What Were The Pioneers Actually Seeking?

What we lost when we turned them into pioneers

I wobble into Costco because I'd thrown out my back for lifting and twisting simultaneously. Nobody informed me that DNA simply doesn’t allow for that after forty. So I’m standing in line clutching this industrial-sized bottle of magnesium gummies because I'm too lazy to order quality ones online…pain makes you do weird things. In front of me is a twenty two year old buying frozen pizza, and condoms and looking like the future is one long series of excellent bad decisions. Suddenly I’m hit with this ridiculous longing to be chosen by something bigger than laundry, and this nagging suspicion that I'm wasting my entire existence.

I think back to when I visited a monument in Utah with bronze pioneer statues. Chins lifted toward the horizon, handcart wheel catching the light just right, and violins swelling somewhere in the background while children in bonnets stare nobly into destiny like they already know they’ll end up embroidered onto a wall hanging one day. I knew that was not my destiny. That’s when I realized history prefers its saints emotionally manageable. Because real people don’t just “cross the plains.” Real people are contradictory and capable of catastrophe and revelation and will abandon variations of themselves for something they want to become and call it God because it’s hard to describe what is happening inside them.

Yes, pioneers came out West because they were fleeing persecution, seeking survival, and were trying to build a religious community beyond the reach of mobs and governments and newspapers calling them dangerous lunatics. All of that is true. But I also wonder if many of them were escaping something like insignificance. Something I was feeling a lot of in that line at Costco. It must be terribly claustrophobic being spiritually trapped inside an ordinary life as a seamstress, or a tenant farmer, or a laborer feeding someone else’s machine (kind of like the modern trad wife... but that's another essay). The idea of being born, working, exhausted, and then buried, all within thirty miles of where your mother first held you feels boring and predetermined. But then suddenly a guy appears saying, No, no. You are not random. You are literally part of Israel. History is unfolding now. God is gathering people. Angels are appearing. Zion is being built. The world is about to change and you matter to the story. Most people would follow that voice. I would've followed that voice barefoot into Antarctica. It occurred to me that maybe they didn't cross the plains merely to survive. What if they crossed them to become.

When you strip us away from our sophistication and podcasts and ergonomic desk chairs, we remain creatures starving for meaning. We want our suffering to mean something and our lives to be part of a grander plan. We don’t just want meaning, we want to become someone different.

Back in the 1800s, people still carrying the physical evidence of ordinary lives suddenly found a religion offering transcendence. It is one of very few religions that did not emerge from marble cathedrals or polished theology departments. It evolved from dirt floor cabins, frontier exhaustion, folk magic, ecstatic visions, half-starved people, splintered hands, muddy boots, people speaking in tongues, and ordinary humans trying to find God in the chaos of being alive. Joseph Smith did not emerge from a culture of clean rationalism like some isolated oddball suddenly announcing gold plates to horrified Presbyterians. He was from a culture already saturated in supernatural expectation.

We must imagine the past was intellectually primitive only because we think technological advancement offers us existential wisdom. But frontier people experienced reality as enchanted in a way modern life has almost beaten out of us. A vision was not automatic pathology. It was part of reality. And then these people crossed the plains. From my perspective the plains were a sort of initiation that dismantled the old self, stripping down the ego to its frightful little wiring.

When describing Pioneers’ suffering it’s mostly in logistical terms, such as starvation, exhaustion, cholera, frostbite, and death. And yes, obviously those things matter enormously because bodies are real, feet blister, babies die, and grief physically alters humans, because the social structures that tell a person who they are simply end. I can imagine that status disappeared, predictability disappeared, possessions, routines, familiar heirarchies vanished mile after mile across land so vast. Pilgrims throughout our history know that to transform, it requires disorientation first.

But in our modern culture, we’re obsessed with comfort. It’s our unofficial state religion. Wellness is mostly comfort in linens drinking electrolytes from a forty dollar copper cup. And listen. I enjoy comfort immensely. I want soft blankets no bra and for nobody to text me “Can I ask you a quick question?” like the rest of civilization. But comfort like that rarely alters consciousness. Meaning does. And that’s why the pioneers were not merely trying to survive. I think many of them were trying to become spiritually real to themselves.

I’ve noticed our current culture likes to diagnose intense religious conviction as either manipulation or delusion and then congratulates itself for being more evolved while building identical psychological structures around politics, celebrity culture, wellness movements, and whatever man currently has a microphone. We do this constantly because we ache to participate in something larger, to transcend so badly we will manufacture it from almost anything available. The pioneers happened to build theirs around God… and chosen-ness is one helluva drug.

When we begin believing we’re accelerating toward apocalypse, or preparing the earth for divine intervention, or participating in gathering the elect, those beliefs alter the psyche. This is when blisters become the evidence and loss becomes sacred and endurance becomes your identity. Because pain that feels pointless crushes us, but pain that feels like it belongs to a story can carry us astonishing distances.

This could be why the pioneer story unsettles me when it is diluted to sentimental pageants and handcart reenactments. Because this friendly version doesn’t ask the question of what the pioneers probably understood all too well. What were they willing to become? So if you are a descendent, I’d suggest that your inheritance was far more than just a handcart, obedience, and faith. Your inheritance is hunger.

This week Utahns celebrate Pioneer Day. Whether or not you believe the theology that carried those wagons west almost feels beside the point to me now. Because every generation inherits the same hunger. I’ve never met a human who wasn’t looking for their frontier.

With Much Love and an Ice Pack,

Sarah Steed xx