Author: Mike Ericksen
Date: 2013
Publisher: Empath
ISBN: 978-0-9883604-3-3
Length: 375 e-pages
Illustrations: black-and-white reproductions of
old photographs
Quote: “Thousands of similar Mormon pioneers, un-noted
and unsung, quietly slipped into the amalgam that became our modern world. In
grateful memory to all of them and especially to my own ancestors, I have
chosen to recall this history and to put their unsung stories, to the best of
my ability, to life and to song.”
Many of the first European immigrants to North
America were “heretical” Christians. Disagreement with the organized churches
in which they’d grown up, however slight, made them feel unwelcome if they went
to church and subjected them to legal penalties if they stayed home. They
looked for new places to organize churches of their own, some of which were
equally oppressive to new dissenters. The Revolution and the novelty of forming
an independent nation distracted a generation from the minutiae of their faith
in the late eighteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, a “Great
Revival” of renewed dedication to religious faith, often characterized by
fanatical adherence to picky little rules, swept over the continent. Two
substantial, though unconnected, new schools of Christian thought formed in the
1840s, when religiosity had been whipped into a real froth by William Miller’s
reported discovery that the Bible foretold that our world would end in 1844. Protestants
who agreed with Miller up to the point of the world ending in 1844 either
became influential in their denominations (some denominations that had not
preached a literal Second Advent in 1830 have preached that doctrine since
1840) or formed a new denomination, led by Bible students from Baptist and
Methodist churches, called Seventh-Day Adventists. Many Christians who
disagreed with Miller followed a new “prophet,” Joseph Smith, whose new vision
led him to write—he said, transcribe—a new book, the Book of Mormon, which his
followers added to the Bible. They called themselves the Latter-Day Saints but
have usually been called by the shorter name, Mormons.
Disambiguation has remained an important task for
anyone talking about these two religious groups. The S.D.A. are well inside the
Protestant tradition; the L.D.S. regard themselves as a fourth branch of
Christianity, distinct from Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Christians. They
were reviled and persecuted for this perceived arrogance, and even more when
desperation motivated church leaders to sanction polygamous marriages. Their
persecution consisted in fact of being told to leave one place after another.
They feared, as they packed up and moved, that eventually other Christians
would come after them with swords and guns. Their tradition still includes a
fair amount of melodrama based on those understandable fears.
From the early hard times of the church come the
events novelized as Upon Destiny’s Song.
Ericksen wasn’t always, he tells us, as fascinated by genealogy as some Mormons
are. (In fact this church’s contributions to the specifics of American history
have been vast; if your genealogy has not yet been printed in a book and you
want to start compiling that book, you’ll probably be referred to the Mormons
for leads on your departed ancestors.) What he knew about his ancestors was
that they came from Denmark and they’d been dead a long time. Then as a young
musician he got involved in writing songs for an historical pageant about
events in which his ancestors had participated. Trying to imagine a
great-great-grandfather who died on the way to Utah and the daughter who became
Erickson’s great-grandmother, he soon found himself composing a whole musical
about their story.
It was a real Western story—one of many. Denmark
was not a terribly poor country and Ole Madsen was not a terribly poor man. Ane
Marie, whose name was originally Olesdatter but who was told that in the United
States it had to be Madsen, didn’t have time for much adolescent rebellion
against Papa and his adoption of a new religion; when they came to North
America her energy was taken up by getting the rest of the family across the
Rocky Mountains, in winter.
The historical fact is that many Mormons were
persuaded to cross the Rockies pushing and pulling “hand carts” instead of
covered wagons. The carts were cheaper, and tended to fall apart along the way.
People left Iowa or Nebraska singing some version or other of songs like “Walk
Along with Your Hand Cart.” If lucky they stumbled into Utah with the boots on
their feet, the coats and blankets on their backs, and not much else—usually
without the carts, which had contained changes of clothes, the provisions
they’d eaten along the way, and one or two of each person’s most prized
possessions, often Bibles or other books, family pictures or letters, and
similar souvenirs. Some families remembered what their ancestors had tried to
bring to Utah and lost. For Marie Madsen it was a songbook; Papa had brought
the Bible.
If you’re drawn to stories of “How the West Was
Won,” less by shoot-outs than by hard work, the survival of the fittest and the
loss of the majority, you’ll probably like Upon
Destiny’s Song.
Two things some readers might not like:
1. Though novelized in the sense that conversation
and characterization have been added to the story, Marie’s story is told as it
happened, not reshaped for Hollywood. In fact her big adventure may have been
complicated by, or may have delayed, puberty—her great-grandson didn’t ask—and
she had time to recover from it before she met her husband. When her adventure
story ends we know that she’s going to be married and become a great-grandmother;
that happens “offstage.”
2. The
historical facts of the story are an intense read.
