President Gordon B. Hinckley capped and summarized several months and an intense week of pioneer sesquicentennial celebration July 26 by dedicating a new Memorial Garden near the base of Ensign Peak in Salt Lake City.
The dedication occurred 150 years to the day since Brigham Young and eight other Church leaders ascended the cone-shaped knoll north of what today is the downtown area. From that vantage point they surveyed the valley and in a figurative sense raised "an ensign to the nations," in accordance with the prophecy in Isa. 11:12. In so doing, they signified their new Rocky Mountain settlement as a place of gathering for modern Israel, and the base from which Zion would expand to fill the earth.Ensign Peak Memorial Garden was constructed by the Church to complement a nature park completed last year in a partnership effort between a civic group and the city. Dedicated a year ago by President Hinckley, the park includes a plaza at the base of the peak, informational panels, an improved trail to the peak, and refurbishment of a monument on the peak. (See Aug. 3, 1996 Church News.)
The new garden is located across the street from the plaza on property adjacent to the Ensign Peak Ward meetinghouse. It features benches, trees, a plaza and plaques giving the history and scriptural significance of the peak and telling of the pioneers who established the city and built the Salt Lake Temple.
In addition to President Hinckley, President Boyd K. Packer, acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve, spoke at the garden dedication, as did Gov. Michael O. Leavitt of Utah. Elder M. Russell Ballard of the Quorum of the Twelve, chairman of the Pioneer Sesquicentennial Committee, conducted the program. In attendance were other apostles, the Presiding Bishopric of the Church, and other General Authorities. Presiding Bishop H. David Burton offered the invocation.
In an overwhelmingly colorful display, youth from the Salt Lake, Salt Lake Parleys and Salt Lake Monument Park stakes carried flags of many nations from the meeting ground to the peak, while the audience sang "High on the Mountain Top," the familiar hymn written with Ensign Peak in mind.
Multi-colored balloons were released as President Hinckley cut the ceremonial ribbon opening the garden. Included were 150 purple balloons, representing 150 years of history, 148 green ones representing the pioneers in the vanguard party, and nine yellow ones representing the nine men who ascended the peak and waved a yellow bandanna attached to Willard Richards' cane as an ensign to the nations.
"This has been a most remarkable season, this great sesquicentennial celebration," President Hinckley declared. "I don't know that we've ever had anything quite to equal it in all of the history of the Church."
Essentially, the memorial garden dedication brings the celebration to a close, he said. "There will be other events through the year, since this is the great sesquicentennial year, but essentially it will all be over tonight. Brother Ballard we're going to put to bed for about a week and get him rested up, then put him to work on something else."
The celebration has put the LDS people in remembrance of their legacy and inheritance, he said. "It should have made us stand a little taller, my brothers and sisters, as those who come from a great people who put the cause in which they believed above all other considerations, even the consideration of life itself. . . . There was nothing more precious to them than this thing for which they had joined the Church. And when they committed themselves to membership they committed themselves to whatever might follow. How thankful we ought to be! What a marvelous thing it is to be the partakers of a great inheritance, to have behind us those who are strong and able men and women of vision and industry and great capacity and faith and devotion and loyalty to the cause in which they believed."
Noting that the celebration has awakened in people a consciousness of their forebears, he added, drawing chuckles from the audience: "I think there has been more family history dug out than ever before. Everybody wants to claim relationship to somebody who came across the plains."
That is all right, he said, but added: "Whether your forebears came across the plains or whether you were baptized only yesterday, all of us are the partakers of that marvelous legacy, my brothers and sisters. It's a thing that concerns the entire Church. From the very start, we've all been in this great cause together. This has had a solidifying effect, and I'm grateful for that. My heart has been touched, my vision has been increased, my faith has been strengthened by what I've seen."
The prophet reminisced about the dedications of landmarks along the Pioneer Trail in which he has been involved. "I hope I won't sound egotistical," he said. "It isn't Gordon Hinckley, it's the office, but there's quite a tale of them."
He began with Nauvoo, and mentioned dedicating the temple block after the Church obtained title to it; the old cemetery where many LDS people are buried, including children who died of diseases that today can be quickly cured; restored historic buildings; and last year, the park along Parley Street leading to the ferry landing where the Saints began their exodus and westward trek.
"It was there that I met Gov. [James] Edgar," he said, referring to last year's dedication, "And I just can't get over the fact that the governor of the state of Illinois came from Springfield over to Nauvoo to be with us on that occasion. And now he has come out here as the guest of Gov. Leavitt and participated with us here [for Pioneer Sesquicentennial activities in Utah]."
