Every Day Is Special: Mormon pioneer

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July 24 – Pioneer Day in Utah

Posted on July 24, 2017

If you go to Salt Lake City, Utah, today, you might see something like this:

You see, today is Pioneer Day, a statewide holiday that commemorates the first group of Mormon pioneers who came to and settled the Salt Lake region.

Mormon is the word used for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After the death of Mormonism-founder Joseph Smith, in 1844, a group of Mormons followed their church president, Brigham Young, all the way from the Mississippi River to Utah Territory.

Even though this date commemorates the day in 1847 when Young and the other pioneers arrived in Salt Lake Valley, the holiday also honors all pioneers, of every faith or no faith, who "settled" the West.

And by "the West," I mean the western portion of the 48 contiguous United States (Alaska and Hawaii are waaayyy farther west than what we call "the West").

And by "settle," I mean "white folks coming and grabbing land that indigenous / native folks had been using but didn't OWN in a legalistic, document-oriented way." The Salt Lake Valley had been the home for groups of Shoshone, Ute, and Paiute. At the time when Young and his followers founded Salt Lake City, the land was Shoshone land - but they only used it seasonally. There were no permanent buildings there...until the Mormons began to build.

Even if a particular group of settlers were not the first to see a patch of land, travel a particular route, or use a particular valley, they were still going into the relatively unknown - to them, at least - and they still faced a lot of dangers. So they had to be courageous, resourceful, and (to be perfectly honest) lucky to survive. So, yes, let's celebrate pioneers!!

Salt Lake City has a lot of cool statues. This one memorializes the pioneers:

Many of the 70,000 Mormon pioneers couldn't afford a wagon and a team of oxen to pull the wagon...so they went West with only the possessions they could fit into a handcart they themselves pulled:

Here's an amazing fact: Mormon pioneers planted crops alongside the 1,300-mile-long trail so that later travelers could have a supply of food!

In addition to a parade, Pioneer Day festivities include a rodeo and concerts:

Also on this date:

Jose Barbosa Day in Puerto Rico

Anniversary of the Founding of Detroit

Cousins Day

Children's Day in Vanuatu

Simon Bolivar Day

Anniversary of the Apollo 11 splashdown

Guelaguetza Festival in Oaxaca

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

May 12, 2013 - Odometer Day

Today is Mother's Day in the United States—which is perfect this year, because it is also Odometer Day. Being a mom can be a lot like running a marathon—you have to go on and on and on and on, morning til night, scooping up this and sweeping up that, lugging loads of stuff everywhere you go, driving miles here, walking and climbing stairs there...It would be great to have a giant gauge to measure all the miles (or meters) moms go.

Well, an odometer is just such a gauge for cars, bikes, and other vehicles. Whether it is a mechanical or an electronic device, an odometer tells how far a vehicle has traveled.

Today is NOT Odometer Day because today marks the anniversary of the first invention of an odometer. No, that day is lost in the mists of time. We know for sure that Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Chinese used odometers, and apparently the odometer has been invented many times, independent of each other. Who knows? Perhaps a crude odometer was invented by someone, somewhere, soon after the invention of the wheel!

We know that Englishman Thomas Savery invented an odometer that could be used on ships, and we know that Benjamin Franklin fashioned a simple odometer to measure the mileage of routes he traveled as Postmaster General under the Continental Congress. We know that a Mormon pioneer named William Clayton wanted to keep track how far his wagon traveled each day. He determined that 360 revolutions of his wagon wheels made a mile, so all he had to do was count wheel revolutions. Clayton tied a red rag to one of his wheels and started counting. It wasn't too many days before Clayton tired of this method of measuring distances. He discussed the problem with another pioneer, and they came up with an idea of fixing wooden cog wheels to the hub of a wagon wheel in such a way that they could tell the mileage. A third man built the device, which they called a roadometer. (Even though they weren't traveling on roads!)