On July 24 1847, my GGGG Grandfather Lorenzo Dow Young, alongside his brother Brigham Young and 148 other Mormon pioneers, had their first view of the Great Salt Lake Valley.

This is the place, they said.

I have multiple sets of grandparents who made this unimaginable trek. Across oceans, states and territories. Across the Great Plains and the daunting Rocky Mountains. Driving ox-drawn wagons through rushing rivers, endless prairies, steep mountain passes, and rocky, wheel-killing canyons. Enduring harsh winters with little food and too much sickness. 

Spending 18 months of untold sacrifices to find their place of refuge. 

I can’t imagine their daily hardships, so different from my relatively cushy 21st Century life, but I do try and imagine the joy and exhilaration they must have felt looking down on the valley stretching out before them. The culmination of their toils, and the beginning of their hopes and dreams.

I was not raised in the Mormon faith, but I’m proud of these brave and indomitable people...these ancestors of mine.

Along with their few belongings, and their belief in a better future, they have brought my cells, my genes, the building blocks of who I am, bouncing in a covered wagon across that Mormon Trail.




Pioneer
Stock



40”w x 30”h
Collage: acrylic, paper, photos, ink, charcoal, pencil on cradled wood panel






︎ lorenzo dow young 



 one tough cookie︎

Whenever I’m having a hard day, I think of this description of my Great Great Grandmother in the Daughters of Utah Pioneers Historical Register:

Mary Foster Windley  1836 - 1927

Becoming sick even before leaving Florence, Nebraska to cross the Plains, Mary was confined to bed in the wagon made on top of stoves. She was delirious most of the way as her hip bones tore through her skin and three small bones at the base of her spine decayed. Scarred for life, she perservered until she was able to walk again.

After their arrival in the Salt Lake Valley, she cared for her family in a tiny room with a straw bed in one corner, a dry goods box for a table and oilcloth bags stuffed with clothing to sit on. To help her family she made glue for Dinwoody Furniture by boiling hoofs and scrap hides.

Responding to a call to settle the Bear Lake Valley, Mary’s family was one of the original settlers of St. Charles, Idaho. Her second child, Charles, was the first child born in that settlement. There, they endured extreme winters with primitive shelter and little food. The first winter, she fed her family frozen potatoes and a little milk, thickened with frosted smutty wheat ground in a coffee mill.



 ︎unbroken 

My grandmother’s health may have suffered from the trek out west, but her soup tureen brought from England survived the trip quite well.


I was thrilled to discover many treasures of my ancestors at the Pioneer Memorial Museum in Salt Lake City.





︎ my great greats

John and Mary Foster Windley met in a Mormon church in Birmingham, England. They, along with many Europeans, were enchanted by the testimonies of Mormon missionaries, and tales of the land of milk and honey waiting for them in the New World.

They had quite a honeymoon trip in 1861. Ships, trains, riverboats, wagon trains, fevers, stillbirths, rattlesnakes, freezing nights, unhappy native americans...


Kathryn Windley — Milan, NY