Mormon America - Revised and Updated Edition by Richard Ostling

Author:Richard Ostling
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061749803
Publisher: HarperCollins

CHAPTER 15

FAITHFUL HISTORY

“MY THIRD GREAT-GRANDMOTHER, CATHERINE PRICHARD OAKS, LOST most of her possessions when a Missouri state militia drove the Mormons out of that state in 1838. Seven years later, when state authorities stood by while a lawless element evicted the Mormons from Illinois, she lost her life from exposure on the plains of Iowa. My wife’s second great-grandparents, Cyril and Sally Call, hid in a cornfield as a mob burned their home in Illinois. My great-grandfather, Charles Harris, was sent to prison in the Utah Territory in 1893 for his practice of plural marriage. His eldest daughter, my great-aunt Belle Harris, was the first woman to be imprisoned during federal prosecution of Mormons in the 1880s.”

This recital is vintage Mormon remembrance. The speaker is Dallin Oaks, member of the LDS Quorum of Twelve, former president of Brigham Young University, Utah Supreme Court judge, University of Chicago law school professor, and law clerk to Chief Justice Earl Warren. The occasion is testimony delivered June 22, 1998, before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on behalf of the Religious Liberty Protection Act.

Mormons remember. Great-grandfather’s memoirs are privately published and bound in leather, passed down for succeeding generations to cherish. Great-great-grandmother’s diaries describe a time and a life lived and relived by her descendants. Bound blank books are a staple on sale in Deseret Book stores and church distribution outlets. From the time they are young priesthood holders, Mormon youths and their sisters are exhorted to keep journals as part of their religious commitment. Missionaries are reminded by their superiors that these journals represent a part of their sacred duties. They are fulfilling a command that the Lord gave Joseph Smith on April 6, 1830, the day the church was organized in Fayette, New York.

The Lord said, “Behold, there shall be a record kept among you” (D&C 21:1), and the first historian to keep that record was the newly appointed apostle Oliver Cowdery. John Whitmer was added as Cowdery’s assistant in 1831, also by scriptural command of the Lord (D&C 69:3, 8), to “continue in writing and making a history of all the important things which he shall observe and know concerning my church;…writing, copying, selecting, and obtaining all things which shall be for the good of the church, and for the rising generations.”

Mormonism has had an official church historian continuously from the day it was founded up to the present day. All but one of them, the late Leonard Arrington (in office 1972–1982), have been General Authorities. (Therein lies a tale to come.)

So Mormons remember, and they remember in great detail. The remembrances bind them as a people. They tell and retell their stories of pioneer privations and persecutions, of courage and faithfulness. Pioneer Day in Utah is celebrated each year on July 24 as a major holiday with parades, picnics, and reenactments with sunbonnets and covered wagons rumbling through the valley. Each summer, stakes and Mormon Boy Scout troops make mini-treks through a small patch of desert to learn something about dust and ash cakes, and how a handcart is tough to pull.

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