Church Talks
OUR PIONEER HERITAGE
[Talk was given by John E. Enslen to the members of the Wetumpka Ward on Sunday, July 22, 2012.]
In referring to Mormon pioneers, President Gordon B. Hinckley, at that time a living prophet, said: “I hope you never get over being thankful to them. Let us read again and again, and read to our children and our children’s children the accounts of those who suffered so much.”
When we are baptized into this Church, we adopt as our own the pioneer heritage that made it possible for us to become members of the Church. The life stories of the pioneers—their sufferings, their accomplishments, their sacrifices—belong to us. We are connected to them and their life stories in a real and literal way. We are connected to them by virtue of a direct line extending from original pioneer convert to subsequent convert to subsequent convert and so on until it reaches our own personal conversion. There is an unbroken chain of conversions that tie us to the Mormon pioneers, and the influence of that linkage can be as powerful in our lives, if not greater, as that influence which is created by the connections of blood and birth.
[I talked about six or seven minutes about several Alabama-related Mormon pioneer stories as follows:
1. The 80 or so Pueblo saints from Alabama and Mississippi who arrived at Ft. Laramie a year ahead of Brigham Young and in the valley five days after Brigham Young, one of whom is the namesake for Holladay, Utah;
2. Lysander Davis, the first Mormon missionary to preach in Alabama;
3. Samuel Turnbow, the first Mormon convert to be baptized in Alabama;
4. Benjamin Clapp, the first Mormon missionary from Alabama and who baptized Samuel Turnbow;
5. The Utley Brothers, especially Samuel who lost his wife and four children in Winter Quarters and who himself died on the trail in route to Salt Lake; and
6. The two Alabama women who married William Carter.]
There is a primary song titled “Pioneer Children Sang As They Walked.” Several times in the song it says that pioneer children sang as they walked and walked and walked and walked. The song presents an idealistic picture of pioneer children and pioneer life. They didn’t really always sing and sing and sing and sing as they walked and walked and walked and walked. More often, they cried and cried and cried and cried, and complained and complained and complained and complained, even saying, “My feet hurt.” “Are we there yet?” “How much further is it?” “When will we get there?” People in the 19th century were basically the same people as we are in the 21st century. And yet, we know that they were forced by their circumstances to be tough physically, and they endured much suffering physically. Keeping food on the table, a good milk cow in the barn, a few chickens in the coop, a good horse in the corral, and a sturdy wagon in the shed, and a dependable rifle with ammunition were major accomplishments.
Many of the early Saints watched their family members, especially their infants, die from accidents, Indian raids, or diseases that could not be cured in the 19th century. Nauvoo was not a particularly healthy place, and the many forced removals of the saints in freezing temperatures under the trying circumstances of severe persecution, added to the death toll.
Historian Dean Hughes had this to say recently about the death of children: “When I first began to study Latter-day Saint history, I found myself thinking that the pain of loss could not possibly have been as severe for pioneer parents as it would be for us. Didn’t they know when their children were born that there was a serious chance that they would never survive to adulthood?
That was my theory. But I remember talking to my grandmother who—lived to be 98 years old. Two of her siblings died as infants, and a 14-year old brother died when she was 8. Her little sister, Millie May, died at 2 when my grandma was 16. When I probed her feelings about those losses two-thirds of a century after they had happened, she began to cry, especially when she spoke of her dear little sister. Here’s my theory now. Human responses don’t change very much. Death is death, and the loss of someone we love has always been hard and always will be. Those early members didn’t ‘get used’ to losing their children; they suffered.”
We’ve tend to stereotype those hearty Mormon pioneers. We speak of them with awe as though they were almost superhuman creatures. We are apt to say in our day, “I would not be able to do all of the things that they did.” But let me ask this question, is that the proper lesson for us to learn from our pioneer forbearers? Why speak of our noble forbearers if we’re only going to use them to convince ourselves that we aren’t as capable as they were by comparison?
Our heritage should inspire us. My study of history tells me the right conclusion is that pioneers were ordinary people who did what they were called upon to do—and in many cases, didn’t do what they were called upon to do. Some triumphed, others failed. We honor those who triumphed.
But the point is, they did what they did, still possessing all the human weaknesses that we deal with. Many of them rose to the occasion and did the hard things. That ought to be a lesson to us: We can do the hard things, and do the hard things, and do the hard things, and do the hard things, until we arrive at our destination. We need to add a verse to the primary song about doing the hard things.
We are currently passing through a very hard time in the world spiritually, which can have more adverse eternal consequences than passing through hard times physically. There is prevalent more evil than was faced by the pioneers, and the evil is intense, unrelenting, and sophisticated. The devil is wired into every home. We may see far fewer infant deaths, but we deal with worse social ills than 19th century families faced in their worse nightmares. And at least they had for the most part actual intact traditional families for support.
So what can we do? We can look to the faith of the pioneers. That is the principle that transcends itself from their generation to ours. As Elder L. Tom Perry said: “Pioneer faith is needed as much in the world today as in any period of time. We need to know that heritage. We need to teach it, we need to be proud of it, we need to preserve it.”
We can also recognize that we ourselves are pioneers for the following generations. We, in spite of our humanness, can be stalwarts. It’s the simple things done collectively by the masses like us that make up the backbone of the Church—simple things like everyone doing their home teaching and visiting teaching, serving faithfully in their callings, attending their meetings, properly preparing their talks and lessons, being honest, paying our tithing, keeping the word of wisdom, being a good neighbor to others in and out of the Church, being fair, hardworking, and competent employees and employers, and keeping ourselves unspotted from the ways of the world.
We should teach our children to sing as they walk, and sometimes they will do it, but sometimes they’ll complain about their blisters. We should never forget our pioneer heritage of faith. They followed the prophet and kept on the trail, despite all of the adversity. They did not expect perfection from others any more than we should expect it from ourselves.
In the end, average people just like us did amazing things, and they arrived at their destinations. We can do the same. 1,000 years from now, those of us in convert lands like Alabama will be looked upon as early pioneers. What we do will matter. We, too, are pioneers and what we do and how we live our lives has vital consequences for the next generation, especially the next generation of our own families.
May our names be deservingly held in honorable remembrance, I pray in the name of Jesus Christ.