--- title: Improvement Era description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930. authors: - Evans, John Henry collections: - periodicals tags: - magazine - improvement-era periodical: Improvement Era volume: 28 number: 3 published: 1925-01 publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations publisher_place: Salt Lake City language: en type: magazine reference: "John Henry Evans, “The Heritage and Promise,” *Improvement Era 28, no. 3 (January 1925)*: 202–207." source: url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera2803unse transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers. identifier: improvementera2803unse start_page: 202 end_page: 207 rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1925-01) source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera2803unse publication_year: 1925 note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1925, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright. --- # The Heritage and Promise THE HERITAGE AND PROMISE By John Henry Evans, Author of "One Hundred Years of Mormonism" III But the Latter-day Saints are a chosen people in another sense than that they have been picked out from the nations by the magnet of the gospel. For conditions after their conversion to "Mor- monism" have tented to sift the stronger from the weaker with a view to the survival of the fittest. Four times in their history have the "Mormons" been expelled from their homes in different states by the ill will of their neighbors. In eighteen hundred thirty-one, when the Church was less than a year old, they were forced to seek refuge from scorn and hatred in western New York state by settling in Ohio. In a few years public sentiment in this latter state compelled them to abandon their farms and homes, their employment and their temple, and flee to Missouri, which was then the frontier of the United States. Scarcely nine years had elapsed in Missouri when they were forced by an armed mob to seek a new retreat in Illinois. Finally, in this last state, after they had built a beautiful city, the wonder of the West, popular feeling, crystalized in mob violence and armed with the power of the law, drove them, in eighteen hundred forty-six, beyond the pale of the nation to eke out an existence among the Indians on the Great American Desert, or to die of hunger. In order to show just how these external conditions worked as a sifter, an instance may be given in enough detail to reveal the elements of character involved. One of these "Mormons" was an apostle of the faith, a man of general culture intelligence and refinement. He had joined the Church during the first year of its existence, had soon become promi- nent in the organization, and had shared the vicissitudes of his people in three states. He had been arrested, and, with other leaders of the Church, had been sentenced by court martial to be shot. These men were now in prison waiting for the sentence to be executed. Early one morning, before the rest were awake, he rose from his bed on the unmattressed floor, where he had slept without covering. The door was unbarred, and the place momentarily without guard. Should he escape? The weather favored him, for it was snowing, and the snow would cover up his tracks. Following his first impulse, he went out at the door, walked and then ran into some woods a mile or so away. Here he sat down on a fallen tree and reflected. Should he go forward to his former home in Ohio or back to his fate? In the THE HERITAGE AND PROMISE 203 Buckeye state he had some land with a house on it. He could escape there, send for his wife, renounce his Unpopular religion, and live in peace with his neighbors. That was the prospect on the one hand. On the other hand, there were continued enmity with outsiders, persecution at their hands, unpopularity with the world, maybe death from a rifle shot within a few days at most. It was a moment fraught with the deepest tragedy. But he an- swered the question to his own soul by returning to the jail and his comrades! This is but one out of many thousand cases that might be cited to show how the "Mormon" people have been tested in the Great Separator. Time and again have they been forced to show what mettle of the pasture they were of. During those early days of out- ward opposition not a "Mormon" but could reacquire the good will of his former friends and his external peace by renouncing his allegiance to Joseph Smith. Not in effect only, but in words as well, has this highwayman's challenge been put to their faith: "Your religion or your life!" Sometimes they have ignobly chosen their "life," but generally they have preferred their religion to their life. It is difficult for us to believe that there have been times in the history of our country when to be a "Mormon" meant to incur the hatred and detesta- tion of the whole American people, to be deprived of political rights that were supposed to be inalienable to American citizenship, and to be associated in the popular mind with all that is undesirable. Yet it is so. Now, in this fiery furnace, seven times heated, only the hardier spirits have survived. The rest succumbed to the flame. It is said that in the never-to-be-forgotten handcart company, touching beyond all things else in "Mormon" history, any member of that ill-starred group could have died by just lingering behind and giving up. Many of them did this, but the most of them survived by just not giving up. And this has been true of members of the Church, especially those who have come up through the tribulation of the early days — they might have purchased immunity from persecution, loss of property and rights, and the scorn of outsiders by renouncing their belief in miracles and new revelation and the priesthood. They had the courage and forti- tude, however, to refuse to do this. IV "Sons and daughters of the Western pioneers," exclaims David Starr Jordan, in an outburst of praise for the men who deal with things, "yours is the best