[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.”
Two chapters in Mormon Women’s History have received awards from the Mormon History Association:
The award for the best article on any topic went to Amy Harris for “Early Mormonism’s Expansive Family and the Browett Women” (chapter 4).
The award for the best article on women’s history went to Andrea G. Radke-Moss for “Silent Memories of Missouri: Mormon Women and Men and Sexual Assault in Group Memory and Religious Identity” (chapter 3).
The Mormon History Association announced the awards on June 8, 2018, at its annual meeting, held in Boise, Idaho.
[This was originally published on May 21, 2018, on the Church History Library’s blog The Historical Record.]
June 2018 marks 40 years since President Spencer W. Kimball announced that the priesthood could be conferred on “all worthy male members of the Church” (Official Declaration 2). The announcement provided new opportunities to members of African descent throughout the world. Men could now be ordained to the priesthood, and men and women could participate in individual and family temple ordinances.
In conjunction with the First Presidency’s “Be One” event (scheduled for June 1, 2018), which will commemorate the events of June 1978, the Church History Library is pleased to present several original historic documents from black Latter-day Saint history from May 21 through August 4, 2018. The exhibit is free and open to the public during the library’s normal hours—Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with extended hours to 8:00 p.m. on Thursday evenings, and 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. on Saturdays.
We invite all to visit the exhibit, learn more about the rich history of blacks in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and leave a personal message in the commemorative guest books. These guest books will be preserved in the library’s permanent collections as a record of this 40th anniversary celebration.
This post identifies each of the 16 items on display, providing links to digital images where available and call numbers for the Church History Catalog. It also provides links to additional information about the creators of these significant documents.
Public historian Sheila Brennan rightly observed that “public digital humanities work requires an intentional decision from the beginning of the project that identifies, invites in, and addresses audience needs in the design, as well as the approach and content, long before the outreach for a finished project begins.” This post presents recent initiatives in the LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City as an example of using multiple digital technologies to deliver the right records to the right persons, even at times when the recipient did not know that she needed the record.
My Particular Public, My Library (and Me)
I’ve always found it more helpful to attempt to serve particular publics rather than a general one. The Church History Library is the institutional archive for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a faith with nearly 16 million members living in countries around the world who speak more than 100 languages. Daily religious practice among Latter-day Saints engages history in multiple ways. The Church itself was organized in 1830, and the histories of its founder Joseph Smith and of its founding scriptural texts (of which The Book of Mormon is most widely known) provide the basis for how members develop and nurture their faith. Each week adherents re-enact a ritual sharing of bread and water with an explicit charge to remember Jesus. Sunday and weekday classes for youth and adults routinely teach the ancient and modern histories of the Church. Each year every local congregation prepares a history of its activities. Individual members are encouraged to keep diaries to prompt mindful reflection; they write autobiographies to pass on to children and grandchildren; they gather genealogical data about their ancestors for use in sacred temple rituals. As a member of the faith community, I participate in sacred rituals, I have been assigned to compile the congregational history, and I have taught the Church’s history as a missionary to those exploring the faith and as a Sunday school teacher of youth. As an academically-trained historian, I have also taught about the Church and its history to non-Mormon undergraduate history students in a public university and to LDS doctoral students from multiple disciplines.
The Church History Library operationalizes its mission to collect, preserve, and share the records of the Church. We gather and store records—more than 240,000 archival, manuscript, and oral history collections with more than 270,000 print and rare items—in 26 locations on 6 continents. Access and preservation strategies are centrally managed. A portion of our records are not for external distribution, as we comply with international copyright and privacy laws and respect the confidentiality of corporate and priest-penitent settings. Yet, our online catalog provides multi-lingual access to more than 10.7 million images, a number that grows at an average rate of 307 images per hour and is guided, in part, by patron digitization on demand. Some of our records, such as the historical papers of Joseph Smith and of early Mormon women, undergo transcription and formal documentary editing. We collaborate with other work units that manage a museum of history and art, historic sites from the Church’s 19th-century history, and genealogical research. We have employed a variety of audience research methods— focus groups, segmentation analysis, persona development, true intent queries, usability testing—to better understand our audiences. We serve internal influencers who make historically-informed decisions, speak to the entire membership, and develop Church products and curriculum. We assist systematic researchers, including academics, journalists, and advanced genealogists. And we seek to improve the quality of historical engagement of Church members. The desire to touch the lives of individual members prompted us to think beyond traditional outreach invitations to “Discover the Church History Library” in search of a personalized connection.
From Records to Database to Targeted Email
Our goal of connecting Church members with historical records operates in a world of realities. One of the things we have learned about Church members is that they prefer interpreted histories—exhibits, stories, or videos—to the “raw” records in our collection. Further, our online library catalog is neither intuitive nor a destination. And, our members are more active on mobile devices, especially internationally. So we decided to focus on Church members who were engaged in genealogy work with a goal to encourage the use of records in our collections as sources for their family history findings.
The first phase of the initiative involved creating a database of missionaries who had served during the Church’s first 100 years, from 1830 to 1930. For the later 70 years of the span, missionary service had been recorded in a series of “Missionary Register” volumes that we scanned and then shared with FamilySearch, the LDS Church’s genealogical organization. FamilySearch’s indexing volunteers transcribed details about every name. For missionaries who served from 1830 to 1860, we assembled a team of approximately 55 modern-day missionaries who researched to identify individuals from period manuscripts and periodicals. In February 2016, we launched the resulting Early Mormon Missionaries site, a searchable database of more than 38,000 missionaries that provides information about individuals, direct links to digitized sources in our catalog, and historical contextual information. The announcement drew attention, increased website traffic, and led to additional record acquisitions.
