Arthur Parker: Mormon Folklore and the Stabilization of the West

On July 2, 1856, Arthur Parker got lost from his family. The Parkers were Mormon pioneers. After conversion to the Mormon Church, they sailed from England on the "Enoch Train". In America, they joined the Daniel D. McArthur handcart company. Twenty-two days into the journey, Arthur Parker lay down beside the trail and fell asleep. His parents, further up the train, did not realize he was missing until nightfall. His father went back to search for Arthur, discovering him eventually at a woodsman's home.

The loss and search for Arthur Parker is recorded in two separate journals: the journal of fellow pioneer Archer Walters and the official Company journal. Archer Walters wrote:

July 2nd. Brother Parker's little boy, age six, was lost. The father went back to hunt him.

July 5th. Brother Parker brings into camp his little boy that had been lost. Great joy through the camp. The mother's joy I can not describe (Hafen, 61).

The official journal reads:

July 2nd. We remained in camp untill [sic] fifty past three p.m. owing to Brother McArthur's company having lost a boy by the way . . . (Hafen, 203).

Over the past hundred years, this small tale of family worry has expanded to include: an explanation of how the boy was lost; instructions from the mother, Ann, to her husband; the use of a bright red shawl as a signal; descriptions of the weather; the location of Arthur when found and the reunion. Many of these details have been passed down through the family; others have been added through retellings. Arthur's Parker's adventure has entered Mormon culture to become one of their many folktales of pioneer trials.

Folk history, says William A. Wilson, is "generated by the folk . . . constantly re-created . . . in response to their current needs and concerns, reflective of what is most important to them" ("Mormon Americana," 440). Arthur Parker's tale has been re-created as a family history; a religious principle, a source of ancestral faith, and a symbol of "pioneering" in our modern day. It is truly Western; it grows out of not just Western history but out of a journey through the Western landscape. In Arthur Parker's tale, Mormon ideas and ideals are inscribed upon the West, ideas and ideals that also transcend it.

The tale has at least three major forms: the initial journal entries, the family version and a mixture of the two. The journal entries are by necessity sparse. There is no story, simply a record of events. It is notable that the company entry does not even mention the boy's successful return. The emotional impact of the rescue is reserved for the individual diarist--Archer Walters--rather than the more businesslike company recorder.

In the 1950s, Camilla Woodbury Judd, daughter of Arthur Parker's sister, Martha Alice, wrote an expanded version of the tale which appeared in Angus Cannon Woodbury's book History of the Jeremiah Woodbury Family. Camilla, reputed in the family to have been a soulful and dramatic person, also wrote a poem of the event. Camilla's narrative of Arthur Parker's loss includes howling wolves, a "bright, wool shawl" (which appears in every subsequent version), a hardhearted company captain, and a fainting mother. A slightly different rendering of Camilla's narrative was also printed in Treasures of Pioneer History; Treasures comprised thirty-two volumes published over a five year period by the Daughters of the American Pioneers.

The publications of History and Treasures coincided with two separate events: the work of folklorists Alma and Austin Fife and the nationwide growth of regional pride. Alma and Austin Fife are pinpointed as the founders of research into Mormon folklore, a discipline that has expanded greatly over the past fifty years. Although scholars before and at the time had done work in this area, the Fifes expanded the field, both through their collection (now known as the Fife Folklore Archive) and their ground-breaking book Saints of Sage and Saddle. The Fifes also brought a serious, scholarly and humanist attitude to their research. Nowadays, the Fifes' writings comes across as too aggressively "enlightened." The Fifes had been raised as Utah Mormons but were no longer active when they began their work. Their insistence that this made them automatically objective comes across as special pleading to current scholars. Nevertheless, their work proved invaluable to the discipline.

At the same time, and interrelated, regions through the United States were experiencing a boost of regional pride. Beginning in the Jazz Era, regionalists explored "what they perceived to be in the bedrock of America, its civic traditions, its folk cultures, its very landscapes" (Dorman, 24). For many people, this bedrock included family stories. Mormonism, which stresses genealogical ties as part of its theology, has always encouraged the preservation of such stories, leading to the publication of family histories like Angus Woodbury's.

Family stories place the writers, and their kin, in time and in place. They stabilize the family network which to Mormons is all-important. They give significance, sometimes special significance, to family accomplishments. They create a heritage, an inheritance: I am the person I am because of my ancestors; I can be proud of (or, if one prefers the Jerry Springer approach, disgusted by) my forebears. Whatever I feel in response, these stories help me make sense of my life.

