My brothers and sisters, I\u2019m very grateful for the prayer, the introduction, and especially for the beautiful musical numbers. I agree with the late apostle Adam S. Bennion, who used to say, \u201cWhat we need in this church is better music and more of it, and better speaking and less of it\u201d (see Sterling W. Sill, Leadership, <\/i>vol. 3 [Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1978], p. 288). \u201cCome, Come, Ye Saints\u201d is one of our most loved hymns, not only because of its pleasing music or even its poignant words but because of the feelings it evokes as we reflect on the nobility and courage of the first and second generations of valiant Latter-day Saint pioneers who laid the foundation of this mighty kingdom. Some of us are descended from these remarkable stalwarts. Like many others, my great grandfather, William Jordan Flake, answered the call of President Brigham Young to leave the Salt Lake Valley and lead a colonization effort into northern Arizona. The town he established under the apostolic leadership of Erastus Snow was named in honor of both of them\u2014Snowflake, Arizona. I\u2019m told that Snowflake once had a sheriff named Jack Frost. When he told people he was Jack Frost from Snowflake . . .<\/p>\n
Over the years we\u2019ve taken a lot of flack because of the name Flake. <\/i>My missionary son found it hard enough to be known as Elder Flake, but it got even worse when he was assigned a companion named Elder Looney! People really had to be honest in heart to accept the gospel from Elder Flake and Elder Looney. Incidentally, Snowflake is just down the road from another little Mormon town called St. Johns, one of whose favorite sons is the president of this university.<\/p>\n
It is a wonderful blessing to have been raised hearing stories of pioneer ancestors on both sides of my family and from many other families as well. Not all of these stories were of major trials and tribulations. Sometimes they concerned funny little incidents of everyday life. Listen to this entry from the journal of Henrietta Williams as she crossed the plains.<\/p>\n
They knew that I was no cook, but left that job for me. I built a fire after gathering buffalo chips, and getting it started, the wind playing with it as it pleased. I put the dutch oven on to heat with the cover by the side of it. I made a pie of dried apples, putting it into the oven, the lid still heating, and turned toward the wagon several yards away from the fire for safety. A nice cow sneaked up and helped herself to the pie and sneaked off, when a girl called to me to look at my rice. I had a hard time cooking the biscuits as I was jumping in and out of the wagon, climbing over the provision box, watching my baby girl and getting what <\/i>[my husband] wanted as it was his misfortune never to find anything that he was looking for. The fire had its own way of burning. I thought, \u201cOh, Zion, will we ever reach thee?\u201d <\/i>[Quoted in Nancy Clement Williams, After One Hundred Years <\/i>(Independence, Missouri: Zion\u2019s Printing and Publishing Company, 1951), p. 157]<\/p>\n
I enjoyed hearing my father and grandfather tell of one pioneer brother confessing his folly. He was leading two rather large calves with a rope in each hand. When he came to a gate, he needed both hands to open it. Not wanting to let the calves escape, he tied one rope around each of his legs. Here is this note from his journal: \u201cThose calves had not dragged me fifty feet before I figured out what I\u2019d done wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
A number of years ago I traveled by chartered bus to Palmyra, New York, with 150 wonderful young women from BYU and other Utah schools. These young ladies served as special missionaries to help put on the Hill Cumorah Pageant. On our return trip we visited several Church history sites along the pioneer trail. One of these sites was the Mormon cemetery at Winter Quarters near Omaha, Nebraska. As we walked quietly up the hill containing many graves of the Saints who died there, our spirits were subdued. Located at the top of the hill is that impressive Avard Fairbanks monument with which you are no doubt familiar. It is a statue of a pioneer mother and father, a shovel in his hand, standing before the open grave of their baby. At the base of the monument in bronze are listed in alphabetical order most of the names of the 600 pioneers buried there. Those 600 are just a tithing of the 6,000 whose graves lie along the rest of the trail. Without a cue or suggestion from anyone, the girls began to sing \u201cCome, Come, Ye Saints.\u201d At first they sang very strongly, but as the words and spirit of that great hymn sank deeper in their hearts, their singing turned more into sobbing. By the last verse I think I was the only one still singing. As I voiced the words \u201cAnd should we die before our journey\u2019s through,\u201d I was scanning the list of names on the bronze plaque. In the F\u2019s two names caught my attention\u2014Samuel Flake, age five months, and Frederick Flake, age one day. Then I stopped singing, too.<\/p>\n
As the Church continues to expand, especially in foreign lands, the percentage of members who are literal descendants of the pioneers decreases, but I believe that those who bind themselves to this great work that the pioneers began are somehow spiritually adopted and become descendants of those noble forbears. This very real bond was touchingly displayed for me once when I listened to one of my students with tears running down his cheeks express love and gratitude for his heroic pioneer ancestors who crossed the plains. This would not have been so unusual except that his name was Doug Sakaguchi and he was a Japanese convert. In a very real way, I believe Brother Sakaguchi is just as much a descendent of the pioneers as I am.<\/p>\n
