672. The Real Reason the Pioneers Came West, and a pioneer story of one of my husband Wayne's ancestors from England.
This is a very interesting article, about pioneers wanting to go to "Zion". I'm also going to post some about my pioneer ancestors. I know that my own pioneer ancestors came for that reason, after having been persecuted a lot in Nauvoo, and other early settlements of the Saints. I'll put more of our family pioneer stories on very soon.
This was written July 24, 2014, in this blog.
His conversion to the Latter Day Saint religion was the result of a dream. He dreamed that as he was standing by his gate, he saw two men coming down the road toward him. He then awoke. Several days later he saw the two men of his dream coming down the road toward him as he stood by the gate. They told him they had a message for him and he asked them into his home. They were missionaries, and in due time Philip, his wife and family with the exception of the oldest son, John, were baptized into the church in 1849. From then on the Kirks were faithful members of the branch. They also entertained many missionaries in their home.
These children worked hard and sent money for the rest of the family to join them in Zion, while the parents saved what money they could also in England, and came 4 years later. Before they left England, their associates made a dummy out of straw and pitch, tied it to a pole and burned Philip in Effigy. On June 4, 1868, Philip, Mary Ann and daughters took passage on the packet ship, “John Bright”. This was the last year that sailing vessels would be used. The more expensive steam ships would be used from then on, and the Church leaders were anxious for as many Saints as could to emigrate in 1868.
The Kirk family were 6 weeks on the sea on a very rough voyage. Their ship left Liverpool, England June 4, 1866 and landed in New York July 13, 1866. From New York they traveled by train to Laramie, Wyoming, where, on July 25th they began the journey across the plains to Salt Lake City. In the company were 300 Saints, with 31 wagons, all under the leadership of Captain Joseph S. Rawlings. He was one of those men that had been sent from Salt Lake City to help the saints on to the Valley.
They traveled slowly in wagons along the well-worn dusty trail, making a circle of their wagons at night, while their cattle were guarded near by and arising at dawn to continue the tedious journey. They finally arrived in the Valley on August 20, 1866. No doubt members of their family were there to meet them, and take them on to Tooele to the home that had been prepared for them. The trip across the plains had prepared Mary Ann somewhat for the primitive ways of doing things in Utah. It took her a little time to get used to the ways of the pioneer women, but this was her new home now, and she was very happy to be reunited with James, Ann and Joseph again, who were established in Tooele. The people of Tooele welcomed them gladly and did all they could to make them feel that it was a good place to live. The town of Tooele was quite a place by the time the Kirks arrived in 1866.
Joseph, who came with other saints when he was 10 years old with his older brother James, and sister Ann, tells that he had no schooling but was taught to read by his mother, using the Bible as a text-book. Probably the other children were taught the same. When Joseph was eight years old, he went to work in a brick factory, using a wheel-barrow to haul the bricks. He was so small that he had to have straps placed over his shoulders to support the handles. He walked two miles to work each morning and returned the same distance after ten hours of hard labor. For this, he received one-half crown or approximately fifty cents per week. As a boy, he recalled that he never had enough to eat; he said he was always hungry.
When the three, James, 17, Ann, 15, (Wayne's great grandmother) and Joseph, 10, sailed on the ship they suffered all the privations of a long and dangerous trip. They ran short of provisions and were limited to a small amount of food. This was a real trial for the ten year old boy. They had only sea crackers to eat and many times Joe would wake up at night and cry for something to eat.
A well-to-do young lady, Miss Ann Stevens, who was on board the same ship, took a great liking to James (then 17) and at one time gave him a piece of cake from the main deck. James hid the cake under his pillow so he would have something for Joe if he happened to wake at night. During the night Joe awoke and when James looked for the cake someone had stolen it. It was homemade cake, and was a great delicacy for a homesick and hungry boy while crossing the ocean. The three children arrived in New York where they stayed for three weeks. One night James went for a walk and saw loads and loads of bread, the first he had seen since leaving home, but he did not have any money to buy bread.
The three left New York and crossed the plains in the Joseph Horne Company, an immigrant train of fifty wagons. They arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on September 30, 1862. Henry Green took all three so they wouldn’t have to be separated.
All of their children grew up to be very ambitious, honest, generous, compassionate and wonderful people. Mary Ann was nearly 75 years old when she died in Tooele, May 6, 1895. He was very lonesome after she died. Philip lived on for 4 years, being cared for by his children, until February 15, 1899, when he passed away at the ripe old age of 82. They are buried in the Tooele City Cemetery.