blood in the realm." The "best blood in the realm" is not that of the social aristocrat, the silk-stocking class, the group that traces its lineage back to some landed gentry who acquired their property originally by practicing the burglar's art, or by receiving it through aiding and abetting a 204 IMPROVEMENT ERA burglar king in some predatory war. Nor is the "best blood" neces- sarily that which flows through the veins of the rich in rents and in- terest, whether their wealth came through an inheritance and a life of ease or through the sweat and tears of the man with the hoe, toiling in the sun. Nor again is that the "best blood" which pulses through the body of kings, for* these have oftener than not been cruel, unintel- ligent, even depraved, many of them without a single virtue to recom- mend them to posterity. The "best blood" is not even in the so- called aristocracy of the intellect, the class that is trained in colleges and universities, for knowledge is not synonymous with character. But the "best blood," on the contrary, is in the men and women who live the life of industry, of honesty, of sobriety, of godliness, and who attempt, however ineffectively, to abide by the Christian rule of conduct — and that, too, irrespective of whether their lot is cast in the turmoil of the city or in the silence of the farm, whether they work with the hand or with the brain, whether they tread "the paths of glory" or follow the example of the "mute, inglorious Miltons," of whom the poet speaks. People of this class everywhere constitute the backbone of nations. Not the accident of birth and environment, therefore, determines what blood is in a man, but rather the funda- mentals of character and habits. The "best blood" is in the "aris- tocracy of worth." There is something eternally fascinating in the doings and character of the pioneer, whether he works in the field of thought or of action. He may be pushing his primitive barque out over the "up- mounting seas" of the ancients, in search of a new route somewhere, or he may be shoving out the frontiers of civilization another mile into the wilderness, or he may be cutting out a new segment in the subtle realms of the mind, where no man may follow, except to see the fruits. It does not matter; none can stand by and look on but with wonder- ment at the masterful will in man. No one can read without a feeling of absolute awe the uplifting story of Columbus, who, in spite of the murderous plottings of his ignorant sailors, pursued his way with steadiness of purpose across the unknown seas, sustained only by his indomitable will and the conviction that he had received a divine appointment to seek a new route to the West. Or the story of the Jesuite missionaries to the world that the great Genoese had laid bare, who, leaving the comforts of the cloister with its books and gardens and quiet life of thought, literally facing martyrdom in the wilderness of the New World, with its entangling jungles, its treacherous streams, and its savage life of ceaseless danger, in order to teach the natives of America the gentle- ness and peace of Christ and his Good News. Or the story of Pasteur, working amid all but insurmountable material difficulties and the op- position of the unteachable medical science of his time, but accomp- lishing nevertheless the greatest revolution during thirty centuries of THE HERITAGE AND PROMISE 20$ medicine and surgery, to the unmeasured blessing of humanity through all generations. Equally inspiring is the record of those hardy and adventurous spirits, men and women both, who braved the perils of the Western frontiers. Abandoning a life of comparative ease, they took their ways out to the untrammeled mountains and plains of the West to conquer or to die. With tireless industry they hewed down the forest, they plowed and sowed and reaped, they erected such dwellings as the materials at hand would allow, they spanned the rivers and creeks with bridges, they built rude highways to connect the towns of a locality, they established schools and chufches, till by slow degrees they brought whatever elements of civilized life existed in the East and planted it securely on the foundation of a new life, to the enrichment of both. Among those who established Western America, however, the settlers of Utah are easily the outstanding figures, for the reason that, in addition to the usual hardships experienced by the pioneers of the West in general, there are present in the first settlement of the Beehive State elements that are not to be found in those of any other Western community. Like other pioneers of the West the "Mormons" were under the necessity of establishing roads to connect the towns in building. But they had also to make a road for the most part across the long stretch of uninhabited territory between the Missouri river and the Salt Lake Basin. They had a similar hard-fought contest with nature, wresting from her reluctant hand a meagre subsistence, happy if the grasshopper and the cricket and the drouth did not lay waste their growing crops. And then, too, they had their homes to make, their churches and school houses to build, and a civil government to form with power enough to protect them from themselves and others. All these hardships of primitive life the "Mormons" shared in common with Western pioneers in general. But others they had that were peculiar. The country to which they came was about as inhospitable by nature as could be found on the continent. On the maps of the period it was designated the "Great American Desert." Daniel Webster described it in a senate speech as "a worthless area, a region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, of whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs." Utah, as it came to be called, was the driest part of this region, and Salt Lake valley, where the first settlements were made, was a dreary part of Utah. Indeed, the very soil here refused to respond to the hand till its thirsty alkali had been quenched by water turned from the canyon streams in canals and ditches. Life in this region therefore, would necessarily tax more heavily the hardy virtues of the pioneer than in a country where "you had but to tickle the land and it laughed with plenty." 