Comments on: Pioneer Day

By: Blain

Blain — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:06:33 +0000

21 — AFAIK, their families did when they died a natural death — the children weren’t killed (at least, not the ones seen as young enough to not remember, although they did remember).

By: Robert Pare

Robert Pare — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:26:32 +0000

Who buried the children of Mountain Meadow?

By: Susan M

Susan M — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:40:31 +0000

At least they didn’t have to bury him with a spoon.

By: J. Stapley

J. Stapley — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:44:57 +0000

…Though unpublished, Paul Reeve delivered a wonderful paper that touches on this about ten years ago: “‘The Devil Was Determined to Kill the Babies’: Matters of Communal Health in a Nineteenth-Century Mormon Town,” paper presented at the Communal Studies Association Conference, St. George, Utah, September 25, 1999.

By: J. Stapley

J. Stapley — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:36:07 +0000

Steve, those are great questions. Having the sort of training that I do, I tend to view such accounts as misdiagnoses – they simply didn’t have the tools to explain what was going on. That said, similar accounts are not too uncommon and battles with the destroyer [queue Sam] are a definite part of the early Mormon narrative. I leave the possibility that it was as he said, though.

This was still pretty early in the development and popularization of Mormon spirit cosmology. I would not be surprised if the belief that one slumbered until the resurrection was fairly common.

By: Alf O'Mega

Alf O'Mega — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 01:54:05 +0000

I checked some dates on FamilySearch, and it appears that, besides having buried a wife already (“a companion for life . . . a bosom friend”), he had also lost his first daughter as well as little Hosea’s younger brother (just the previous month). As he feared, he would indeed lose his remaining daughter just a year later. Seven years later his wife Louisa and infant son would die in childbirth. She left three children, all of whom survived into the twentieth century.

He married several other women, one of whom was already pregnant when little Hosea died. She would die in childbirth just three months later. Another plural wife had already deserted him. In 1855 he married the woman who would bear the majority of his children. Of the eleven she bore, three died in infancy, but the rest lived to adulthood. The last of his nineteen children, Charles Stevens Stout, born in 1876 when his mother was 43 and his father 66, lived until 1951.

By: SteveP

SteveP — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 01:47:02 +0000

This was a heartbreaking story. Two things I found fascinating: I was interested in the perspective that his son was being destroyed by demons. Especially, someone so young. It is easy for me to discount that and likely his son was going through pain and contortions due to his illness, but how widespread was the belief that that was possible? The second was the idea that his son would sleep until the resurrection. Was the idea of a spirit world waiting-place not developed at the time?

A thought provoking post for Pioneer Day!

By: Tracy M

Tracy M — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:27:40 +0000

Thanks for sharing this J.

By: Sonny

Sonny — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:25:29 +0000

Wow. Thank you for that post. Lately Pioneer Day is something I haven’t given much thought to, which I guess is a bit too easy to do outside of Utah. I needed a sobering reminder of the heartaches they had to endure.

And thank you Hunter for the link to the equally heartwrenching journal entries of Lafayette Guymon. That last name caught my eye, and it turns out Lafayette is a half-brother to my great grandmother Harriett Guymon.

By: Christopher

Christopher — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:08:17 +0000

Thanks, J. An appropriate and moving post.