The first thanksgiving in the Salt Lake Valley was not in November. It wasn't even in the fall of the year.
It was observed 150 years ago this month, on Aug. 10, 1848, and it was indeed an occasion for gratitude.The Pioneers had been in the valley under the leadership of President Brigham Young just over a year. The previous year they had survived a shortened growing season resulting from their late entrance into the valley in July. They had endured the first winter in their new home.
To ward off starvation, they had learned from the Indians how to forage for such edible plants as sego lilly roots, thistle greens and roots, and wild berries. Wild game also supplemented their diet.
They had overcome spring frosts to get crops in the ground and have them germinate in time for a harvest. Then, through prayer and divine intervention, they had been delivered from an immense infestation of crickets in what has become widely known as "the miracle of the gulls."
Now it was time to celebrate.
"Rather than commemorate their arrival in the valley the year before (most had come at different times), they found abundant cause to celebrate their new harvests," wrote Richard E. Bennett in his book published last year, We'll Find the Place - The Mormon Exodus, 1846-1848.
"To mark the occasion, the 10th of August was selected as a day of thanksgiving, a day `to celebrate the first harvest raised in the valley with songs of praise and thanksgiving.' "
The symbol of their joy was one that had rallied them during their arduous trek across the plains from Winter Quarters the year before, the Liberty Pole. In Council Bluffs, Iowa, and again at the Elkhorn River in Nebraska, they had erected a 51-foot pole with a white flag at the top, emblematic of their escape from oppression and into freedom.
Now, in the valley, such a pole became a symbol of their initial success in obtaining the place God had prepared for them.
The celebration began at 9 a.m. at the bowery on the block where the Salt Lake Temple was to be constructed. A new Liberty Pole was raised, a white flag was hoisted to the top as cannons were fired and the people shouted, "Hosanna to God and the Lamb forever and ever, Amen."
Below the white banner, in turn were raised a bundle each of wheat, barley, oats and corn.
Parley P. Pratt, whose account of the occasion is among the most thorough, wrote: "There was a prayer and thanksgiving, congratulations, songs, speeches, music, dancing, smiling faces and merry hearts. In short, it was a great day with the people of these valleys, and long to be remembered by those who had suffered and waited anxiously for the results of a first effort to redeem the interior deserts of America, and to make her hitherto unknown solitudes `blossom as the rose.' " (Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt, p. 335.)
Elder Pratt was among the speakers; so was Elder John Taylor, his fellow member of the Quorum of the Twelve.
Absent from the celebration was President Brigham Young and Church leaders traveling with him. They would not return from Kanesville, Iowa, where most of the Saints were still living, until September.
The harvest dinner, Elder Pratt recounted later, included bread, beef, butter, cheese, cakes, pastry, green corn, melons "and almost every variety of vegetables." (Pratt, Autobiography, p. 335.)
Dinner lasted until 2 p.m., followed by band music, dancing, "prayers and preaching," famous pioneer midwife Patty Sessions noted in her journal.
Elder Pratt, in fact, composed special lyrics for the occasion, to be sung to the tune of "How Firm a Foundation." The chorus reads:
Let us join in the dance, let us join in the song,
To the Jehovah the praises belong;
All honor all glory we render to thee
Thy cause is triumphant, thy people are free.
The verses recount the Saints' struggle to be free of persecution and oppression. And the last verse exults in the refuge they had found in their mountain home:
The storms of commotion distress every realm
And dire revolutions the nations o'erwhelm;
Tho Babylon trembles and thrones cast down be,
Yet here in the mountains the righteous are free.
(Journal of Levi Jackman, Aug. 10, 1848, quoted in Bennett, We'll Find the Place.)
It is striking how closely this first thanksgiving of the Latter-day Saints in the Salt Lake Valley parallels the first thanksgiving in the New World observed by the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock in 1621. Both groups had come to a new home to escape religious persecution; both had battled the elements in an effort to provide their first harvest; both had received help from Native Americans.