President Hinckley said it is remarkable that this governor, who is friendly to the Church, walks in the shoes of Gov. Thomas Ford, who was not sympathetic or helpful to the cause of the Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo in the 1840s. "I could tell you a lot about Tom Ford," he said. "I have studied in some depth the life of Gov. Ford and it's a most tragic and sorrowful picture."
In Iowa, President Hinckley recalled, he dedicated the recreated log tabernacle at Kanesville in which Brigham Young was sustained as president of the Church when he returned there in December 1847 from the Salt Lake Valley.
In Nebraska, President Hinckley related, he dedicated the Mormon Trail Center at Winter Quarters.
Regarding Wyoming sites, he told of the Church's acquisition of the Sun Ranch, calling it "miraculous." He said it gave the Church access to the federal land that includes Martin's Cove, where he dedicated a monument built by the Riverton Wyoming Stake that honors the members of the ill-fated Martin Handcart Company. He spoke of dedicating another monument constructed by the Riverton Stake at the summit of Rocky Ridge, built to honor the members of the Willie Handcart Company, who also suffered greatly.
"We dedicated the Rock Creek burial ground a year ago," he said. "It is hallowed and sacred ground. I first visited that place in 1939 when I came west and photographed the trail along the way. Thirteen people died there in a single night, among them, little Bodil Mortinsen, a 9-year-old Danish girl who went out to gather brush for a fire and came back and put her arm on a wagon wheel with the other arm holding the brush, and there she froze to death."
President Hinckley spoke of this year's dedication at Simpson's Hollow, the site where Lot Smith and 44 men delayed the entrance of the U.S. Army into the Salt Lake Valley "to keep them out there in Wyoming through the winter so that we could work out some kind of reconciliation, which came to pass through the graces of Col. Thomas L. Kane."
In Utah, he said, he has re-dedicated This Is the Place Monument, Ensign Peak trail and the Brigham Young Historic Park at Main Street and North Temple. "And now tonight we will dedicate the Ensign Peak Memorial Garden. For me, it has been an odyssey for which I will always feel grateful, all the way from Nauvoo to here, dedicating landmarks along the way. I can't say enough of appreciation, my brothers and sisters, for those who have gone before, and who have left an inheritance for each of us. None of us can ever repay them. We can make an effort to do so by the lives we live, by the service we render, by our faithfulness as members of the Church they loved, and by our diligence and loyalty in doing that which the Lord would have us do."
He said the pioneers entered the valley on a Saturday and worshipped on Sunday, thanking the Lord for a safe arrival. "And then on Monday, they decided they would do a little exploring. . . . Nine of them came here to this peak, which Brigham Young said Joseph Smith had seen in vision and which he [Brigham] immediately recognized. They climbed that and unfurled their banner as an ensign to the nations. . . . God be thanked for that which they dreamed as they stood here. Now, we are 10 million strong. We're in more than 160 nations represented by the flags which you've seen here tonight. God help us to go forward in a way that is symbolic of their great undertaking."
President Packer told of being with his family the previous Tuesday as they ascended Independence Rock in Wyoming, then visited Martin's Cove, Rock Creek and Rocky Ridge.
"Brother [James E.] Faust had said before we left that your life will never be the same after having been to Rocky Ridge, and so it is. You'd have to be there to see the challenge, the impossibility of what [the handcart pioneers] did and how they did it."
He told of the hardships faced by his great-grandmother who was in a handcart company. Reading from her journal, he recounted that as the company was journeying, a considerable military force was marching on the other side of the Platte River. Based upon false reports, they had been sent to quell a supposed rebellion among the Latter-day Saint people. "And we could see them and their weapons shining in the sun," he read from the journal.
President Packer commented: "As they marched along the one side of the river singing, `We'll find the place . . . where none shall come to hurt or make afraid,' on the other side, a fourth of the standing army of the United States was heading west to do just that. They [the pioneers] walked with faith in every footstep."
From his family's excursion to the historic sites, President Packer remarked, they had been impressed "that before Ensign Peak was Rocky Ridge. And you would have to be there and stand on Rocky Ridge to fully understand what they did. In the Old Testament, there is the expression, `I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.' [Psalm 121:1] And I suppose that's what we are doing now, looking unto the hills in order to draw strength."
He then recited the words to the hymn, "For the Strength of the Hills," (Hymns, No. 35) including the verse: "We are watchers of a beacon whose light must never die; We are guardians of an altar 'Midst the silence of the sky. Here the rocks yield founts of courage, Struck forth as by thy rod; For the strength of the hills we bless thee, Our God, our fathers' God."
