July 24th is Utah’s unique holiday. It commemorates the arrival of religious pioneers fleeing persecution in the Midwest.
For many in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, their arrival that sweltering summer day in 1847 was nothing short of a miracle. It marked the end of an epic journey and the beginning of Zion. The story of the pioneers and their historic trek took on mythic proportions, passed down in hushed tones to descendants for the next 178 years.
There have been feature films, plays, music, art and countless handcart reenactments to herald their heroism.
Historian W. Paul Reeve, head of Mormon studies at the University of Utah, shares the belief that the pioneer story is worth celebrating and remembering — but not in its simplest and most sugarcoated versions.
Here are some clarifications about this important moment in Utah and Latter-day Saint history that Reeve has shared on social media, in speeches and in interviews in recent years.
Did the pioneers need Brigham Young to proclaim “This is the place” to know where they would be settling?
No. The trekkers did not “wander aimlessly westward. … As early as September 1845, Brigham Young had zeroed in on the Salt Lake Valley,” Reeve writes. “On Sept. 9, 1845, Brigham Young declared to the Council of Fifty in Nauvoo: ‘It has been proved that there is not much difficulty in sending people beyond the mountains. We have designed sending them somewhere near the Great Salt Lake.’”
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) The sun rises over the Salt Lake Valley at This Is the Place Heritage Park in July 2023.
What’s significant about July 24th, and why is Brigham’s pronouncement so central to the story?
The advance party of Latter-day Saints “consisting of 42 men and 23 wagons arrived on July 22, 1847, and camped at present-day 1700 South and 500 East (marked by a ‘First Encampment Park’),” Reeve says. By the time Young came, two days later, the earlier arrivals had moved north to plow land and plant crops. The state holiday celebrates Young’s arrival on July 24. “His reported visionary experience that day is best described as a confirmation of a decision already made. Pioneer Levi Jackman recorded this on July 28, 1847 [spellings and punctuation have been standardized]: ‘The camp was called together to say where the city should be built. After a number had spoken on the subject, a vote was called for [and] unanimously agreed that this was the spot . . . After that, President Young said that he knew that this is the place. He knew it as soon as he came in sight of it, and he had seen this very spot before.’”
Was Utah a part of the United States when the pioneers arrived?
No. The beleaguered believers “were deliberately fleeing the United States. They crossed an international border to settle in [what was then] northern Mexico,” Reeve writes. “Latter-day Saint leaders selected northern Mexico because Erastus Snow said on March 22, 1845, ‘the Mexican government is weak’ and the Saints were looking for a place outside of firm governmental control.”
Were the pioneers American patriots?
It’s complicated. “Many of the Saints in 1846-1847 nursed considerable grudges against the United States,” Reeve writes, noting that Latter-day Saint leader Hosea Stout, for example, wrote in his diary that he was “glad” when he learned a war had erupted between the U.S. and Mexico and hoped that it “might never end until they were entirely destroyed for they had driven us into the wilderness and was now laughing at our calamities.”
Latter-day Saint apostle Orson Pratt wrote in 1845: “It is with the greatest joy that I forsake this republic. If our Heavenly Father will deliver us out of the hands of the blood-thirsty Christians of these United States and not suffer any more of us to be martyred to gratify their holy piety, I, for one, shall be very thankful.”
Were the Latter-day Saints trailblazers?
No. “They followed the Oregon Trail and then Hastings “cutoff” into the Salt Lake Valley, blazed by the Donner Party the year before. They did blaze a half-mile trail around Donner Hill rather than over it.
Were there any enslaved pioneers in that first company?
(Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune) Three enslaved men — Green Flake, Hark Wales and Oscar Smith — and free Black pioneer Jane Mannings James are honored in 2022 at This Is the Place Heritage Park.
Yes. Among those who arrived on July 22 were “three enslaved men: Hark Wales, Oscar Smith and Green Flake,” Reeve writes. “Flake and Smith were baptized Latter-day Saints who were enslaved to fellow Latter-day Saints. They were sent ahead to build shelters and plant crops for their white enslavers. In other words, enslaved African Americans were Latter-day Saint pioneers. Free Black Saints arrived in 1847, too, including Jane Elizabeth Manning James, her husband, Isaac James, her son Sylvester, and their son Silas.” Many of them can be found at the U.’s Century of Black Mormons website.
Was it an empty land when the pioneers arrived?
No. By settling in what would come to be called the Utah Territory, the pioneers displaced many groups of Native Americans, Reeve explains. “Native peoples went from claiming 100% of the land base we call Utah to 4% of the land base within 60 years of the Latter-day Saint arrival.”
Were handcarts a common form of pioneer transportation?
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Handcarts, as this reenactment depicts, were far from the primary mode of transportation for Latter-day Saint pioneers.
No. The 1847 pioneers, for instance, “did not pull handcarts into the Great Basin,” Reeve writes. “The handcart companies came later. Handcarts were the least typical way of arriving in the Salt Lake Valley. Fewer than 5% of migrants arrived in handcart companies.”
Did a lot of Latter-day Saints die on the journey to Utah?
Death rates among Latter-day Saint pioneers in the 19th century “were not as high as sometimes imagined,” Reeve reports, citing a Brigham Young University mortality study, which says that of the 56,042 documented Latter-day Saints who migrated between 1847 and 1868, 1,910 died on the trail. The pioneers thus experienced “a mortality rate of 3.41% on the trail,” Reeve notes, “less than a percent higher than the U.S. annual mortality rate for the same period, which was between 2.5% and 2.9%.”