindergarten age, living in the greater Chicago area — my mom (having a beautiful singing voice) had the lead female role in a still-popular, still-occasionally-performed musical called Promised Valley — the ultimate romanticized version of the Saints' travails and trials en route to the American promised land (that would be Utah, yes). [Re: video: this is a trailer for a stake production happening this very day! — head in to about 2:20 to actually start hearing some of the music.]
While July 24th is a state holiday in Utah and features an annual Days of '47 (that's 1847) parade and fireworks and so forth, the steady participation of non-Utahn Mormons has dwindled, especially in recent years. For one thing, the number of Mormons (American or otherwise) who have family ties to Crossing the Plains has diminished over the years; for another, such a very American event resonates less and less with foreign converts whose lives and cultures are far removed from America's Wild West.
Pedigreed Mormons often refer to any place outside the Zion Curtain, a.k.a. Mormon Corridor — Utah and parts of Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, and perhaps stretching a bit here, even So. California — as "the Mission Field," a place fraught with spiritual challenges and peril. My children grew up in that particular part of the Mission Field referred to as "Back East" — which present-day conservative Mormons view with deep suspicion as a bastion of (evil) political liberalism, and which old-timers still think of as the place where the Mormons were chased out by the (evil) Gentiles.
Indicative of the depth of Back East depravity even among the Saints, I frankly do not recall that our local congregation (a.k.a. Ward) or collection of congregations (a.k.a. Stake) ever held a specific Pioneer Day celebration — perhaps because there were stake picnics on Memorial Day and Labor Day to attend, and a third picnic, hot on the heels of the Fourth of July, at that, was probably too much… particularly for the majority who lacked pioneer blood and thus were unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary for figuring out how to make a Radio Flyer wagon look like a Conestoga wagon (or finding a Radio Flyer wagon in the first place, démodé as they already were in the mid-to-late 1980s).
But although parade and picnic were lacking in Pittsburgh, on the Sunday closest to Pioneer Day, we would nonetheless every year listen to sermons and sing ever-more-anachronistic pioneer-related hymns to which fewer and fewer congregants could personally relate. The children may have also presented a medley of pioneer songs, too — as a perennial accompanist for Junior Sunday School and all, I certainly remember playing "Here Comes the Ox-Cart, Oh So Slow," and "When Pioneers Went to the West, With Courage Strong They Met the Test," and "Pioneer Children Sang as They Walked, and Walked, and Walked, and Walked." (The first line of another such children's song was "Little pioneer children, eating berries for food," which in my wickedness I always rendered as "Little Donner Pass children, eating others for food" — but I digress, and boy, do I.)
Anyway, I may be wrong, but the same Pittsburgh-style Pioneer Day seemed to be observed in the very same way even after we moved to very, very Mormon Belmont, MA (yes, same town as Mitt Romney, though we opted out of being in the same congregation) — no picnic, no parade, just pioneer-themed sermons and songs on the closest Sunday thereto. In short, outside of the Mormon Corridor, Pioneer Day has had less and less meaning as the years have gone by. Recently, however, the Mormon Church has revived interest in the whole narrative by encouraging stakes to hold "Mormon Pioneer Treks" — youth-oriented reenactments of the pioneer experience held over a weekend or even longer. (Some treks actually take place along the 1,300-mile Mormon Trail, with the most devoted (a.k.a. fanatical) doing the entire thing. (Unsurprisingly, enterprising Mormons have started Trek-supply businesses to support the effort of keeping the pioneer memory alive. Getcher pioneer sunbonnets and flat-pack handcart kits right here!)
Truth to tell, I rather regret that the Trek wasn't thought up while I was a teen, or while my kids were still attending church. Might have been fun. (Or it might have been loathsome, depending on how much pressure and guilt would have been applied to coerce reluctant youth into participating.— And it should be noted, by the way, that these Pioneer Treks are becoming a "must-do" all over the world, even here in Europe, even here in France, notwithstanding some understandable grumbling about this throwback to the old American hegemony in the church, and despite Salt Lake City's desire that Mormonism be seen as world-wide and completely international, rather than American, yadda, yadda.)
Well, now that our little nuclear family is soon coming up on 20 years of "inactivity" (including the non-observance of the holiday), a couple of related things before I let you go about your business again:
1. Since our having gone astray, my parents have gotten into genealogy big-time, and lo! Unbeknownst to any of us, I actually have Mormon ancestors who joined LDS, Inc., pretty much right around the beginning (i.e., in the 1830s). Said ancestors went west to Utah. We did not have any clue about this whatsoever. So far as I and my parents knew, we were a "convert family" — my parents having joined the Mormon church when I was a baby back in the mid-1950s.
2. We did not know about these Mormon ancestors because while they did in fact follow Brigham Young to Utah, they were among the surprising many (and largely unacknowledged) who turned around and headed back East (likely sometime in the 1850s). Why? Unfortunately, my ancestors didn't leave any records — at least none that my intrepid genealogist-detective dad has been able to find so far. However, polygamy was kept pretty secret even from the rank-and-file Saints, and when it was publicly acknowledged in 1852, a lot of people were disgusted and left. Then, too, Brigham Young ruled with a heavy hand and a fair number of people got fed up with his autocratic ways. The Reorganized LDS Church — the largest of the "non-Brighamite" splinter groups after founder Joseph Smith's death — sent missionaries to Utah to persuade people that the Salt Lake church was wrong.
Any or all of these factors may have contributed, but it is unlikely that we will ever know for sure. Despite their having gone Back East, my ancestors' having made it to Utah meant that my convert dad has qualified for membership in the Sons of the Utah Pioneers. (As his daughter, the thought has struck me right this instant that I am therefore likely qualified to become a Daughter of the Utah Pioneers, although at the moment I am disinclined to try to find out. But still, hmm.)
3. I have become more aware of what "pioneer" means to people who are being displaced by the newcomers, as per this thoughtful essay that appeared earlier this month, written by a faithful Mormon in New Zealand. In short, pioneers — whether they've landed in Utah or in South Africa or any other already-occupied place in the world — have nearly always been a significant source of trouble and grief. Such is the human condition. Given all this, even if I still believed in Mormonism, I think I would be disinclined to celebrate the day anymore — unless I lived in Utah. (I confess I am a real sucker for fireworks.)