Many years ago, Dr. Earl V. Pullius, a non-Mormon scholar, told a story on this campus that deeply impressed me with the connection between the first and second generations of pioneers and the present generation of young people and converts in the Church. Before World War II, the renowned musician Bruno Walter was the conductor of the Vienna Symphony. This symphony was a unique musical organization with a spirit and unity and synergism that produced glorious music, powerful and unmatched by any other symphony. When the Nazis took over Austria, the conductor fled to America. It was not until 1947 that he was finally able to return to Austria. His first priority was to visit his beloved Vienna Symphony. As he approached the concert hall where they were practicing, he could hear the strains of their remarkable music. He said that if he had been anywhere on the face of the earth and heard that sound, he would have been able to identify it as coming only from the Vienna Symphony. When he entered the concert hall, to his amazement he discovered that although the exquisite musical quality was still there, not one of the musicians playing with the symphony had played with it when he was its conductor. All of them were new, but the powerful spirit remained. All of the first and second generations of pioneers are gone. Our challenge is to keep alive that great, valiant spirit of sacrifice and courage that characterized their lives and service.<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, Elder Jack H. Goaslind of the Seventy gave a moving address from this pulpit<\/span><\/a>. It was the 151st anniversary of the assassination of the Prophet Joseph and his brother Hyrum. As Elder Goaslind reflected on that tragic event, my mind was drawn to a copy of a newspaper clipping I have in my file containing an interesting, though somewhat garbled, account of the Martyrdom reported two weeks after the fact in the New York Weekly Herald. <\/i>The headline reads: \u201cImportant News from Nauvoo: Death of Joe and Hyrum Smith: Terrible Excitement in the West.\u201d In part the article said, \u201cWe yesterday received by western mail the following particulars of the death of Joseph Smith the Prophet and his brother Hyrum. They were both shot. There was tremendous excitement in the west in consequence of their death\u201d (8 July 1844). The article continued and then ended with this three-word conclusion and prediction: \u201cThus ends Mormonism.\u201d<\/p>\n This newspaper was not alone in that gloomy forecast. Many observers, both friendly and antagonistic, believed that with the death of its dynamic leader, the church Joseph founded would go the way of numerous other flash-in-the-pan religious movements. That prognostication likely would have come to pass had Joseph Smith in fact been the founder of the Church, but he was not. I bear my witness with yours that the establishment of this Church is the very fulfillment of Daniel\u2019s prophecy that in the last days \u201cshall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed\u201d (Daniel 2:44<\/a>). In Doctrine and Covenants 33:5<\/a>, the Lord proclaims, \u201cAnd verily, verily, I say unto you, that this church have I established and called forth out of the wilderness.\u201d Expectations that the Church would disintegrate had been voiced frequently before the Martyrdom and have been heard many times since. Even now, anti-Mormon writers engage in wishful thinking as they see what they believe are the foundations of Zion crumbling. When the authors of a book critical of the Church predicted, \u201cThe future of the Church is dim ,\u201d President Gordon B. Hinckley responded with characteristic politeness:<\/p>\n Without wishing to seem impertinent, I should like to ask what they know about that future. They know nothing of the prophetic mission of this Church. The future must have looked extremely dim in the 1830s. It must have looked impossible back in those Ohio-Missouri days. But notwithstanding poverty, notwithstanding robbing, notwithstanding murders, notwithstanding confiscation and drivings and disfranchisement forced upon the Saints, the work moved steadily on. It has continued to go forward. Never before has it been so strong. Never before has it been so widespread. Never before have there been so many in whose hearts has burned an unquenchable knowledge of the truth. <\/i>[\u201cCounsel to Religious Educators,\u201d 14 September 1984 (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1984), p. 7]<\/p>\n One of the early antagonists of Joseph Smith and the Saints was Thomas Ford, governor of Illinois. He was a willing facilitator, if not an active perpetrator, of the death of the Prophet. His view of Joseph Smith and the future of the Church is expressed in his History of Illinois:<\/i><\/p>\n Thus fell Joe Smith, the most successful impostor in modern times; a man who, though ignorant and coarse, had some great natural parts which fitted him for temporary success, but which were so obscured and counteracted by the inherent corruption and vices of his nature that he never could succeed in establishing a system of policy which looked to permanent success in the future. <\/i>[Thomas Ford, A History of Illinois: From Its Commencement as a State in 1818 to 1847<\/i>(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), p. 249]<\/p>\n In an address given on this campus in January of 1988, President Hinckley detailed how after Thomas Ford\u2019s betrayal of Joseph Smith, the governor\u2019s fortunes declined until he died in obscurity and poverty six years later. President Hinckley observed:<\/p>\n It is a thing of interest to me that except for his connection with the death of the Prophet Joseph, Governor Ford is almost entirely forgotten today. The decline of his fortune and the sad end of his life, and that of his wife, together with the tragic experiences of their five orphan children, become a tale of defeat, bitterness, and misery.<\/i><\/p>\n While Thomas Ford has been largely forgotten, love and respect for the Prophet who was murdered at Carthage have grown across the world.<\/i><\/p>\n