Pioneer Day and the Days of '47

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

Surviving pioneers of 1847 at the Jubilee, Salt Lake City, 24 July 1897. George Edward Anderson. Library of Congress.

The same community has marked the same day for a hundred and seventy-seven years, and the sentence everyone quotes was written down thirty years after it was supposedly said. The wagon company that left Winter Quarters in April 1847 was 143 men, three women and two children, with 73 wagons and a cannon. Three of the men — Green Flake, Hark Lay and Oscar Crosby — were enslaved. Scouts reached the Salt Lake Valley on the twenty-first of July. Brigham Young, sick in a wagon, came through on the twenty-fourth, and that is the date that stuck. This is the right place, drive on. It is on the monument and in every retelling. It was first attributed to him by Wilford Woodruff more than thirty years afterwards, and Utah's own state history site is careful to say he is said to have made it. They began marking it in 1849. Cannon fire at dawn, the Nauvoo Brass Band playing from carriage beds at half past seven, the flag up the liberty pole, a procession, speeches, the Declaration of Independence read out — and then a communal meal shared with the Ute people who lived there and with forty-niners passing through to the California goldfields. In 1857 the tenth anniversary drew 2,587 people, six brass bands and a howitzer, and broke up when riders came in with news that a federal army was on its way. The fiftieth, in 1897, ran five days, and marked several things at once: the anniversary, the finished Salt Lake Temple, statehood, and the end of the anti-polygamy prosecutions. The parade carried floats for the territory's silk industry and its first newspaper, alongside Native Americans and a Pony Express rider. Green Flake, then an old man, was there and given a certificate. And on the twenty-second of July they founded the Utah State Historical Society — which is a fair sign that the day had already stopped being only a church observance. The centennial in 1947 dedicated This Is the Place Monument, sixty feet of granite by Brigham Young's own grandson, in front of nearly fifty thousand people. The parade has run nearly every year since. It was cancelled from 1932 to 1934 for the Depression, in 1943 for the war — the royalty finally got their ride fifty years later, in 1993 — and in 2020 for the pandemic. July 24 is a Utah state holiday and the government closes. What the day means has moved. Utah's own historical society now says the settlement of the Wasatch Front forever changed the lives of the Indigenous people already living there, and says it in the same paragraph as the celebration. Native Americans march ahead of the pioneer floats and there is a powwow at Liberty Park. Some Utahns who are not Latter-day Saints keep the twenty-fourth as Pie and Beer Day instead, which started at a Salt Lake bar sometime after 2005 — a joke about a word, and also a way of joining in. Between 1847 and 1868 something over fifty-six thousand people made the crossing. About 1,910 of them died on the way. If your family walked or drove that trail, add their names below. Compiled by MyHistoryStone from published reference sources, August 2026. Corrections welcome.