Reliving Mormons’ Trek to California

When you think about it, Las Vegas is the one place these folks may not stand out. But they will be easy to spot at any other point along the 800-mile trail between Salt Lake City and San Bernardino.

Just look for more than 200 Mormons, dressed in pioneer garb, traveling in covered wagons.

The arduous trek this spring and summer will replicate the Mormon journey to Southern California 150 years ago, when 437 pioneers traveled across the vast deserts of southern Utah, Nevada and California to settle at the base of the Cajon Pass in what is now San Bernardino.

The wagon train is scheduled to leave Salt Lake City on April 25 and arrive in San Bernardino at the end of June for a three-day festival at Glen Helen Regional Park. Organizers said Southern California Mormons will make up the majority of the “pioneers.”

“This is a unique story in the history of the West, yet nobody knows about it,” said Marilyn Mills, co-director of the Heritage Trails Celebration. The San Bernardino woman will participate in part of the trek.

In 1851, Brigham Young, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sent colonists to establish a western outpost that would serve as a major link in the church’s supply line between San Pedro’s harbor and Salt Lake City. The community would also be a way station for missionaries and converts from the Pacific islands.

“This was the first Anglo-American settlement in Southern California,” said Nick Cataldo, a past president of the San Bernardino Historical and Pioneer Society.

The boom town also included freed slaves, former slaveholders, Jewish merchants, trappers, prospectors, Spanish landowners and Native Americans, according to Edward Leo Lyman’s book, “San Bernardino: The Rise and Fall of a California Community.”

Heritage Trails organizers said their reenactment will underscore the community’s diversity and its ability to come together.

“It’s the most unlikely group you’ve ever imagined,” Mills said. She quoted a passage in a pioneer’s diary: “They worked almost as one family, they were so united.”

Cataldo called it “an amazingly cohesive group.”

Even more amazing when you consider the times and church history. Though always opposed to slavery, Mormons didn’t allow blacks into the priesthood until 1978. The belief, since rejected, was that African Americans were descendants of Cain and carried the curse of the man who killed his brother Abel.

But prejudices fell away in the western outpost as settlers worried more about survival.

“They felt really up against it,” said Joseph Bentley, the church’s Orange County director of public relations. “They had a lot of blank walls to climb. Without working together, they would surely have foundered.”

Within six years of the Mormons’ arrival in Southern California, San Bernardino’s population had swelled to 3,000. Roads, houses and businesses had been built. Arid cattle land had been successfully farmed. Mail and freight routes had been started.

But then Young called the Mormons back to Salt Lake City. He needed manpower in case the church’s deteriorating relationship with the federal government escalated into war. He also worried about reports of disloyalty in the San Bernardino ranks.

Two-thirds of the church members obeyed, heading back across the desert. Settlers who refused to budge were excommunicated or drifted away from the church. The Mormons wouldn’t establish another official church in San Bernardino for more than 60 years.

“That’s the most striking feature” of the Mormon immigration to Southern California, said Donald Waldie, a social historian and author of “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir.” “The Mormons came, settled down and then went back. The history of California is much different than that.”

Though only in town for a half-dozen years, the Mormons are credited with being the founding fathers of San Bernardino. They gave the city, among other attributes, its basic physical design, which was patterned after Salt Lake City’s.

The 2001 wagon train is designed to bring attention to the Mormons’ role in Southern California history, in addition to giving church members and others a realistic taste of pioneer life.

The 60 or so wagons will travel at 3 mph and cover 20 miles a day. The wagon train will roughly parallel Interstate 15. At times, though, the group will stray as much as 90 miles from the highway to follow the original trail that led pioneers from water hole to water hole.

The condition of the trail being followed by the 21st century Mormons will vary greatly: from paved roads to tiny dirt paths.

The reenactment is similar to the journey in 1997 when thousands of Mormons rode in covered wagons from Nebraska to Salt Lake City to mark the 150th anniversary of Brigham Young’s pilgrimage to Utah.

“Mormon pioneers who crossed the plains did not have this kind of severe journey [crossing a desert],” Mills said. “The trek to California is a far more arduous journey with the heat and no water.”

Today’s pioneers will have a few extra gadgets at their disposal: cell phones, global positioning satellite equipment, Internet linkups (https://www.heritagetrails.cc) and even helicopters on standby in case of emergencies.

Event organizers invite the public to participate, for either a short stay or the entire journey.

“And if they have a wagon,” Mills added, “that would be great.”

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San Bernardino Pioneers

The pioneers in San Bernardino who were part of the Mormon wagon train from Salt Lake City in 1851 or arrived at the settlement shortly thereafter included:

Biddy Smith Mason--Mason was a slave who came to San Bernardino with her Mormon owner. Freed under California law, she moved to Los Angeles, became a landlord in the downtown financial district and ended up as one of the state’s richest women. In 1871 she founded the First African Methodist Episcopal church, still one of the city’s most prominent congregations.

Jacob Rich--A Jewish immigrant, he brought the first Torah to the community. It remains today at Congregation Emanu El Clare in San Bernardino.

George Albert Ralphs--Ralphs, as a small child, traveled on a later Mormon wagon in 1857. He founded Ralphs Grocery Co. in 1873.

Fred T. Perris--A Mormon convert from Australia, Perris served as a civil engineer for the settlement. He developed a railroad route through the Cajon Pass that allowed travelers and freight bound for Southern California to bypass San Francisco. The city of Perris in Riverside County is named after him.

Sources: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, San Bernardino Historical and Pioneer Society