Consequently, families have photos, reunions, traditions, stories, anecdotes, place and time-centered tales that give order to the past. They are not lies. A better word might be "myth," not in the common use of the word ("a false tale" or "a story found in a book") but in the literary sense of the word. J.R.R. Tolkien compares myth and fairytales to a soup in which events are boiled "for a long time, together with many other older figures and devices, of mythology and Faërie, and even some other stray bones as history" (28-29). Myth often captures the psychological and emotional impact of an incident; because of this, myth can be truer than a simple notation: "Dog died on this day." By re-invoking and creating spiritual, emotional or intellectual responses, it can define the past and thus stabilize one's current experience. This process of stabilization moves outwards from the family to society at large. To a degree, history is an exercise in popular culture; society collectively agrees (or collectively disagrees) on the roadmap of its local, regional, national, even international past. As individual stories gain credence, society gains ballast.

Camilla Judd's narrative of Arthur Parker's adventure has followed this movement from family story to communal memory. In his 1974 speech "Where Much Is Given, Much Is Required," Apostle Boyd K. Packer quotes from Archer Walters' diary, then somewhat disingenuously from "one of the diaries." "One of the diaries" is Camilla's rendition as found in Treasures. However disingenuous, Camilla's narrative is crucial since it supplies the essential part of the story:

Ann Parker pinned a bright wool shawl about the thin shoulders of her beloved husband and sent him back on the trail to search again for their child. Should he find him dead, he could wrap him in the shawl; if he was found alive, the shawl could be a flag to signal her (77).

It is likely that this exchange between husband and wife actually did occur. Camilla would have heard the story from her mother, Mary Alice Parker, sister of Arthur Parker. In fact, it is only in recent years that the term "one of the diaries" has been replaced by the less contestable "historical sources" when speakers and writers relay Arthur Parker's tale. Over the past ten years, President Hinckley, head of the Mormon church, has promoted more factual approaches to Church history. In the 1980s, the Church was embarrassed by the Mark Hoffman forgeries, letters purporting to tie Joseph Smith more closely to magical practices; the letters were purchased by the Church out of self-protection. Mormon historians such as Richard Bushman and Leonard Arrington as well as non-LDS scholars of Mormonism encouraged the Church to let its history speak for itself. Under Hinckley's leadership, the Church historical sites have been updated historically and corrected (when wrong). In Palmyra, New York, for instance, the Smith farmhouse has been restored to its true 1825 appearance, and a log cabin, in which the Smith family lived for nine years before the farmhouse, has been constructed.

Subsequently, the tale of Arthur Parker in recent publications has appeared as a straight-forward narrative with no supernatural motifs. Yet, the incident of the bright shawl (which may, after all, be true) remains. The Church is not after all interested only in factual accuracy but in the religious, emotional and moral meaning of its history. In 1992, Merrill J. Bateman, a member of the Seventy, gave a speech at General Conference entitled "Coming Unto Christ by Searching the Scriptures." Elder Bateman used the story of Arthur Parker to encourage diligent reading of holy writ: "We need to search the scriptures with the same vigor that Robert hunted for his son and with the consistency of the mother searching the horizon if we expect to hear his voice and know his words." As well as scripture reading, Arthur Parker's story has been used to promote personal sacrifice, gratitude, missionary work and courage: religious principles which pertain to the Mormon culture at large, not just a specific family or group within Mormonism.

This is, according to William Wilson, the purpose of folklore. Wilson, the current pre-eminent Mormon folklorist, is considered to be the Fifes' successor in the field. In his article "Folklore, a Mirror for What? Reflections of a Mormon Folklorist," Wilson sets forth the differing approaches as to what comprises folklore: "[F]olklorists generally have considered [what is] memorable in religious folklore--that is . . . dramatic tales of the supernatural –rather than . . . the quiet lives of committed service that I knew really lay at the heart of the Mormon experience" (16). Wilson argues that "experiences are socially constructed and . . . it might therefore be a mistake to exclude [individual, everyday events] from folkloristic analysis" (18).

Wilson is proscribing a new approach to folklore. In his thesis Representing Culture: Reflexivity and Mormon Folklore Scholarship, David Allred calls this approach "pragmatic reflexivity." He defines pragmatic reflexivity as:

[A] rhetoric of ethnography [which] would allow folklorists and anthropologists to study, write about, and represent a culture without objectifying, marginalizing, and totalizing the people who become ethnographic subjects . . . and give a voice to everyone involved in the project, the researcher and the researched (16).

