Some of us have the notion that the Mormon pioneers saw the world in bold strokes of black or white, while we moderns squint through myriad shades of gray. As we prepared ourselves to write, opening the books the pioneers wrote for no one but themselves or their children we found those blacks and whites bold and clear, but the surprise was what arched in between – not “shades of gray” at all, but a rainbow of passions and fears, dares and enormous presumptions. Their “trail of dreams” paralleled, often at a stone’s throw, two rivers that have taken on mythic proportions – the Platte and the Sweetwater – and along each of them the pioneers traveled upstream.
Brothers Arrrington, Kappp PPerry, and I discovered that by the side of the Sweetwater today lie countless dull stones. Toss them into that bracing current and suddenly they are the deep blue of the night sky, the gold of sunset through clouds of dust, or the pink-white of snow, or stars. So it was with the lives of common souls who plunged into the river of pioneers and walked their thousand miles upstream into the valleys of the Wasatch to make us a home.
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The whole idea of pioneering was (is) to leave Babylon behind. The trail along the south bank of the Platte was crowded with travelers pursuing richer soil and gold. The trail along the north bank, the rougher trail, was blazed by Latter-day Saints pursuing the dream of spiritual wealth and beauty. The south-bank trail ended in the rich Willamette Valley of Oregon and the gold fields of California . The north-bank trail ended in a desert waiting to blossom as a rose.
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