Legacy
Handcart pioneers and the handcart movement are important parts of LDS culture, music and fiction. Arthur King Peters described the importance of this part of Mormon history in Seven Trails West:
| “ | This heroic episode of Mormon history exemplifies many of the enduring qualities of nascent Mormonism itself: thorough organization, iron discipline, unswerving devotion to a cause, and limitless self-sacrifice. . . . The true Mormon Trail was not on the prairie but in the spirit. | ” |
Wallace Stegner praised the examples of those of the handcart companies, particularly in comparison to other pioneer parties:
| “ | Perhaps their suffering seems less dramatic because the handcart pioneers bore it meekly, praising God, instead of fighting for life with the ferocity of animals and eating their dead to keep their own life beating, as both the Fremont and Donner parties did. . . . But if courage and endurance make a story, if humankindness and helpfulness and brotherly love in the midst of raw horror are worth recording, this half-forgotten episode of the Mormon migration is one of the great tales of the West and of America. | ” |
Read more about this topic: Mormon Handcart Pioneers
Famous quotes containing the word legacy:
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)