The Real Reason the Pioneers Came West
Image by Clark Kelley Price.
It was a September day in 1842 when George and Ann Quayle Cannon stood with their six children on the windswept dock at Liverpool ready to board the great ship Sidney for America. Crowds of emigrants thronged the gangplank, worried over details, and clutched a few remnants of the home they were about to leave behind. They carried boxes, beds, and assorted bundles. Some had cabbages, some cheese, some bread and butter stored in tins.
Like so many others, the Cannons were uprooting themselves and leaving England, but not for the bounties of America. In fact, George had written his sister in America, asking, “Please let us know what are the most necessary things to take to America in respect to clothing and utensils…You have never mentioned what sort of a country it is, or how people are employed there, and how land is sold (whether high-priced or cheap).”
Even without this knowledge, the Cannons would go—go even though they “got nothing” for their furniture, not even their clock of “drawers,” which had long belonged to the family; go even though Ann’s brother did not bother to come and see them off; go even though Ann was in the midst of a sickly pregnancy and had the premonition that, should they leave then, she would not make it to America.
Yet for a long time she had kept a secret savings, skimmed from their household accounts and squirreled away to surprise her husband that they might emigrate. They had waited so long while they had helped pay for other Saints to sail, counted while their months turned into years, and Ann felt it intolerable to wait any longer. What was worth all this fuss, this price, and finally for Ann, the ultimate sacrifice? Too weak and seasick to hold anything down, she died on board ship and was buried somewhere in the vast Atlantic Ocean. George and Ann were coming to build Zion.
“Oh Zion, dear Zion.” Creating Zion was the burden of the prayers of the early Saints. They yearned for it, carried it like a fire in their hearts, longed for that society away from the oppressions of the world where a celestial order prevails. It was a heavenly homesickness they carried with them, a sense that “the world we have made and are making is not the world God meant us to have.” God has far better designs and happier ways for his children.
So, from the earliest times of the Restoration, new converts left their fields and fortunes, going, “one from the bed, the other from the grinding,” and bade farewell to all they had known to gather.
They came first to Kirkland, then Missouri, then Nauvoo, and finally rumbled across fourteen hundred miles of plains and mountains, breaking their carts and wagons, but not their spirits in pursuit of Zion.
“Thy kingdom come,” they prayed, and they were willing to shoulder their part to make it happen, even if they left a heartbreaking string of graves, across the prairies and their backs were bowed under the weight of what they had given up.
Historians who see the great western movement of the Mormon pioneers merely as an escape from persecution miss the point. Much more than escape, the pioneers were involved in a monumental creative effort. They felt themselves called out of the world because they wanted Zion. “Go ye out from Babylon. Be ye clean.” They were to gather to Zion for “a refuge from the storm” that would soon be poured out upon the whole earth.”
They would gather because, according to the parable of the wheat and the tares, “the time of harvest is come.” They would gather to one place “to prepare their hearts and be prepared in all things” for the second coming of the Lord. With particularly poignant meaning for those who had been forced from their sacred temples in Kirkland and Nauvoo, they would gather to build a temple to God where they could make eternal covenants to be his people.
The Bible gives a fairly detailed description of Zion, but the Saints are distinctive in their response to the message. For them, Zion is not a promise of a faraway impossible tomorrow. They believe “that Zion is possible on this earth, that men possess the capacity to receive it right here and are therefore under the obligation to “waste no time moving in the direction of Zion.”
Still, when the Saints were driven from Missouri and there was no gathering place, Joseph Smith instructed the missionaries in England not to teach the doctrine of gathering. But, according to John Taylor, they “could not keep the spirit of it from the people.” Heber C. Kimball had not told George D. Watt anything about the doctrine of the gathering, but just ten days after George became the first man in England to be baptized, he came to Heber “his face shining like that of an angel, and said he, just as sure as the Lord lives the Saints will gather to America.”
John Taylor told of a sister in Liverpool, England, who said to him, “Brother Taylor, I had a very remarkable dream or vision. I don’t know which, and it went something like this: I thought that the Saints were gathered together on the Pier Head—and there was a ship about to sail. The people said they were going to Zion, and they were singing what they called the songs of Zion, and rejoicing exceedingly; you were among them, and you were going also. Now I want to know if you can tell what that means?” Clearly Zion swells in the hearts of her citizens.
