Pioneer Day is an official holiday in Utah. I know a little bit about it. Lucky for me, the hubs has written a ton on this topic, so I’m handing this space over to him today as the in-house expert:

Today is Pioneer Day in Utah, commemorating the 1847 arrival of Brigham Young leading the first group of Mormon pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley. The arrival is memorialized at the supposed site where Young declared “this is the place” at the end of their journey, now dedicated as This Is the Place Heritage Park.

Young most likely did not do that. He was prostrate with fever in the back of a wagon when they arrived. Fellow Mormon leader Wilford Woodruff came up with the story three decades after the fact.

But it’s a good story, and it captures the essence of the Mormon hegira. They wanted to get away from American civilization, which had consistently persecuted them for almost 20 years, and create their own in a place nobody — or at least no other white Americans — wanted.

The Mormon adventure played a key role in my first two books. In America 1844: Religious Fervor, Westward Expansion, and the Presidential Election That Transformed the Nation, I wrote about the presidential candidacy and assassination of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith. That murder led to the Latter Day Saints’ exodus to Utah three years later.

I wrote about the Mormons again in Lincoln’s Pathfinder: John C. Fremont and the Violent Election of 1856. Fremont played a small role in recommending the Salt Lake Valley to Young, but the main Mormon story of 1856 was the tragic handcart disaster in which several hundred immigrants died after getting a late start and getting caught in the snow in Wyoming.

About a decade ago, we visited Martin’s Cove, one of the campsites of that winter, and we traveled (by car, on a highway) along some of the route those immigrants took. We’ve visited a number of other Mormon sites, too: Nauvoo, Illinois; Winter Quarters in Florence, Nebraska; the Carthage Jail where Smith was lynched. Arwen is always amused by the earnest attempts at proselytizing by the people who work in these places; my instinct is to engage them in discussions of Mormon history to see how much they know. Usually, it’s quite a bit.

As the largest home-grown religion, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints plays an outsized role in American religious history, and a crucial role in the history of the West, so it has always been of interest to me as I’ve studied both. It’s not quite a coincidence that I wrote about two years in which Mormons played a significant part in the story.

There’s no Mormon angle to my new book, The Pathfinder and the President: John C. Fremont, Abraham Lincoln, and the Battle for Emancipation. There might be in my next one, though, or possibly the one after that. Stay tuned.