I think most of us have had at least a passing thought over the weekend about pioneers. I've noticed my thinking on this unique state holiday of ours has changed as I've grown up. When I was a child, I longed to be a real live pioneer kid because I thought sun bonnets were cute and buffalo chips were some kind of new snack cracker.
Now that I'm a mother, I wonder (especially after a long stay in the mountains with seven kids and no outhouse): How did all those people take care of necessities without sanitary facilities and a roll of Charmin?And I wonder about other things. I wonder if I could pack up a small wagon or handcart, call it everything I own, leave the rest and not look back.
I come from "good Mormon stock," and I've been raised on family pioneer stories right along with Relief Society luncheon casseroles and punch-and-cookies firesides. But the tales of tough men and women risking their lives always seemed too heroic to relate to personally. I thought pioneers were a special breed of people who wore funny clothes and looked great in granite or bronze.
I've always heard about the deaths along the way, the babies left in shallow graves, the waiting wolves. But it never really meant much until I had a baby, a baby with a name, fat pink cheeks, a shock of golden hair and a smile to melt you down to your toes. Now I wonder, what if I had to leave Amy's infant body in the cold earth, never to see her, never to hear her, never to hold her in my arms again.
The great Mormon trek west happened. It really happened. Some of those Utah pioneers are my kin. They were among the ranks who froze and starved, lost husbands, children and wives. I know this drama encompassed large numbers like the Hollywood movies like to portray. But this move to religious freedom and a new unknown life in the frontier really happened individually one step at a time, one dusty boot in front of the other.
Utah pioneers were heroic, but they were also real vulnerable human beings who had to put their pants and pantaloons on one leg at a time. They got tired and irritable as well as died for what they believed in.
As a child, my class learned a pioneer song for presentation to all the admiring adults in our LDS ward. The words we sang were, "Pioneer children sang as they walked and walked and walked and walked. Pioneer children sang as they walked and walked and walked and walked. They washed at streams and worked and played. Sundays they camped and read and prayed. Week after week, they sang as they walked and walked and walked and walked and . . . walked."
I used to think the lyric writer of that song had a rather limited vocabulary. But now I think Elizabeth Fetzer Bates caught the vision of what it is to be a pioneer. Pioneers are simple people who dust themselves off, even though the going got tough, and just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
When the going gets tough in my life, I think about Daniel and Emily, Natanial and Lois, John and Rebecca, William and Elizabetth,and Thomas and Mary, my pioneer ancestors. Then I remember, I could have things a lot tougher. So I throw my tired shoulders back, set my sights, dust myself off and start putting one foot in front of the other. Then I "walk and walk and walk and walk and . . . walk."