The Saints felt the urge to gather because “the Spirit of the Lord rested upon them, and they could not stay themselves.” John Taylor told the British Saints, “[When the elders laid their hands] upon your head, among other things you received the Holy Ghost and the spirit of the gathering. But you did not know what it was that was working in you, like yeast sometimes under certain conditions, producing an influence causing you to come to Zion. Yet you could not help it. If you had wanted to help it, you could not while you were living your religion.”
Brigham Young said of the pioneers “the spirit of the Lord was all the time prompting them…They could not do anything else, because God would not let them do anything else. The brethren and sisters came across the plains because they could not stay; that is the secret of the movement.”
Alma Ash said in 1885, “Whenever I saw another Mormon family emigrate to Zion, it used to cause very peculiar feelings to enter my heart. And oh, with what joy I pondered upon the gathering. The possibility of our family emigrating to Zion in the near future would give me the greatest joy. Indeed, I know of nothing which brought so much joy to my young heart as to talk about going to the Salt Lake valley. Many times we young Mormon exiles played “Going to the valley” by constructing a train and a ship and the like, of chairs and tables. Then we would imagine we were traveling along.”
Though that silent, inner stirring is sometimes unnamed, the spiritual inclined feel a longing, almost a memory, of a former, better state, and they wish to regain it. Zion is the answer to that longing, designed on God’s principles, where every institution and relationship promotes joy. It is a place of beauty, whose standard in all things is a light to the world. It is a place of peace and unity, where the false pride, follies and selfishness of the world are forgotten. The buildings, walls, streets and gates, the throngs in shining robes are not the essence of Zion. When all else is stripped away, Zion is the pure in heart.
Those who wanted to build Zion, then had to begin by looking to their own hearts. “We are trying to be in the image of those who live in heaven: we are trying to pattern after them…to walk and talk like them, to deal like them, and build up the kingdom of heaven as they have done,” said Brigham Young. Yet it is hard for those who have so long lived in the world, immersed in Babylon, to envision Zion: hard to be a Zion people when one cannot yet conceive it, can only catch glimpses of its beauty from a distant shore.
Thus, a pattern emerges in the scriptures. Those who would go to the promised land, those who are longing for Zion, must first learn its principles in the wilderness journey.
It is a difficult journey whose tests are to be endured, a necessary labor to be performed in order to find the safety and joy of the promised land. The children of Israel trudged through the desert for forth years. Nehi and his family trekked the most foreboding desert of the world. At some future time, there will be another coming out of Babylon, which is the world, to build Zion. In every case the promised land is reached only after the tedious and difficult journey, and the heart is transformed in the process.
Priorities become clear to converts who shed every precious keepsake along the trail, who dragged on when their bodies cried out in utter exhaustion. They came to know and pave the Lord when human strength was gone and He was there to compensate, when their faith, like gold seven times purified. they learned to give freely to each other and bear one another’s burdens in the furnace of affliction. These are Zion lessons that the world cannot offer.
Brigham Young, who said he had Zion constantly in his view, put it simply: “I want hard times, so that every person that does not wish to stay, for the sake of religion will leave.” Zion could not be built by those who would come on false pretenses. Though it didn’t always succeed, the trail was to strip Babylon from the heart of one who wanted to build Zion.
So they came from Vermont and Kentucky, from England and Wales, came in a growing swell to build their beloved Zion and then be driven from it again. Finally, weary of being a driven people, they sought refuge in the mountains in an arid valley that nobody else wanted and formed a city called Great Salt Lake. By some estimates, nearly seventy thousand people brought rickety wagons and carts and tramped those plains; six thousand of them died along the way, their dreams of Zion buried in a trailside grave.
For the rest it was “Carry on, carry on”—and they did, leaving a legacy that burns in every Mormon heart.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now I'll include Entry # 197, about one of my husband Wayne's ancestors!
Do you have Mormon pioneer heritage?
FamilySearch has created a simple sign-in tool that will allow you to discover your pioneer heritage. After you discover more about the pioneers in your history, take the time to read their trail stories, also found on this page. The past is an amazing storybook.
http://spr.ly/6185lI9X (copy and paste!)
Wayne's great great grandfather Phillip Kirk, had quite a history, and 3 of his children came 4 years before the parents had enough money to come also. This tells their touching stories.
61. Wayne's great great grandfather, Phillip Kirk, "Burned in effigy"
Today, I want to tell the story of Wayne's great great grandfather, Phillip Kirk, and his wife Mary Ann Taylor.
