“This is the place!” Some awkward truths
Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2025 2:15 pm
It’s always interesting to scratch the surface of the history the Church wants to present. This article in the SLC was enlightening.
Oh. So it was already the place prior to BY declaring “this is the place”. He declared he'd seen the place in a vision, AFTER a place had been decided upon by a vote.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.’”
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.’”
Oh. They were following an established trail.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.
Oh. I believe the name for that is “ethnic cleansing”.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.”
Oh. Sort of hard to explain then why the Church focussed on handcart reenactments.Were handcarts a common form of pioneer transportation?
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.”
Oh. So not really the heroic death march that it’s been painted then.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%.”
Oh. Do Latter Day Saints celebrate their slave-owning history?Were there any enslaved pioneers in that first company?
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.