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Dr Exiled wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 24, 2025 6:00 pm

I Have Questions wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 24, 2025 5:07 am

That sounds like an interesting family anecdote. I’d love to hear more about that.

He unfortunately never broke his promise and our family history is his son (great .... uncle) relating that he wished he could have some personal details about the disastrous handcart trip to insert into the family history he was writing but there weren't any. Loyalty to BY overrode posterity.

ETA: they were pretty young at the time, my great, great .... grandparents. I believe he was 25 and she was 19. They survived and were on foraging and burying the dead detail. Must have been horrific and shouldn't have happened and BY didn't want anything made of his blunder. He had Mountain Meadows to worry about ...

This spatial history project will map out the beginnings of the white settlement in the mountainous sub-region of the United States West, now modern-day Utah. Led by Brigham Young, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church) began to settle in Salt Lake Valley in 1847, having been driven out of Illinois by religious persecution and envisioning a new Zion in the American West. The expansion of their settlement led to conflict with natives over territory, resources and sovereignty (Cannon 1952: 893). Over the next half-century, migration, conflict, forced relocation, disease and trophy hunting of buffalo would severely impact the Native American population. The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad resulted in more and more white migration until eventually, the remaining Native American people would only make up 1% of Utah's total population in 1900.

I Have Questions wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 24, 2025 6:29 pm

I made a post on another thread that might be better placed here…

Dr Exiled wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 24, 2025 6:00 pm

He unfortunately never broke his promise and our family history is his son (great .... uncle) relating that he wished he could have some personal details about the disastrous handcart trip to insert into the family history he was writing but there weren't any. Loyalty to BY overrode posterity.

ETA: they were pretty young at the time, my great, great .... grandparents. I believe he was 25 and she was 19. They survived and were on foraging and burying the dead detail. Must have been horrific and shouldn't have happened and BY didn't want anything made of his blunder. He had Mountain Meadows to worry about ...

Thank you, those are the real stories of Pioneer Day. It strikes me that Pioneer Day shouldn’t be a celebration. It should be a day of remembrance. A day to remember the fallen, the hardship, the lessons learned, the Native Americans that lost their land etc.
When you think about it, what the Pioneers did to the native Americans is what Israel is doing to Palestine. Albeit with less ammunition. The end result was the Native Americans losing the lands of their birthright, just as the Palestinians are being eradicated from their native lands. I’d wager that parallel isn’t considered on Pioneer Day, that the Native American story isn’t told.

I think this is an interesting project…

This spatial history project will map out the beginnings of the white settlement in the mountainous sub-region of the United States West, now modern-day Utah. Led by Brigham Young, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church) began to settle in Salt Lake Valley in 1847, having been driven out of Illinois by religious persecution and envisioning a new Zion in the American West. The expansion of their settlement led to conflict with natives over territory, resources and sovereignty (Cannon 1952: 893). Over the next half-century, migration, conflict, forced relocation, disease and trophy hunting of buffalo would severely impact the Native American population. The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad resulted in more and more white migration until eventually, the remaining Native American people would only make up 1% of Utah's total population in 1900.

The Mormon Pioneer story is really one about the ethnic cleansing of native Americans from the area now known as Utah.

Dr Exiled wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 24, 2025 7:01 pm

Funny you say the above. I was going to edit my post above one more time to mention how my Martin Handcart grandfather was quite the native american killer as well. He was "called" to settle the Nephi Utah area and the natives stubbornly wanted to keep that land. Pioneer grandfather spent months in a fort with his other compatriots fending off and killing Native Americans during the Blackhawk War. https://historytogo.utah.gov/black-hawk-war/

I wonder if he thought it was worth it to leave Northern England while he was stuck in the fort or while burying yet another of his handcart group or while almost freezing to death. Perhaps that is why he kept silent as well.

Darren Parry, former Chairman of the Shoshone Tribe and devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, spoke to ABC4.com in an exclusive interview Thursday about the complexities of one of Utah’s most popular holidays.

“On one hand, I’m Shoshone… and on the other hand, I’m a sixth-generation Latter-day Saint,” Parry said. “I absolutely love and honor the pioneers who came, but they didn’t discover this land. There were people that lived here.”

The story of Manifest Destiny, a belief that drove expansion across this continent at the cost of Indigenous lives, lands, and cultures,” Parry said. “I think a lot of people don’t look at the… problematic side of their ancestors coming here because it was never taught,” he said.

According to Parry, before the arrival of Mormon Pioneers, the Shoshone Tribe’s home base was centered in Cache Valley, or “Sihiviogoi” in the Shoshone language, meaning “Willow River.”

Over time, more and more pioneers came and settled in the valley. By 1856, thousands of Pioneers had settled there and had already begun to deplete its natural resources.

The late BYU historian, Harold Schindler, wrote in 2012 that tensions began to grow between settlers and the Shoshone, who, “faced with dwindling lands and food sources, had resorted to theft in order to survive.”

“The saints began writing letters to Salt Lake for somebody to come take care of the ‘Indian Problem,'” Parry told ABC4.com, adding that the letters eventually made it to U.S. Soldiers at Fort Douglas.

According to Schindler, on January 29, 1863, soldiers from Fort Douglas attacked a Shoshoni camp on the Bear River near modern-day Preston, Idaho, killing nearly 300 men, women, and children. However, many Shoshone believe the number to be closer to 400, making it the largest massacre of Indigenous people in the history of the U.S.