Oh, Pioneers....

First off, if you're not from Utah, you need to know that pioneers are to Utah what cows are to Wisconsin... or so I'm told, having never been to Wisconsin. We just love our pioneers here, or at least we're supposed to. The truth is, I've discovered I have very complicated feelings about pioneers, and it's taken me a while to sort them out.

The good: I loved Little House On The Prairie. As a kid, I loved both the books and the t.v. show. As an adult, I still love the books, but cannot watch the t.v. show because it's so melodramatic. Still, I have a fondness for the Ingalls, to the point that I tried calling my cat "Half-Pint" once. She did not appreciate it.

The bad: All those pioneers stole their land from people who had been living there for generations. Well, sometimes the government stole it and then gave it to the pioneers, but still....and, when my loyalties are tested, I go with the tribes I love, not the one into which I was born......speaking of which...

The ugly: Here's the deal. What I really hate are Mormon pioneers. This is in spite of being a descendant of  them and only slightly connected to my ambivalence towards Mormonism in general. Really, the root of it all is a deep and scarring event in my childhood, namely having to play Pioneers with my mother's younger sisters. In this traumatic game, first I was informed that I would only have one dress--and maybe a second good one for church, but only maybe--for the whole trek from wherever (Ohio? Missouri? My Mormon PTSD amnesia has kicked in and I have no idea where we were fleeing from) to Zion. (For those of you who thought Zion was the Jewish homeland, you clearly have not lived in Utah. If you want to learn about the true Zion, I can arrange for a pair of missionaries to visit you, but I'd advise against it.) Anyway, even if I got a second dress for church, I would not, under any circumstances, ever have any jeans, shorts, or overalls to wear. Now, I was a girly girl, and even known to wear dresses to school some days, but every day?

It got worse. Next--and this is the news they knew would really destroy me--I was told I could only take one doll (and I had about three dozen, all of whom I loved equally) and that if there wasn't enough room in the wagon, that doll could be cast out and left on the plains. I don't remember if I cried. I think I might have been too horrified.

The next part of the game involved sitting on a bed, pretending it was a wagon bench, and singing hymns. Somehow my aunts were either not aware of the fact that my parents were heretics and had stopped going to church except when they felt they must...and even then they eventually realized all the people who said they "must" were wrong. But I digress. The result of this was that, aside from kids' church songs, I knew no hymns. I'd been in Sacrament meetings enough that I should have known hymns, but said meetings were so tense with all the things everyone was feeling, but not saying--mainly that my parents were heretics--I couldn't remember a single hymn. Of course, I was so traumatized by my doll facing the possibility of being cast out, that I wouldn't have been able to sing anyway.

In the game of Pioneers, if I registered the slightest complaint, I was reminded that I was lucky to be riding in the wagon....for I could instead be like our ancestor, Maria Ann, who at age ten and a half, not only walked across the plains, but pulled a handcart. My aunts spoke of Maria Ann with great reverence. Even my mom, before she became a heretic, had published a poem about Maria Ann. My first and last talk in Primary (Sunday School for Mormon kids) was reading that poem. And, while it was a fine poem, I really came to hate Maria Ann and all the obedience and piety she symbolized. It only now occurs to me that Maria Ann, age ten and a half, had absolutely no say in either pulling the handcart or making the trek. I mean, nowadays, you tell a kid that they're getting rid of all their clothes and toys--aside from one, which you might force them to cast out somewhere on the plains--and they're going to walk and pull a handcart from Ohio or Missouri or wherever until some dude named Brigham announces "This is the place,"--and that modern kid will turn around and call a child abuse hotline.

But back to the game, having been threatened with pulling the handcart, I would pretend to mumble hymn lyrics while secretly, and earnestly praying--for some tribe, be it the Shoshone, or Ute, or Paiute, or somebody to come massacre us. (Maybe they'd even spare me, realizing that I had been born to the wrong tribe, and they'd adopt me into the right one.) Sadly, that never happened, though sometimes we'd be called to dinner and my grandma's cooking generally lessened the pain from my ordeal, though at night, I would still lie in bed, looking at my beloved three dozen dolls and wondering which I would choose and how I would bear to leave the others, or even take the one, knowing she might be tossed aside.

I feel better having figured out the trauma at the heart of my Mormon pioneer hatred as well as a piece of my childhood insomnia. As for Maria Ann, I've decided to reinvent her. See, there's all kind of documented facts about her life because Mormons love documenting their ancestors, but I refuse to read it. I do know that she was married to a polygamist and later divorced him and lived in California. I don't know if she did that because polygamists were being arrested and a lot of couples got legal divorces and/or fled Utah. (In fact, this is why Mitt Romney's father was born in Mexico....they were hiding with the other polygamists.)

And, before my relatives start posting what really happened to Maria Ann, I don't want to know because my version is best. She turned thirty, realized she hated Utah, raged at her parents for making her drag that damn handcart across the plains, grieved the dolls she left behind, and decided to find her own tribe off in California. There, she had passionate affairs with brown-skinned men, but did not let them stay the night. She managed her own money, spent as much of it as she wanted on dolls, ate nothing but desserts, swore loudly and profanely to a God who loved her for her wildness and disrespect, and she lived happily ever after.

*Apparently, Maria Ann did not marry a polygamist, but a man who later deserted her, leaving her with a houseful of kids, and remarried. And I'm not sure about California. Doesn't matter. My version is still better.