Pioneer Tribute

Again this is long (sorry). Since it is Pioneer Day, I thought I'd share a speech I gave for a class that ISU required when we lived in Bloomington:


They rushed across the fields under the late-June, Illinois sun. Soot, smeared across their faces for disguise, dripped black on their shirts with the sweat of summer exertion and the feverish anticipation of mob justice. They leaped over the fence surrounding the jail yard, shrieking oaths and calling for blood. The soldiers stationed to guard the prisoners stood between the advancing men and the door. As the rushing mob met the defending army, some of the soldiers stepped aside laughing and others joined the frantic melee up the stairs to the landing.

POP! POP! POP! Unable to kick it open, they fired through the door with rifles, pocket pistols and six-shooters. Lead balls whizzed through the air as the vigilantes struggled to get their shots in before hearing their intended victim fall from the window with the exclamation, “O Lord my God.” In a wild dash to witness the destruction of their enemy, the mob rushed headlong down the steps, cheering when they saw Ol’ Joe’s body, limp and leaning dead against a water well. The wolf was finally dead. The dirty, traitorous, adulterous, power-mad, blaspheming, wife-stealing, horse-thieving, murderous, satanic, obscenity-breathing wolf, Joe Smith.

The wolf, Joseph Smith, was a beloved shepherd to his people. Days before his death he bid farewell to his sorrowing flock with the words: “ I am going like a lamb to the slaughter; but I am calm as a summer’s morning; I have a conscience void of offense toward God, and towards all men. I shall die innocent, and it shall yet be said of me – He was murdered in cold blood.”

The mob and soldiers fled. The deed accomplished, they fled as whispers flew that the Nauvoo Legion was on the march – a dreaded militia, 4,000 strong, well armed and disciplined, rivaled only by the United States Army herself. Rumor insisted that they were coming to avenge their general, their leader. The mob, moments before united in murder, scattered, each seeking to save his own skin. They scampered into the woods, down back roads, through fields and gullies – not daring to return home for days and weeks. Terror gripped them on their departure as tightly as blood lust had on their arrival. They ran like hunted beasts looking back with wild eyes and faint hearts.

But the Legion did not march – they laid down their arms and meekly obeyed the law. The men of this militia were not primarily soldiers – they were teachers, artisans, brick-masons, craftsmen, and farmers from mostly New England stock. The men and their wives knew how to work and build things. Having left their homes to follow their faith, they worked and built in Kirtland, Ohio; they worked and built in Independence, Missouri; and they worked and built up Nauvoo, Illinois – a city raised from malaria-ridden swampland to become nearly the size of Chicago to the east. They built homes, schools, foundries, dance halls, churches, and temples and gathered to worship God as they chose, like their pilgrim ancestors. They worked at being united, as Christ taught his disciples. They worked at building the very Kingdom of God on earth.

To their mostly Southern, frontier neighbors they were pests. Wherever they moved, they voted as a block – gaining instant political power and instant contempt – first, for their puritan views about abstinence and abolition, then, for doctrinally separating the Trinity into three distinct Personages and uniting in plural marriage. They were labeled Mormons, after the strange book they claimed was scripture along with the Bible – a name spoken in derision, but one more genteel than most other names used when speaking of the strange cult on the riverbank.

The Mormons knew how to work and build, they learned about violence and destruction while in Missouri. Many of their men were killed, their women raped, some of their children dashed against the walls of their own homes, as mobocrats, lusting for the lives and left-behind lands of the Saints, followed Governor Lilburn Boggs’s “extermination order” – a slaughter decreed from the state house in order to sow “peace,” and reap political gain. They fled, in some cases without shoes, their bloody footprints trailing in the snow behind them, until they reached Illinois and the kindly arms of the citizens of Quincy – who pitied them, and backed their pity up with food and shelter for fellow Christians. The refugees soon recovered, reorganized and raised Nauvoo on the banks of the Mississippi – a grander civilization than any they had built in Missouri, with wide, clean streets and well-kept buildings. But again, persecution grew with their population and political power, until the bodies of their prophet and his brother were wheeled into town on horse-drawn carts, the victims of another governor’s empty promises for protection. Another Governor, who asked the Saints, then demanded that they leave his state.

Leave they did – forced from their homes on an unforgiving night in February 1846. They walked over the frozen Mississippi and into Iowa, setting up winter quarters and hunkering down until spring. From there, they walked next to their wagons and oxen, thirteen hundred miles in all – walked over the muddy prairies of Iowa, walked over the endless Platte Valley of Nebraska, walked over the high, cold plains of Wyoming, walked through the passes of the Rocky Mountains and walked down into a desolate, desert valley with nothing but sandy soil, sagebrush, and a dead salty sea to welcome them as they looked down from a mountain peak and Brigham Young declared, “This is the right place.” There they dug in – literally – digging furrows for crops on the same day they walked into the valley of the Great Salt Lake. After a couple years of drought, when only more migrants rained down on the valley, they began to prosper.

Converts by the thousands began sailing from England to make the trek to “Zion.” Thousands of poor peasants, the working-class of the British mills and farms, with only enough money saved to sail on cramped and stench-laden vessels over the treacherous vastness of the Atlantic. These thousands most often had no money for wagons, cattle or, in some cases, adequate food for their families. They fashioned handcarts, for which they became their own beasts of burden – the fathers and mothers pushing their little ones and provisions over the entire length of the trail. Hundreds died of fatigue, hunger and exposure along the way. After observing the boarding of these immigrants on a London dock, Charles Dickens described these accidental pioneers as the “pick and flower of England.” This pick and flower, these humble poor, left with almost nothing but their faith that they would someday see their new desert home and help it to blossom like a rose.

It was not a trail of bitterness, though it was a trail of suffering and self-denial. It was a trail of hope – hope that they would be left in peace to worship God as their own consciences dictated. It was a trail of faith – faith that God would protect them in the mountains. It was a trail of singing and dancing, of children collecting wild flowers near the camps, and of women driving teams of oxen as the men stood watch for unfriendly natives and even unrelenting mobsters.

These pioneers, these patriotic American heroes driven from their own country into Mexican territory, these men and women of faith and action, these honored dead, are the great grandparents of my parents. They are great and grand to those who consider their endurance and faith a sacred heritage. I honor them with words, but no words can render adequate honor to those who lay down their lives rather than compromise cherished beliefs. The very rocks of the Mormon Trail speak their honor, nourished as they are by the blood, sweat and tears of their struggle for a safe home in the mountains.