In Search of Pioneer Day

Turning Our Faces Towards Zion

I write this at the feet of my ancestors. I’m in Liverpool, sitting on a large concrete slab, a stone’s throw from the River Mersey. I sit on the base of a monument to Latter-day Saint pioneers—a statue of a mother, a father, and two children, presumably British, their backs to their ancestral home, their faces to the New World. They aren’t named. They could be any number of the tens of thousands of Britons who joined this restorationist faith and felt called to gather. But I claim them. In them, I see my ancestors.

The statue, donated by the Church to the City of Liverpool a handful of years ago, is a tribute to this shore – that marked both the end and the beginning for the Saints. They came from Ireland, Scotland and Wales, from all across England, or from a borough here in Liverpool. They boarded ships and hauled cargo, taking their last steps on dry land for Heaven-knows-how-long, trusting wholly in a faith and an idea – a faith that God lives and speaks, and an idea that moving halfway across the world would bring them closer to that voice. May they have considered economic or other motives, as well? I can’t say, and many academics concede this must be why—for why else would one depart the Motherland for America—and not for the bustling cities of the Eastern seaboard or the golden rivers of California, but for rugged terrain of swampy Nauvoo – a stone’s toss from the Frontier – or rocky Salt Lake, the beating heartthrob of it? 

I spent the better part of last year attempting to answer this question. Why did my ancestors, and nearly 90,000 other Latter-day Saint converts, sail from Liverpool to the North America in the 1800s? Was it driven wholly by faith? Was it a rational, cost-benefit decision based on potential economic and social mobility? Was it both, or neither, or something else entirely? I decided to take a sample of emigrants from the U.K. in the first two decades of migration (1840 to 1860) and pore over any writings they left behind for clues. I read their autobiographies and journals. I studied their correspondence. I coded for any possible hint at a reason for leaving England or heading to America. Sociologists call these “push factors” and “pull factors.” I maintained a running list of both. Pull factors were things like “gathering to Zion,” “reuniting with family,” “meeting a prophet.” Push factors included fleeing economic depravity or obeying a missionary’s urges. Both were prominent, and seemingly influential, in each migrant’s decision.

But the more I analyzed each account, the more I came to recognize that the line between the so-called “temporal” and “spiritual” reasons for migrating was tantalizingly blurry. The pioneers wrote about these factors as if they were all spiritual. They weren’t leaving Britain because the economy was poor; they left because Britain was Babylon, a place of “oppression, priestcraft and iniquity.” They weren’t heading to America because it was a land of opportunity, but because it was the land of milk and honey, the Land of Promise. 

Peter McIntyre wrote that his migration did not free him of economic struggle, but as relief from “Babylonish captivity.” James Barnes wrote of migrating to “America … in other words to the Land of Promise [or] the Land of Zion.” Mary Penfold Goble wrote of providing better opportunity for her children: “I want to go to Zion while my children are small, so they can be raised in the Gospel of Christ[.]” Are these temporal or spiritual motives? Can the two be distinguished?

I was in Cambridge earlier this month. My great-great-great-great-great grandmother, Sarah Jarrold Hyder, was the one of the first Latter-day Saint women baptized in the city. (Family lore said she was the first; the longtime Cambridge Ward historian claims she was the second. I defer to his authority.) She was a widow, her late husband the cleaner and dyer for Queen Victoria and the Royal Family. She was educated and refined. She was never all that religious, but after her husband passed, his dying wish was that his children be raised in a church. Sarah began taking her children to a local Anglican church. 

Sarah’s first exposure to Latter-day Saints was through her baker. The first time she heard the church’s full name, she laughed. She listened long enough to realize that the baker’s strange faith seemed to have some of the answers she had been seeking for years. When she decided to get baptized, her mother tried to dissuade her: “Sarah, if you want to be baptized, be baptized by the Baptists and not by those deluded Mormons!” Sarah stood by her conviction and was baptized in the dead of winter. When she decided to migrate to Utah, her mother offered her a £300 bonus from the family estate. Sarah turned down the offer, sold her business, and dragged her family across an ocean and a continent. 

In that liminal period, between her husband’s death and her conversion to Mormonism, I’m not sure where or how Sarah worshiped. Maybe she attended communion on Sundays, or maybe she stopped in for services throughout the week. Cambridge is dotted with an Anglican church on every corner; I don’t know which was Sarah’s preferred one. All I know is her father, William Jarrold, is buried in the graveyard outside of St. Botolph’s Church, near Pembroke College. If I were Sarah, I would go there. If I were Sarah’s descendent, that’s the first place I’d go to try and connect with her.

I arrived on a rainy Thursday afternoon, when few people were on Trumpington Street and fewer within the church. It’s a stately structure, 700 years old, built of flint and rubble. A small doorway welcomes visitors at the base of a tall, square-cornered tower. I bowed my head and entered. It smelled of incense. I caught eyes with a kind-looking woman, the only person I saw inside. She seemed to welcome us home.

