Sacrament Meeting talk - 03/15/2015

March 15, 2015

I spoke in the Plano 3^rd ward today.  The YM/YW just completed a TREK where they pushed handcarts over the north Texas plains on the National Grasslands.  It has been rainy and cold, so the ground was already muddy, and they got hit by a pretty substantial rainstorm on the 2^nd day of the Trek. 

There were three youth Speakers who were on the TREK who spoke first, and they used most of the meeting time.  I had prepared the following talk, which would take me about 12.5 minutes.  I had pre-marked some of the stories to leave out if time ran short, but I had to cut out almost all the pioneer stories to make it fit in the remaining time.

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I bring you the love of the Stake Presidency as I speak today on assignment.  My topic today is How our Pioneer Heritage influences our future Pioneering.   My personal heritage is that I am descended from pioneers.

My grandfather grew up in a tiny Utah town, and as a young man worked in his father’s mercantile store.  I was very lucky to see him and my grandmother almost every day, either at our house or theirs.  Grandpa was great about taking me and my cousins with him when he was going to cattle auctions, or out to work on his farm.  During these trips, he loved to tell us stories of his youth, just as I’m doing right now. 

The cool thing about him was that he was the 13^th child of his parents, so they were fairly old when he was young.  Most men his age had parents born in Utah, after the trip across the plains to Utah, but both his parents were born in the Nauvoo area. 

I want to tell you about my grandpa and his parents – my great-grandparents.

Grandpa’s  father, my great-grandfather, was 7 years old when the Saints were forced to leave their homes in a bitter-cold morning in February 1847.  He crossed the Mighty Mississippi on the ice when the river froze solid – a very rare occurrence indeed on that wide, strong river.  As a youngster, he probably helped keep watch on the livestock, and he would have been called in to help in the brutally hard work of getting wagons and livestock through the Iowa mud in that wet spring, as they struggled to join the other Saints in Winter Quarters.

All the journals that talk about crossing Iowa mention mud in almost every entry:

·        Bro Smith’s wagon got mired in a mud hole and we had to call on 25 or our brothers to push it through.

·        Bro. Smith’s team of oxen slipped over the bank.  We had to get the yoke off them before we could pull them out, but one of them died of exhaustion and we left it in that hole.  Brother Stevens gave him a milk cow to help pull his wagon.  [My great-great-grandfather Stevens loaned the milk cow to one of the brothers in his company in exchange for a bucket of corn.  When they got to Utah, he didn’t get the cow back.  He never mentioned it, but it was recorded in someone else’s journal.]

·        Brother Wilson was so deep in the mud that he lost his boots and we were unable to find them.  He walked barefoot for 3 miles to camp.  The next morning when he woke, there was a pair of boots just inside the flap of his tent.

Great-Grandpa’s family stayed at Winter Quarters until the very end, raising grain to support that great migration.  They finally joined a company of pioneers to make the journey to Salt lake in 1851, among the very last of the Saints from Nauvoo. 

We sometimes don’t appreciate how long it took to get the Nauvoo Saints to Utah.  A few got there in 1847, more went in 1848, but very few went in 1849 because the way was choked with gold miners joining the California Gold Rush.  More went in 1850, and the last of them in 1851.  So, it was five years total to make the trip.

My great-grand mother was only a couple of months old when they had to leave Nauvoo, and was only 20 months old when they arrived in Utah, so she had no memories of it at all.  Many babies were buried along that trail, but she was one of the lucky ones, and she grew up in a rapidly growing Salt Lake City and was relatively pampered.  Her father was a talented stone carver, and worked on many buildings in Salt Lake, and later on the new statehouse building in Fillmore for that one year when Brigham Young thought the capitol of Deseret ought to be in its geographic center.

Now, back to Great-grandpa.

 Great-grandpa’s family lived for a couple of years in Utah Valley south of Provo, before Brigham Young told them to sell their place and move to Southern Utah to colonize the territory.  They were assigned to Cedar City, but when they arrived in Fillmore, they sent back word that they were needed there due to some troubles with Indians and they received permission to help build in Holden, a tiny little town just north of Fillmore.  The Saints built a log fort in Holden that was essentially a square of small rooms with dirt floors, and very few windows.   

As the family grew, they were able to get a 2^nd and then a 3^rd room in the fort as other families built better homes, but they stayed in the deteriorating old fort for many years.  When they finally started work on a wood-frame house, his mother moved in as soon as the floors were laid, excited to be up off the dirt at long last.  She gave no thought to the workers building walls and raising ceilings about her.  She would have been happy with a tent as long as it had a wooden floor!

Great-grandpa was about 17 when they arrived in Holden and started looking for a job because he was considered old enough to be his own man at that age.  He had a horse and he got a contract to carry mail between Fillmore and Cedar City – some 60 miles away, making the round trip twice a week.  That contract brought cash into the area, which was in short supply in Utah all the way up to WWII.  He built his mail contract into a freight-hauling business, and built that into three mercantile stores that were still thriving when I was a boy, although he was gone by then.  He met Great-grandma when her family spent that year in Fillmore, and they were sealed in the brand-new Manti temple.  They built their own home in Holden and raised a large family.  While the mode of travel was via stagecoach, their home was a waystop and they often served meals to 20 people or more at a time.

