c. 1996 Religion News Service

NAUVOO, Ill. (RNS)-Tom and Linda Whitaker of Midway, Utah, and five of their six children have set forth on the same journey their beleaguered Mormon ancestors took 150 years ago, as they fled religious persecution and went searching for a promised land.

At the break of dawn Monday (June 17), they harnessed two horses to a covered wagon, ferried across the Mississippi, and began a three-week trek across Iowa to a place the Mormons called Winter Quarters.

The Whitaker family hopes to learn teamwork, sacrifice and creative problem-solving while forgoing 20th-century pleasures. The women will wear long dresses and aprons; the men will don jeans and cowboy hats. They will eat mostly what they can carry and sleep mostly on the ground.

But the trip is not just about roughing it. It is a sort of spiritual journey as well.

In the winter of 1846, members of the fledgling Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had been driven from the thriving community they had built from nothing here on the banks of the Mississippi. It was the latest in a series of expulsions that had occurred over the previous 14 years, as they followed their prophet and leader, Joseph Smith.

The 11,000 residents of the Mormon community of Nauvoo were persecuted by hostile neighbors who disapproved of Smith’s new religion-particularly its tolerance of the now-abandoned practice of polygamy. But mostly they were suspicious that the LDS Church would become the dominant economic and political force in the state, according to church spokesman Michael Leonard.

They were traumatized by the 1844 murder of Smith and his brother Hyrum, who had been jailed and attacked by a mob.

So, following their new leader, Brigham Young, the Saints headed west for unknown but hoped-for promised land.

“As we face the heat, bugs, miles and dirt, it will give us more appreciation of what the pioneers did,” says 21-year-old Ryan Whitaker, recently returned from a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Tom Whitaker has been a Mormon all his life and has studied church history. But it still is difficult for him to fathom the kind of faith that could carry the pioneers all the way to Utah with a handcart or in a covered wagon.

Indeed, according to the late historian-writer Wallace Stegner, the Mormon trek was a rite of passage for early members of the LDS Church.

“Persecution and hardship discouraged many, and others fell away into apostasy, but what might be called the hard core of Mormonism took persecution and suffering in stride, as God’s way of trying their faith,” Stegner wrote in “The Gathering of Zion.”

The trek was to Mormons what the lions were to early Christians-a chance to test their spiritual mettle.

The hard trail was “a labor to be performed, difficulties to be overcome, dangers to be faced, faithfulness to be proved, a great safety to be won,” Stegner wrote.

The shared experience of the journey, with its all-too-frequent deaths and sorrows, forged the bonds of faith. Many participants kept diaries, detailing every action and event, looking for God’s protective hand in the going.

And they found it often. Rivers miraculously froze to allow safe passage, food unexpectedly appeared, the sick were healed.

By the time the beleaguered Saints reached the Salt Lake Valley, and for years afterward, the stories were told again and again.

“Pioneers were a revered club in Utah,” Stegner said.

Whitaker’s great-great grandfather, George Whitaker, a Mormon convert from England, left his pregnant wife in Nauvoo to drive a wagon for apostle Parley P. Pratt. After arriving in Winter Quarters, where the Saints camped for the winter, George returned for his wife who gave birth shortly after. Husband, wife and child all arrived safely in Salt Lake City.

But many others did not.

Jim Bell, a veterinarian from Farmington, Utah, had several pioneer ancestors. His great-great grandmother gave birth to twin girls along the trail. Eight days later she and both babies died. Their graves were unmarked.

During this month’s trek, Bell hopes to come closer in spirit to his forebears who died on the trail.

“I have a big debt to pay,” he says.

But what of Mormon converts-those new to the faith within the past few generations? What is their connection to the Mormon exodus?

Lloyd Mietzner, a chiropractor from Bloomfield, Iowa, is the wagon master. He joined the LDS Church in 1967 while serving in the military. He and his wife and five of six children are involved in the re-enactment starting this week.

“We live along the Mormon trails in Iowa,” Mietzner says. “I wanted my children to experience the trials, hardships and day-to-day life of the early pioneers crossing our state. I hope the experience will instill in me and my children an understanding of the faith that drove them.”

The participants realize that their re-enactment never will match the extraordinary journey of the Mormon pioneers. But it is, nevertheless, a fitting homage to that trek.

“There is nothing like being out in the dirt, being where things happened, to experience the power of place and the spirit of locale,” says Stanley Kimball, a Mormon historian who has written about the Mormon Trail.

“The Mormon Trail is to me a linear temple,” Kimball says. “I am never closer to my God than when I am out there where it all took place.”

MJP END STACK

AP-NY-06-21-96 1224EDT