If you walk for exercise it can be easy to
underestimate the hardships of the “trail” stories in American history. A
healthy adult can walk thirty miles in a day. Within the twelve hours before
they shut down the fundraising marathons and carry the stragglers in, most of
us could cover 27 miles. Then we could spend the next day mostly in bed, in our
climate-controlled homes, sipping cool refreshing drinks and feeling pleased
with ourselves. The long “trail” travels of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries were very different. People didn’t have to go thirty miles every day;
they could adjust the pace to allow children and small animals to keep up, but
then they’d still be hiking when the heat of summer or the chill of winter or
the plagues of vermin complicated things. All true stories of these travels,
even the success stories like Lewis and Clark’s, are far outside anybody’s
comfort zone.
The Mormons who left Iowa and Nebraska singing,
with cheerful sarcasm, that “some must push and some must pull, as we go
merrily up the hills” with their hand carts, stumbled into Utah with the words
“keep moving or die” on endless loops in their minds. Marie walked past where
the Donner Party had camped. Her own party were motivated not to eat one
another’s frozen bodies because, cold as it was, dysentery managed to attack
them. People saw that their fingers and toes had frozen, knew these extremities
would only fall off, and gnawed on their own dead fingers. Supply wagons came
out from Utah to feed the hand cart contingent and carry the weakest on to Salt
Lake City, and found many too weak to keep food down or to survive the ride
back to town; people were motivated to keep walking, if they could, rather than
ride in a pile of people dying of dysentery in a supply wagon.
Exactly how Marie Madsen came to Utah, Ericksen
admits, has been lost to history. For Mormon pageant purposes he has her
collapsing gratefully among Brigham Young’s household, about which enough facts
were recorded to allow a reasonably accurate reenactment. Maybe she did stay
with Brigham Young’s family, Ericksen says in an afternote—some of the hand
cart contingent really did—and maybe she didn’t. The survivors from the hand
cart parties straggled into Salt Lake City by ones, twos, and threes and were
fed and warmed wherever people had spare beds. And though they were treated as
“brethren” for the rest of the winter, they were expected to pay those who had
taken them in, when they went back to work. (Mormons have been known to argue
that women shouldn’t have to work outside the home, because Mormon communities
depended on women’s work from home.
Ericksen portrays Mrs. Young carrying her crocheting as she goes to meet
guests; as a guest or foster daughter in such a family Marie would have been
sewing or knitting or whatever-she-did-ing as soon as her frostbitten hands could
hold a needle. That was where all those Victorian layers of clothes came from.
Mormon women were not told that their duty was to be ornamental.)
From research, too, come the tidbits of Danish
lore and language. (Readers are unlikely to forget what becomes of Marie’s
songbook. She did not bring it to Utah and it down to her descendants.) I like
them, though; since early childhood I’ve always found the easiest way to learn
vocabulary words to be finding the words used and explained in a story, and so
no doubt will young readers who may want to learn Danish as part of their
family heritage.
The historical fact that the whole party were
Victorian church members keeps the
story wholesome. The hardships and deaths keep it from seeming like a
children’s story, but there’s no sex (sometimes Marie hears of someone getting
married or having a baby) and no real violence. Danish audiences who didn’t
find a speaker credible, we’re told, liked to throw rotten food at him. Frantic
Mormons, screaming at loved ones to “keep moving or die,” might hit them.
Nobody intends to do anyone any real harm. Nevertheless, perhaps because there
are no disposable characters brought into the story just for other characters
to murder, I felt more horror of the effects of violent weather (which was
real) than I usually feel of the effects of violent characters (who are usually
fictional).
If you buy the book, rather than getting a free
review copy, you should get a recorded album of several new songs inspired by
Ole, Marie, and Marie’s mother Ane. (I’d prefer an album of the old songs they
actually sang; my obsession is not necessarily yours.) Additional supplemental
material includes discussion questions, and some short stories about other
events in the Madsen family history outside the time span of the main novel.
Ericksen tells us that Mormons consider genealogy
very important, and people used to scold him for not completing his family’s
records. I can relate to the unenlightened, uninterested younger Ericksen at
the beginning of the story. I had three grandparents whose genealogy was
considered noteworthy enough that I grew up with the books that have been
written about them, from simple lists of who married and gave birth to whom, to
biographies and even fiction about some individual ancestors. The fourth one,
well, came from Tennessee and married “up.” Her father was White; her mother
was “an Indian,” not positively identifiable as Cherokee. In Virginia their
marriage was legal because people like that great-grandmother had been ruled
legally White. There they chose to let matters rest and there I’ve always felt
inclined to let any other secrets they had rest in peace, along with them. And
if the other three grandparents’ genealogy hadn’t been published I would
probably have let their stories die, too.
Which would have been a pity. They were
interesting people. Their stories are scattered about this web site. I won’t
bother retyping those stories here but will merely say that most people who
look up their ancestors’ stories find some lively ones. Everybody eventually
comes to an ancestor or two who need to be...well, more than ten generations
past, because I still think common sense and decency entered the family line
when the Earl’s grandson came to the Carolina coast, probably from his Italian
mother’s side because they certainly didn’t come from his English...anyway,
completely decomposed before one cares to claim any relation to them. Everybody
also comes to some ancestors who may have been obscure or even poor, but who
are remembered for something that was interesting and even heroic, like
crossing the Rocky Mountains with a hand cart.
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