[I was interviewed by Kaitlyn Bancroft for this story that ran in the Church News on July 17, 2018. Read the full story or see an excerpt.]
Think you know pioneer history backwards and forwards? These 3 facts will make you think again
If you think all the pioneers came by handcart, you’re wrong.
If you think they all suffered extreme illness and death? Also wrong.
And if you think Utah was a desolate desert when the pioneers arrived? Wrong again.
“Unfortunately there are many misconceptions about pioneers,” said Keith Erekson, director of the Church History Library. “Across the board, the pioneers were just living the normal 19th century life. They had fun, they played games, they worked, they walked, they fell in love. It was just life.”
In honor of Pioneer Day, here are three misconceptions about the people who walked the plains, and the truths behind them:
1. Only between 3 and 5 percent of the pioneers came by handcart. Erekson said the perception of all pioneers coming by handcart is in art, movies and commemorations, but of the nearly 400 pioneer companies, only 10 were handcart companies.
Thomas Alexander, who was the president of the National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers in 2015, explained that more people came to Utah by wagon than handcart between 1856 and 1861.
“So that’s the irony, is that if a pioneer came back for Pioneer Day and saw all the handcarts, the pioneer would say ‘What is that? I came by wagon. I came by horse. I walked.’ The handcarts were very rare,” Erekson said.
2. The mortality rate of the pioneers was about the same as the rest of the United States. Though there are notable exceptions like the Willie and Martin handcart companies, Erekson said for the most part, pioneers were just as likely to die staying home as they were walking the plains. Alexander added most pioneer companies averaged about a 3 percent mortality rate.
“Again, we like to portray this in lessons and community events and pageants that the pioneers were walking alone in the wilderness suffering, their children were dying, but in reality… the mortality rate of the pioneers was just about the same as the rest of the United States for those years,” Erekson said.
3. Utah was not a desolate desert when the pioneers arrived. Alexander, who is also a former Brigham Young University history professor, said there’s a misconception that the Salt Lake Valley was a desert without trees and with difficult-to-plow ground when the pioneers arrived. The average rainfall in the Salt Lake Valley, however, is 16 ½ inches a year, and farming is possible with 15 inches a year in the right season; because most of the precipation in the valley comes in the winter and spring, it is not available for farming during the growing season, and under those conditions, the pioneers had to irrigate in order to grow crops. They also found cottonwood trees and grass up to 10-feet high, and used water from the mountains for irrigation.
Perpetuating false realities
Erekson said perpetuating these misconceptions about pioneers is similar to how people perpetuate false realities about themselves on social media. If people only focus on how hard it was to walk the plains — even though realities like cooking over a fire and walking for miles were everyday realities for pioneers — then the lessons drawn from pioneers is distorted and people miss their true sacrifice.
“For these pioneers, the sacrifice was their conversion to a new faith. It was the adoption of a new culture,” he said. “And so that points us to different lessons that we draw about culture, about change, about being around new people, and those are lessons that I think are very helpful in the 21st century.”
The misconceptions, however, do affect the way pioneers are celebrated in Utah, seen particularly in the over-emphasis on handcart re-enactments.
“Among all of the possible experiences that pioneers could’ve had, we’ve focused on this one,” Erekson said.
He also said a better way to honor pioneers is to understand what their actual experiences were like and then tell those stories; Alexander added that people should be concerned with the truth and recognize what pioneers did was “extremely important.”
“They established the basis for the society and culture that we have here in Utah,” he said. “And I think it’s right that we honor them for what they did.”