So, my grandfather (their 13^th child) grew up in Holden and helped his father.  He drove freight wagons and tended stock, but his older brothers got the best jobs in the stores and he settled into farming and raising calves.  He loved calves.  He’d go to the auctions around Utah to buy and sell them.  He’d buy little calves just weaned from their mothers, and he’d raise them until they were fat and big enough to be sold.  Sometimes I would go to his house and grandma would send me out to the barn, where I’d find him sitting on a feed sack, just talking to his calves.

Both he and my other grandfather told me that at the time they married they owned a team of horses and considered that they were set for life.  A man could always earn a living if he had a good team.  Both of them earned their living in that way for a while (in different states), but after about 10 years tractors became available and the teams disappeared from almost all the farms.

So how does our Pioneer Heritage influence our lives?  I think we have some important life lessons we can understand better by examining their examples.

1.      The LDS people from Nauvoo were all converts to the church, and they made important decisions about their lives when they made the commitment to join the church.  At that time, joining the church meant moving to the frontier.   That pushed their faith into the middle of a lot of other aspects of their lives, including politics, marriage (some spouses weren’t willing to do it), what they did for a living, etc.   It is that fact that makes it so we now have an LDS faith, AND an LDS culture.  Those two things are separate, but we have trouble separating them in our minds.  For example, we men wear a white shirt when fulfilling priesthood responsibilities.  It has nothing to do with our faith – you can’t find any reference to it in scripture, but it is important in LDS culture.  We never even think about it, because our faith and our culture are so closely tied together.

2.      The pioneers made serious sacrifices for their faith. Today, we don’t have to move like they did when we join the church, but we still have to make some difficult life-style commitments like they did,  such as:

a.       Paying Tithing

b.      Giving up habits in violation of the Word of Wisdom

c.       Time.   We attend a huge number of Meetings, etc.  We spend so much time together that we sometimes get accused of being stand-offish.  We don’t mean to be.

d.      We accept LDS cultural roles and mores.

3.      Service.  We are still encouraged to perform service, just like the early saints were.  Service is an act of sacrifice that builds spiritual strength.  The pioneers are great examples of service because they were completely isolated from all other help as they crossed the plains.  They had to help each other or they wouldn’t have made it.

a.       There are two major examples of pioneer companies who got caught in big winter storms while still traveling across the Western Plains.

                                                                                       i.      The Donner party (not an LDS party) got caught by an early snow storm in the Sierra-Nevada mountains.  They were a band of small groups who acted independently – every group for themselves.  Their story is marked by selfishness.  Almost all of them perished, and the few survivors got through only by committing cannibalism.  Their very name is INFAMY!

                                                                                     ii.      The Martin-Willy Handcart company (who were LDS) got caught by an early snow storm in the windswept, high plains between Wyoming and Utah.  They were in worse trouble than the Donner Party because they had nothing with which to build shelters out there.  But they acted as one large group and helped each other in everything.  Many of them perished, too, but most made it through to Salt Lake, and the difference was that the LDS saints helped each other in every thing.  If one of them had any food, then everybody got something to eat.  They were able to reach out to the Saints in Salt Lake who went to extreme lengths to get them home.

4.      The LDS Saints were asked to do extremely difficult things.  I have read about the brother of one of my ancestors who was assigned to relocate seven times after they reached Utah, each time leaving a new-built home behind.  Each time building a new home in a new place where President Young felt the need for a community of Saints.  Great-grandpa’s family only had to relocate once, but even so they left a wooden home to live on a dirt floor.  The early Saints worked hard to build better lives for their children than they had for themselves.  So why did they do that?  It wasn’t that it was comfortable, nor that they themselves prospered so much.  But their faith was great, in part because of the sacrifices they made.

I love reading about the pioneer Saints.  I like reading their daily journals and picking out little details about their travels. 

For example that last Nauvoo party to travel from Winter Quarters to Salt Lake in 1851 had the assignment to pick up any iron scrap they could find along the way.  They arrived in Salt Lake with their wagons full of iron wagonwheel rims, rusty nails, broken braces, and parts from abandoned wagons.  It was junk, but iron and steel were in short supply until smelters could be built, so it was valuable to them.

It is good, and proper for us to remember those people who were pioneers, and what they did to establish the church in the tops of the mountains.  Their lives even impacted our music.  It helps us gird up our loins and thrust in our sickle with all our might in building up the church in Zion.  The World has need of WILLING men, who wear the worker’s seal.    As we put our shoulders to the wheel, we grow in faith, and No toil nor Labor do we fear.  And we, too, sacrifice to become a Zion people.

And, I say this . . .