For the second phase of the initiative, we partnered with FamilySearch to inform living persons that one or more of their relatives was documented in the database. We cross-checked the names in our database against the 1.1 billion names in the FamilySearch Family Tree, a crowd-sourced database that allows registered users to submit information about ancestors and relatives that gets combined into a single master data file. As a result, we identified 1.4 million users whose relatives matched the metadata in our missionary database. Our partners at FamilySearch created a campaign that sent emails in June 2017 to the appropriate users that contained information about the relative (including a photo where possible) and invited recipients with a single click to go to the relative’s entry in the database. The campaign was designed for mobile devices, employed a/b testing to identify the most enticing subject lines and message formats, and solicited interactive feedback.
As a result of the missionary database campaign, unique visitors to our website spiked tenfold to hit 109,000 on a single day. Unique visitors to the digital records in our online catalog more than tripled, including an initial spike, a new and higher steady plateau, and subsequent peaks of activity around missionary records. Just less than half a million visitors went to FamilySearch’s Tree on a single day (one of their top three days in visitor traffic history) and many of them linked the primary sources in our database to their relative’s record. Qualitative feedback revealed Church members using their finding of a missionary relative in their family interactions as well as in Church settings, such as in teaching and congregational speaking. A surprisingly large number of participants reported that they had thought they were a new convert or the only member of their family in the Church and were thus surprised to learn of a relative active in the faith. The long-term impact of this identity shift from newcomer/outsider to long-timer/insider will play out throughout their lives.
In the end, the missionary database and email campaign digitized records and placed them online, built a tool to increase relevant access to those records, informed more than a million individuals of personally relevant records, changed the behavior of thousands of people, and influenced the identities of many participants.
This post was prepared for a working group at the annual meeting of the National Council for Public History titled “Crossing the Line: Facilitating Digital Access to Primary Sources” on April 21, 2018, in Las Vegas, NV.
Nearly two years after a Church History Symposium devoted to the subject of Mormon women’s history, selected papers from the event are now available in a new volume published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
The volume includes chapters by Keith A. Erekson, Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Andrea Radke-Moss, Amy Harris, Amy Easton-Flake, Heather Belnap Jensen, Josh E. Propert, Julie K. Allen, Benjamin E. Park, and R. Marie Griffith. It was was edited by Rachel Cope, Amy Easton Flake, Keith A. Erekson, and Lisa Olsen Tait.
The book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Visit the book’s page on my website to learn more, download a chapter, or purchase copy.
This summary is reposted from the LDS Perspectives website where they also offer the full audio file and a transcript.
Keith Erekson, current director of the LDS Church History Library, has worked really wherever history could be found or needed. When faced with new opportunities, he’s thought, “let’s go there, and let’s see what we can do.”
In this episode of the LDS Perspectives Podcast Russell Stevenson sits down with Erekson and discusses preserving the artifacts of, reconstructing, and interpreting history.
“We always like to say,” declares Erekson, “‘Well, history’s 20/20. It’s hindsight.’ No, it’s not. We’re just here in 2017, and we’re doing our best.”
He urges a different view. If we break that mindset that we know it all and just say, “I’m looking for the best I can find, and tomorrow I’ll find a little more — and next year I’ll find a little more,” then we don’t get discouraged when something changes because that’s the way it works: it’s always changing. We’re always learning.
His experience working outside of the LDS tradition has shown him that Mormon are not so different than other social groups. We have challenges with our history — the same challenges that exist with every other history.
There are sources missing from Joseph Smith’s experience that we wish were around. Well, there are sources missing from Lincoln’s experience and from Washington’s experience — that’s just how history works. The past is gone. It’s not some great conspiracy that Joseph Smith’s sources are gone — that’s just what happens. The past is past.
In the present, no matter what we’re talking about — whether the 19th century or the Middle Ages — we’re trying to reconstruct it and put it back together, and figure out what it means.
Sometimes people see the Church Archives as sort of a mystical place full of mysteries, but they’d be disappointed; inside the archives, it is quite boring with its concrete walls, metal shelves, and acid-free boxes.
The mission of the church archivists is to collect everything by and about the church, but particularly things by the church. That means they want every copy of the Book of Mormon in every language and in every edition. They want every handbook and every manual. So in some ways, the inside of the archive looks like the library in a local church building, except it’s a little more organized and the scriptures aren’t all destroyed because some deacons played with them.
One takeaway from the ordinariness of the archives is that Mormon history is not as exciting as we think it is. We do have fantastic stories in our history, but more often than not they tend to be exaggerations of events. These types of inflations happen as the generation involved in an event — and this happened in World War I and World War II — starts to pass away, there becomes an awareness: “Oh, we’re losing something; we ought to catch it.” But a lot of times, they’ve already lost it.
Erekson urges listeners to be critical consumers and become aware of how history works and then to be on the lookout for signs of good scholarship. One of the most basic ones is source citations. They’re not there just for fun. They’re there to say the author spent 10,000 hours to write a sentence.
As consumers we needn’t rush to conclusions. The past is over; we’ve got time to think about it.
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The views expressed here are the opinions of Keith A. Erekson and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Church History Department or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.