In applying pragmatic reflexivity, a folklorist would examine not just the stories that involve Mormons or Mormon theology, but the stories Mormons themselves "choose to talk about" (Wilson, 19).

And what Mormons choose to talk about is pioneer courage. Over the past thirty years, church magazines have printed over 400 articles about pioneers, their courage and sacrifice. The historical pioneer journey has become a symbolic act of faith, "faith that [God] would once again lead His people to the promised land, faith that they would not falter or fall" ("Faith in Every Footstep: The Epic Pioneer Journey"), a faith that can be transcribed onto the entire Mormon experience, from conversion to day-to-day living. Member of the First Presidency, James E. Faust, captured this approach in his 1997 speech "Pioneers of the Future":

We are concluding a marvelous year celebrating the struggles and heroism of the pioneers who arrived in the Salt Lake Valley 150 years ago . . . Now [President Gordon B. Hinckley] is directing us to become pioneers of the future with all its exciting opportunities. Faith in every future footstep will fulfill [his] prophetic vision concerning the glorious destiny of this Church.

The pioneer story of Arthur Parker tenders a successful combination of struggles, heroism and faith. It satisfies both forms of folktale, containing a dramatic center and an intimate family setting. Arthur Parker and his parents encapsulate the endurance of the ordinary pioneer, an aspect of Western emigration that is promoted by the Church in an effort to reach its members and stabilize its history.

The American West poses an especially challenging job of stabilization. The West's history is a complicated mass of events: emigration, mining, the Gold Rush, women's movements and the cult of domesticity, the saloon, violence, Catholicism, the treatment of Native Americans, separate Native American groups and their dealings with the U.S. Government, the growth of National Parks, Custer, Buffalo Bill, the border areas, immigration laws, Western films, artists such as Frederick Remington and Georgia O'Keefe, the ideologies of National Progress and environmentalism--multiple events and individuals and beliefs occurring consecutively and concurrently. Each may be interrelated to others or stand lone and distinct. In order to make sense of what took place in the West, participants and onlookers impress story onto the landscape. When religious stories are involved, the region becomes, as Richard C. Poulsen describes it, "the landscape of belief" (106).

This "landscape of belief" is captured effectively in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. For Father Latour, the Southwestern landscape of New Mexico becomes a mirror of his faith. His cathedral is constructed to meld with the environment. A mystical feeling pervades the descriptions of red earth, caverns, antediluvian rock, canyons and ravines. At the end of his life, Father Latour returns to New Mexico, rather than remain in the "society of learned men" in Europe, because only in New Mexico can he breath air "soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!" (273). Belief and region are linked.

Likewise, for Mormons, the journey over a particular landscape to a particular area inculcated that landscape and area with religious significance. The West was for Mormons, "Deseret," a Book of Mormon word meaning "honey bee." The symbol for Utah is still the beehive. A hymn penned by Eliza R. Snow, wife of both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, describes "our lovely Deseret" as a place where "the Saints of God have met" and where children will be instructed to "be beautiful and strong" as well as "affable and kind" and loving of God. (Hymns, "In Our Lovely Deseret"). Deseret, like any Promised Land, can only be reached through a stint in the wilderness. Troubles and tribulations must be endured. "We came here," Brigham Young proclaimed, "I often say, though to the ears of some the expression may sound rather rude, naked and barefoot, and comparatively this is true" (Teachings of Brigham Young, 106). "It was impossible for any person to live here," he stated, no doubt from grim experience, "unless he labored hard and battled and fought against the elements " (107).

Arthur Parker's story illustrates this labor "against the elements," specifically Western elements. "All night," Camilla wrote, "they heard the wolves howling through the forest" (77). Later, these wolves will not attack little Arthur since "God had heard the prayers of His people" (77). In his 1974 speech, Boyd K. Packer related, "The company made camp in the face of a sudden thunderstorm," and Merrill Bateman spoke of Robert Parker searching every "thicket, every clump of trees and gully or wash" while Susan Easton Black gives us the quintessential Western image: "Ann saw the bright red shawl whirling as a flag in the sunset." The landscape provides the hardships that tested and proved these latter-day Children of Israel. By strengthening and sanctifying the Saints, the landscape of the West became holy, much as it did for Father Latour.

Although the most important landscape in the Mormon story is the West, at the end of the 19th century President Joseph F. Smith turned to New England and New York as a new source of Mormon "peculiarism" after the abandonment of polygamy. In New England could be found Joseph Smith's birthplace; in New York, the Sacred Grove (supposed location of the First Vision) and the Smith family homestead. The Book of Mormon Hill Cumorah Pageant in Palmyra, New York began in 1917. In her book The Politics of American Religious Identity, Kathleen Flake comments on such Church sites, explaining "the collective memorials . . . continue to anchor it during the current period of explosive international growth" (169).

