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Pioneers

Mormon Pioneers

After the murder of Joseph Smith the Mormons realised that they could not stay safely in the heartland of America.

Pioneer wagons ©

Latter-day Saint settlements were being attacked by mobs who burned crops, destroyed homes and threatened the people.

The Mormons were persecuted for several reasons:

• They didn't keep slaves, which was seen as a threat to the surrounding slave-owning culture at a time when the abolition of slavery was a big issue.
• Their doctrine of plural marriage was seen as a serious attack on the social and ethical rules of the period.
• The rapidly growing and tightly-knit Mormon communities had the potential to exercise considerable political power.
• They were considered outsiders who led a completely different sort of life.

Brigham Young ©

After Smith's death the new Church leader, Brigham Young, decided that their future lay in the American West.

He decided that the people would emigrate en masse.

It would be a migration like that of the Israelites who had been forced to leave Egypt in search of the Promised Land.

And although the Mormons got to their promised land sooner than the Israelites, they encountered great hardship and suffering along the way.

The first year of migration took the 16,000 migrants to Winter Quarters by the Missouri Rivers.

The second stage of migration took them to the Rocky Mountains and to the Great Salt Lake Basin, which they reached in 1847.

Salt Lake City

The Great Salt Lake Basin was extremely remote, and at that time was outside the USA. It was 1000 miles from the nearest significant town in the East, and so a very long way from their persecutors. Brigham Young decided that this was the place where the Mormons should create their new land.

The area was an inhospitable desert, but the Mormons were inspired by it, and named it Zion. They gave the local river the name Jordan. And they began to build Salt Lake City, which is still the headquarters of the Church.

Utah

Utah

Seagulls ©

The Mormons saw Salt Lake City as their holy city: Brigham Young called it a "Kingdom of Heaven on Earth".

But it was a bleak cold kingdom, and the Mormons had to work hard to make it a liveable place. Their first job was to irrigate the land to make it soft enough to plough and grow food.

In 1848 their crops were damaged first by drought and then by a plague of crickets. The crickets were eaten by a flock of seagulls. The "miracle of the Seagulls" is commemorated by a monument in Salt Lake City.

They swiftly created a plan for Salt Lake City itself, with a Mormon Temple at its heart. The Temple itself was dedicated in 1893.

Salt Lake City ©

The Mormons weren't content with just one city and within the lifetime of Brigham Young they founded another 325 towns.

Government

Mormon Temple ©

The Mormons mapped out a huge area of the west which they called Deseret (which means "honeybee"), and asked the US government to make it a new state.

The government gave them a smaller patch of land called Utah (after the local Ute tribe of Native Americans), as a territory, not a state. The Church leader Brigham Young became Governor.

Persecution and statehood

Persecution and statehood

In 1857 the US President sent troops to Utah to put down what he had been told was a Mormon uprising. After much confusion and preparations for war, a settlement was negotiated and Mormon growth resumed.

Brigham Young ©

The Mormon community grew rapidly, not just by having children, but also by the mass immigration of converts from elsewhere in the USA and from abroad. By the time of Brigham Young's death in 1877, there were 140,000 Mormons in Utah, and at one stage more than half of them were immigrants from Britain.

But more trouble was to come. The Mormons at that time believed in plural marriage; meaning that a man could have more than one wife.

This was regarded as unlawful by USA and legal action was taken to suppress it.

The Mormons resisted; many were jailed for polygamy, while others, including church leaders, went underground.

A law of 1887 placed great restrictions on the Church, removing the political rights of anyone who would not renounce polygamy, and destroying the Church as an economic entity.

In 1890, after praying for guidance, Church President Woodruff announced an end to plural marriage.

Statehood

The end of polygamy allowed Utah and the Mormons to take their place in the USA mainstream.

In 1896 Utah became the 45th state of the USA. The State symbol is the beehive and the state insect is the honeybee.

The beehive was chosen by early leaders of The Church as a symbol of their ideal community; one filled with industry and co-operation.

Mormonism in the 20th Century

Twentieth Century

A Latter-day Saint baptism in Nigeria ©

At the end of the 19th Century the Church was still grappling with the money problems that had been caused during the fight to retain polygamy.

It decided to bring new life to the custom of tithing a proportion of a member's income to the Church. Within a year church income had doubled, and by 1907 the Church was out of debt.

Having until recently been reviled by much of the US population, the Church began to work on its image, and by the late 1920s it had become a respected and respectable institution in the eyes of most Americans.

Dispersion and growth

The Church began to grow strongly outside its Utah stronghold; first in California and the West Coast and then in the East and Midwest.

In the first half of the century the number of Mormons grew from 268,331 in 1900 to 979,454 in 1948.

Some of this growth was due a reform of the missionary system that provided proper training for missionaries before they set out, and ensured that they had the funds to support them during their service.

International

The second half of the 20th Century saw the Church expand massively outside America. In 1950 only 8% of church members lived outside the USA, by 1990 the figure was 35%. Now less than half the membership lives in the USA.

20% of growth is due to children being born into the faith, while 80% is due to new converts.

In 1950 the Church had 8 temples, 4 of them in Utah; by August 2005 it had 122 around the world.

Church membership passed 11 million in December 2000.

Find out more

• Pioneer Day