When the evening prayer service began, there were only five of us – the priest, my girlfriend, myself, two others. I took a seat in a box pew, under a brilliant stained glass window. Services like this have gone on in this structure for centuries, well predating Sarah’s time here. I thought of antiquity when the priest began to pray. He uttered psalmodies and blessings; when he read the psalm, we repeated. “Give thanks to the Lord of lords.” For his mercy endures for ever. “Who led his people through the wilderness.” For his mercy endures for ever.

I felt a distinct sense of age in the words. I felt that generations of good, faithful women and men uttered these same words in this same location. Perhaps Sarah was one of them. Perhaps she had a deep, abiding love for the ritual of the Church of England. Perhaps her husband’s death led her to come to morning and evening prayer, like clockwork, in some sort of liturgical healing. Why would she abandon this for a new, nascent, unheard-of faith? What pushed her or pulled her to Zion? Why leave her home and family to wander in the wilderness? Days after my visit to her church, I learned that St. Botolph—the church’s namesake—is the patron saint of travelers. In his walls, the wanderer finds a home.

When I finished my research project, connecting as many dots between pushes-and-pulls and charting as many statistically significant patterns as I could, I presented it to a group of professors and friends. I emphasized, over and over, that it is nearly impossible to distinguish between temporal and spiritual motives for these migrants. After my spiel there was time for questions. A professor raised his hand—a respected gentleman, an expert on pioneer history. His question, if it can be called that, was more tangential than inquisitive. “The pioneers migrated for spiritual reasons,” he said. “You just don’t see that anymore.” People don’t migrate because of any religious or spiritual motive, he asserted. That was a pioneer thing, and there are no more pioneers. 

Thankfully, a sociology professor was in the room, whose field of study—migration— helped her recognize that the man’s claim was not just naive, but false. Spiritual migration continues. Guided migration, even. One recent BYU study analyzes the effect of religion on immigrants to Utah. Another forthcoming paper details immigrants’ firsthand accounts of miracles experienced during their migration – things like a border patrol agent passing by their vehicle, or a sympathetic lawyer arriving at the perfect moment, or a spare mattress to sleep on in a border-town processing facility. “I’m convinced that God is leading immigrants to the United States today,” the author of the forthcoming study writes. How else to describe these miracles?

And how can one say that these are not pioneers? They renounce home to inch closer to heaven – slowly, painfully, but steadily nonetheless – under the assumption that their lives at a new location will be better, holier, than it was. Temporal factors. Spiritual factors. (Religious-based persecution is a serious factor pushing Christian refugees and asylum seekers to the United States.) But, above all, human factors. Humans are complex and nuanced, each one different. Life-altering decisions can rarely be diluted to a few codeable datapoints. Migrants are humans, and their lives cannot, either.

Pioneers, of course, were humans, too. They were complex people, with differing motives and desires. They made decisions for any number of reasons, many of which we will never comprehend. Many retained a love for their homeland, but abandoned that fealty for a new life. But the new country proved less hospitable. When the United States turned its back on the pioneers and forced them out, what did they feel? Betrayal? Sorrow? A crisis of identity? How does this differ from the modern migrant, who finds Lady Liberty’s lamp far less lustrous up close? Ni de aquí, ni de allá.

At that dock in Liverpool, sitting at the feet of my ancestors, I look across the concrete. At 10 meters’ distance is a fence. It encircles the dock in both directions, as long as I can see, the only thing between a pedestrian and a dropoff to the water. It is covered with padlocks, rows and rows of them, on which lovers have scrawled their initials. I wonder how many of those couples return at some future moment and reminisce about the day they pledged fidelity, wrote on a padlock, then sealed their affection with the sound of a click. 

I wonder if someday, their children and grandchildren, down the line, will come to this dock and scour the hundreds for Grandma and Grandpa’s inscription. I wonder if any of my predecessors have a lock here. No, I think, they left far before this fence was here. I don’t have a lock. Instead, I have a statue. I have a mother and a father, their faces pointed toward Zion, relying on the binding covenant they made. I have two children, one taking steps toward the shoreline, unaware of the challenges that face her. I have another child, slightly older, his back toward the coast, playing with a crab in the sand – either savoring these final moments in his homeland, or completely oblivious to the fact that this might be the final British crab he ever sees. 

To me, this statue is a lock—a symbol of fortitude and continuity, of a generations-long commitment to God, of a commitment to future generations of pioneers.

At the base of the statue, a small plaque reads, “We thank this city for cradling our ancestors.” I thank this city, too, for cradling me as I come home. 

Samuel Benson is a Deseret News staff writer, BYU grad and aspiring peacemaker.

Art by Minerva Teichert