Mary Ann was 17 years old when she married Philip Kirk, 20 years old. They had 10 children, four of whom died young. Early in the 1840’s, Mormon missionaries had been sent to England to tell the people there of a new religion in America. In 1849 some traveling Elders found the Philip Kirk family in Arnold, Nottingham, England. He was then a baker with a pastry shop.
Many of their friends of the Church were emigrating to Utah, but they didn't have money to go to Utah. The whole family worked hard and decided to send 3 of their children, who were able to set sail on the ship, “John J. Boyd” in 1862: James, 18; Ann, 16; and Joseph, 10. Can you imagine sending 3 of your children with friends across the ocean to Utah, and not coming yourself until 4 years later? Probably part of the reason they sent the children ahead was that after they were baptized, his friends and associates took young Joseph and tied a rope around him and threw him into the water to “give him a bath.” The rope came off and there was a mad scramble to save the young boy.
Both their children, and Phillip's family came on a clipper ship.
These children worked hard and sent money for the rest of the family to join them in Zion, while the parents saved what money they could also in England, and came 4 years later. Before they left England, their associates made a dummy out of straw and pitch, tied it to a pole and burned Philip in Effigy. On June 4, 1868, Philip, Mary Ann and daughters took passage on the packet ship, “John Bright”. This was the last year that sailing vessels would be used. The more expensive steam ships would be used from then on, and the Church leaders were anxious for as many Saints as could to emigrate in 1868.
The Kirk family were 6 weeks on the sea on a very rough voyage. Their ship left Liverpool, England June 4, 1866 and landed in New York July 13, 1866. From New York they traveled by train to Laramie, Wyoming, where, on July 25th they began the journey across the plains to Salt Lake City. In the company were 300 Saints, with 31 wagons, all under the leadership of Captain Joseph S. Rawlings. He was one of those men that had been sent from Salt Lake City to help the saints on to the Valley.
They traveled slowly in wagons along the well-worn dusty trail, making a circle of their wagons at night, while their cattle were guarded near by and arising at dawn to continue the tedious journey. They finally arrived in the Valley on August 20, 1866. No doubt members of their family were there to meet them, and take them on to Tooele to the home that had been prepared for them. The trip across the plains had prepared Mary Ann somewhat for the primitive ways of doing things in Utah. It took her a little time to get used to the ways of the pioneer women, but this was her new home now, and she was very happy to be reunited with James, Ann and Joseph again, who were established in Tooele. The people of Tooele welcomed them gladly and did all they could to make them feel that it was a good place to live. The town of Tooele was quite a place by the time the Kirks arrived in 1866.
Joseph, who came with other saints when he was 10 years old with his older brother James, and sister Ann, tells that he had no schooling but was taught to read by his mother, using the Bible as a text-book. Probably the other children were taught the same. When Joseph was eight years old, he went to work in a brick factory, using a wheel-barrow to haul the bricks. He was so small that he had to have straps placed over his shoulders to support the handles. He walked two miles to work each morning and returned the same distance after ten hours of hard labor. For this, he received one-half crown or approximately fifty cents per week. As a boy, he recalled that he never had enough to eat; he said he was always hungry.
When the three, James, 17, Ann, 15, (Wayne's great grandmother) and Joseph, 10, sailed on the ship they suffered all the privations of a long and dangerous trip. They ran short of provisions and were limited to a small amount of food. This was a real trial for the ten year old boy. They had only sea crackers to eat and many times Joe would wake up at night and cry for something to eat.
A well-to-do young lady, Miss Ann Stevens, who was on board the same ship, took a great liking to James (then 17) and at one time gave him a piece of cake from the main deck. James hid the cake under his pillow so he would have something for Joe if he happened to wake at night. During the night Joe awoke and when James looked for the cake someone had stolen it. It was homemade cake, and was a great delicacy for a homesick and hungry boy while crossing the ocean. The three children arrived in New York where they stayed for three weeks. One night James went for a walk and saw loads and loads of bread, the first he had seen since leaving home, but he did not have any money to buy bread.
The three left New York and crossed the plains in the Joseph Horne Company, an immigrant train of fifty wagons. They arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on September 30, 1862. Henry Green took all three so they wouldn’t have to be separated.
All of their children grew up to be very ambitious, honest, generous, compassionate and wonderful people. Mary Ann was nearly 75 years old when she died in Tooele, May 6, 1895. He was very lonesome after she died. Philip lived on for 4 years, being cared for by his children, until February 15, 1899, when he passed away at the ripe old age of 82. They are buried in the Tooele City Cemetery.
Comments