206 IMPROVEMENT ERA Another thing/ that accentuates the character and accomplishments of the Utah pioneers is their motive in settling here. Early immigrants to the West almost invariably left their homes eastward because they expected to improve their material condition in the new home. Ac- cordingly, they selected such parts of the country as looked the most promising from this point of view. Of this fact California is the most signal instance. With the "Mormons" however, it was different. In coming West they were seeking a place where they might find, not prosperity, but safety and religious freedom, They sought a spot where they could worship God in their own way without molestation from others. This fundamental right they had been denied in Ohio, in Missouri, and in Illinois, where they had successively lived. Now, as love of God is higher than love of gold, so the character of the "Mormon" pioneers rises above that of the pioneers of Western Amer- ica generally; just as the character and accomplishments of the Puri- tans of New England were superior to those of the first settlers, say, of Virginia, not because they suffered more — although they probably did this — but because their motives were higher. Nor is this the only indication of the character of the early set- tlers of Utah. First settlers in any part of America, whether in the East or in the West, never rose above the log cabin. Certainly they did not proceed to erect costly edifices- This work they left to their more prosperous children and their children's children. The Jewish temple at Jerusalem, the wonder and admiration of the age, was built when the Israelites were at the height of their wealth and power. But the "Mormons" erected a temple in the sage-brush, when they were in dire need of food. In the log-cabin period they undertook to build a million dollar edifice! Not only so. They erected a taber- nacle under these circumstances that is still unique and still one of the greatest auditoriums in the world; and a theatre that for many years afterwards remained one of the finest in America. This foresight and enterprise are absolutely without a parallel in history. Why are we so deeply moved by the spectacle of the pioneer in any cause of moment? Essentially the reason lies, as already intimated, in the character of the pioneer. Something of fear there is in us all of what lies be- yond our bodily ken. Often it amounts to sheer terror. Because the future lies hidden from our view, it is to the average man fraught with such grave uncertainty as to be faced with dismay. Moreover, it is the nature of most men toi love the soft places, to wait for things to happen, instead of going out after them. Action requires not only energy, but effort directed by vision and intelligence — and these qual- ities are possessed! by only superior spirits in life. To the men who sailed with Columbus on that first voyage, there were both the fear that if they ventured out too far they would fall off, and the terror of the huge sea monsters with which their imagination had peopled the THE HERITAGE AND PROMISE 207 Atlantic. But the great navigator was lifted above this petty fear and superstition by his vision and his knowledge. And so he faced the unknown with a superb faith and courage that challenges our admira- tion. Compare the moderns, who live in childless apartment houses; who run about like mad in mortgaged automobiles; who seek to "serve" the public in offices gotten too often by false promises and bribery; who wrestle ignominiously with shekels in the countinghouses, and commit suicide when the balance is on the wrong side; who dish up in newspaper and magazine private scandal for the delectation of readers with a nose for sensation; who build houses that stand up only long enough to be sold at twice their value; who, henlike, sit year after year on dollars and dimes that God never made at all in order to hatch more dollars and dimes; who depict characters and sit- uations for the film that should never be seen outside the filthy mire in which their prototypes eke out their vile existence — compare, I say, with these self-seeking and ease-loving individuals, with the pioneers of the West, especially of Utah, whose life was cast with the elemental things in the world, as they battled with "the terrible north wind, sigh- ing and sinking his voice as in secret," the "great storm-clouds rolling above them, formless grey daughters of the air"; as they struggled with the shifting dust of the region where they settled, which they forced to produce only by the supreme effort of diverting the mountain streams into canals and ditches, sometimes actually dug with pick and shovel; as they threaded their way up the steep mountain or through the deep gorge, to see if the valley beyond might not be made habitable through the same means that had conquered in the mother community; as they hewed down the trees and shaped them with ax and saw into material for houses and barns that would outlast many generations; or as, with no thought of discouragement or fear, they visioned the future and provided, not in words alone, but in deeds, larger oppor- tunities for their children than had come to themselves, building in a substantial manner step by step a civilization that could be passed on to others. Is it any wonder that we instinctively look back through the years and revere the men and women who braved so many dangers without flinching and who builded so securely the foundations of our life? (To be continued) Maxims The best poems have never been written. The best oration has never been said. The best play has never been given. The best essay has yet to be read. The best song has yet to be sung. The best race has yet to be won. E. L. SPRING.