As a Boy Scout in 1972, living in El Centro,CA., my troop retraced the small portion of the Mormon Battalion March in our sub-sea-level desert of the Imperial County. The feeling of reverent exhaustion that overcame our troop later focus our respect to dedicate a monument to their memory at the adjacent freeway rest area. Pioneers had sacrificed for the kingdom but, I think this church event tested their very patriotism. I like this quote from the lds.org website: (http://www.lds.org/library/
"Church President Heber J. Grant, whose own parents walked across those bitter plains, spoke of the episode more than 70 years later:
"When the Latter-day Saints were being driven from their homes . . . driven from the confines of the United States onto Mexican soil, the [U.S.] government called on Brigham Young for 500 men to help fight Mexico. Show to me, if you can, in all the history of the world another case of a people being expatriated, being driven from their own country, from their own lands which they had purchased . . . the last remnant of them crossing the Mississippi River in the dead of winter, on the ice, nine babies being born during the night of that terrible expulsion, with no shelter . . . going forth on their journey of a thousand miles in the wilderness, after having appealed to the president of their republic, who could only say: "Your cause is just, but we can do nothing for you" (see Endnote 1)—show me another people, I say, who under like circumstances would have furnished 500 men to fight their country's battles! Show me greater patriotism and loyalty to country than this! It can't be done."12
And yet it could not have possibly been loyalty to country that impelled many of the Mormon Battalion soldiers, wives and children. They walked half a continent. They blazed a road. They etched their names in history.
But this was a conquest of faith."
Reference: 12-Conference Report, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, October 1919, 33.
Richard & Leslie Pollock
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