"I would invite every young man and woman to enlist in the 'youth battalion' to gather Israel," President Nelson said in his youth devotional Sunday night. He then issued five specific challenges to enlistees, commitments we already made for tour:
1. A seven-day social media fast
2. A sacrifice of time
3. Stay on the covenant path, or repent and return
4. Pray daily for all to receive the gospel
5. Stand out and be different -- be a lightOn Tuesday morning, we toured the Mormon Battalion Historic Site and claimed a kinship with our forebears who marched in the original Mormon Battalion.
Writing for the San Diego Union-Tribune, Peter Rowe tells their story:
When the Mormon Battalion marched into San Diego on Jan. 29, 1847, residents were not overjoyed.
“People were afraid of them,” said Michael Hemingway, director of the Mormon Battalion Historic Site in Old Town. “Here’s this American army coming in. And they had been told by others that these were religious zealots, terrible people.”
Members of the battalion won over locals, though, by digging wells, building a courthouse and making other improvements to Old Town. . . .
The battalion’s 2,000-mile journey to San Diego is one of the longest marches in U.S. history. During the Mexican-American War, 500 Midwesterners were asked to reinforce the U.S. Army of the West in California.
In July 1846, 496 men, 36 women and 43 children — virtually all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — departed Council Bluffs, Iowa. During the six-month trek west, sickness and accidents caused the deaths of 27. That winter, most of the women and children took shelter in Pueblo, Colo. Lt. Philip St. George Cooke led the rest, 335 men and four women, to San Diego.
“By the time they got out here, the fighting was done,” said Hemingway, who is a church elder. “They were here more to secure the territory.”
Without their original mission, historian Iris Engstrand wrote in “San Diego: California’s Cornerstone,” they found jobs in Old Town: “They made a whitewash and used it to brighten up the houses. They also built a bakery, fired bricks, built log pumps, dug wells, did blacksmithing, and repaired carts.”
Many Battalion members would return to family in Iowa, and some joined Brigham Young’s trek to the Great Salt Lake. But, Hemingway said, the departing Mormons were fondly remembered in Old Town.
“The people wanted them to stay,” he said. (January 24, 2018, linked here)