In more recent years, the Church has reanchored itself to the places of its persecution—Nauvoo and Missouri—and to the pioneer movement. Such refocusing, at the end of the 20th century, could be carried out in relative calm. The places have become spiritual markers, rather than historical memories, invoking thoughts of sacrifice and sorrow rather than anger and offense. In a similar hopeful vein, the Mountain Meadows Association, comprising members from both sides of the massacre, collaborated with the Church in 1999 to erect a new marker in Southern Utah.

Currently, the Church has a string of sites across the United States starting at Joseph Smith's birthplace in Royalton, Vermont. In a westward moving pilgrimage, the latter-day member can visit Church sites at Palmyra, New York; Kirtland, Ohio; Nauvoo, Illinois; Winter Quarters in Iowa and the Mormon Handcart Visitors Center in Alcova, Wyoming. The history of Western Mormon emigration has been stabilized into a Turnerian-like journey of faith-inspiring stories. It has become a metaphor than can be translated across time and cultures.

Since Mormonism is now an international religion, a metaphor of this type has tremendous importance. The Mormon pioneers must be examples to a people far removed not only from 19th century America but from America itself. The success of Arthur Parker's tale is that it can be easily understood even outside its historical context. It contains almost mythical elements: the lost child, the parents' worries, the search, the transcendent signal of the child's return. "One suspects," Merrill Bateman said of Robert Parker, "that he did not just casually look behind a few trees or leisurely walk along the trail" while Boyd K. Packer queried, "How would you, in Ann Parker's place, feel towards the [initial rescuer] had he saved your little son?" The tale is so accessible on a human emotional level that it remains usable as a piece of Mormon folk history.

In the transformation of Arthur Parker's tale from journal entry to family story to Mormon folklore and its continual use within the Mormon Church, the West, as an area, is stabilized. In return, it aids in stabilizing human relationships. Not just Mormons have used the Western landscape in this way. The 19th century concept of National Progress became inscribed upon the landscape through the National Parks. Eastern concepts of democracy and domestication were carried into Western mining towns. Beliefs in the "noble savage" influenced emigrants' attitudes towards the Native Americans. Turner's depiction of the West as a refinery for democracy shaped a generation of Western histories, paintings, films and musicals while the New Western history demands still different depictions, producing a variety of reactions. Debates and concerns over environmentalism color how many see the landscape while political issues draw attention to Western cities and monuments. Say, "West," and you may hear, "Waco, Texas," "Winter Olympics," "water supply," "strip mining," "buffalo," "gambling," "Navajo," "skiing" or "Back to The Future III." The Western landscape becomes a slate upon which concepts, feelings, hopes and perceptions can be written, stories of identity can be created.

Stabilization through story enables humans to cope with life. The experience of history as it is lived (as opposed to how it is retrospectively examined) involves a continual absorption of sensations. We process smells, sights, speech, personal feelings, other people's actions and reactions. On a moment by moment basis, we amass an enormous amount of information. We filter it through our memories, our choices, our genetic and physical environments, our culture and character. We create roadmaps in the self, ways of remembering and explaining ourselves to our families, our neighborhoods and our society. To create this roadmap, we employ our own desires, other stories, the landscape itself.

But the landscape is not passive. Its power on the imagination, and through the imagination on our interior roadmaps, is illustrated by Arthur Parker's tale. The rescue of the little pioneer boy is emphasized by the area through which he and his family passed. Although the story can be told in many cultures, it is hard to imagine it thriving as it did without the Western images it invokes. The Western landscape has provoked many such stories. In his book Lasso the Wind, Timothy Egan uses his sojourn in various Western locations to pull Western history together. The idea is that the landscape will provide a common theme, something recognizable to all.

Arthur Parker's loss and rescue, arising out of the desolation of Nebraska and encapsulating Mormon hopes, enters the Western narrative with a similar goal: to provide an arc of cohesion. Yet it and Egan's experiences are only a few that cry out, and often conflict, for our attention. As Egan says, "It may be easier to lasso the wind than to find a sustaining story for the American West. Still, as storytellers it is our obligation to keep trying" (10). Confronted with so many possibilities, we choose the stories that strike a visceral chord, the ones that satisfy a personal or communal agenda. We pass them on. We start the process again. As Wilson says, "[W]e ignore such stories at our peril" (440). Listen and they will give us stability.

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