Judy and I had always wanted to camp on the Great Salt Lake. When I was a kid, I was told that you could not drown in Salt Lake because the water was so salty that it held you up armpit high. Not being the world’s greatest swimmer, I always wanted to try it. Although I had passed by Salt Lake many times as a kid to visit my dad’s family in Kansas, we had never stopped to check it out. Although this was not as high on my bucket list as the great snake pit quest, I had never forgotten those childhood images of happy, smiling Mormons floating in the vast blue waters of Salt Lake, laughing because even if they tried they could not drown. Judy had seen the same photograph in her youth as well and even though she was an excellent swimmer, she thought it would be great fun to swim there.
Even though we lived on the Oregon Coast neither of us have been swimming in the ocean. First, the waters of the open Pacific Coast are far too cold to swim without a wetsuit, and neither of us had one of those. Not only are they really expensive, they show every ounce of fat and one never knows when whaling will become legal again. The second reason that Judy will never swim in the ocean was that I made the mistake of taking her to see “Jaws”. Even though that was 40+ years ago, she has refused to go more than knee deep in the Pacific ever since. But as Salt Lake is not noted for fish populations of any size, she thought it would probably be safe.
So it was with great excitement that we drove our class C RV (MSP) out onto Antelope Island which is connected by a causeway to the lakeshore. As October is the off season we got to camp anywhere we wanted. We camped in the group campground which had nobody in it but ourselves. The stars that night were spectacular as we opened a bottle of wine while sitting outside in the warm evening air with the lights of Salt Lake City on the far horizon. The next day we walked down to the lake to check out the swimming spots.
It took us about half an hour from the campsite to finally make it to the lakes shore over the rocks and through the brush. The closer we got to the water the more bugs there were. The waters edge was awash with their live and dead bodies. The lake itself was covered with the same. This reality was a far cry from being pristine and swim beckoning as I remembered it from the smiling-laughing-floating Mormon photo. Maybe I had misinterpreted the photo. They may have been floating, but they could not have been laughing, more likely they were screaming or dead. No fucking way was I getting into that water. I would rather drown. It was just at that moment that I thought I saw something out in the lake. Though my binoculars I could barely make out three intrepid individuals who had waded out in an attempt to get to water that was deep enough to swim in. A half mile out and they were only in knee deep water and they were still heading out. Judy and I just looked at each other in total disillusionment. But we had come this far and could not leave without doing something. Both of us gingerly removed our shoes and socks and stuck our big toes into the lake then rapidly removed them before too many bugs attacked, and quickly went back to the MSP to shower. That night we spent another glorious evening under the stars drinking much more wine than the previous evening to toast our bravery.
One of the items we had added to our list after the City of Rocks was a side trip to find out more about the Mormon pioneers. We asked some of the park personnel on Antelope Island where they would go if they wanted to learn more about them. To a woman they all directed us to the Daughters of Utah Pioneer Memorial Museum in Salt Lake City. After a bit of searching we finally found it. The exterior of the building held promise. It was old, always a good sign for a historical museum. It was three stories with a basement, meaning that it could hold lots of interesting and educational shit. It had the word “pioneer” in its name and was in Salt Lake City, the Mormon capital of the world, and we both wanted to learn more about Mormon pioneers. The word “Daughter” was a little disconcerting to me as I was more into the guns, grizzly bears and Indian massacre stuff, but Judy was enthralled so I pretended to be okay with it.
We entered the museum with our hearts beating rapidly in our chests/breasts which is how it should be as it would be a bit odd to have them beating anywhere else, but we were excited. I even perked up a bit from the “daughter” downer as the museum was free. What could be better? Okay it could have been a free air museum with spitfires and ME 109’s but I am trying to branch out from my WWII history fetish.
The first thing we saw was a huge piano. Not the upright sort either but a type of piano known as a “square grand”. It was heavy and imposing and the sign said it had been donated by some dude I had never heard of and had come across the great expanse of America by ox cart. Wow! Some Mormon had transported this massive musical instrument all the way by wagon to Salt Lake City using only an ox! Man-o-man he must have really loved his bitches to do that for them. But that was not all; there were several other pianos in the museum just like that one, all with neat little cards stating the same thing but with different donors. I had no idea that Mormon pioneers were so musical. Lightweight fiddles, banjos, and mouth organs I could understand, but square grand pianos? If the Mormons could bring all this stuff into the west why didn’t the rest of the pioneers do the same? All that Judy’s wagon train pioneer family has to show for their great trek to the Oregon country is a dilapidated rocking chair that was carried across the plains for use by her great-great-grandmother who was 69 at the time and possibly one of the oldest women or men to do the trail. Judy’s great-great-grandmother was supposed to ride in the back of the prairie schooner while sitting on that chair. Which naturally being a relative of my wife’s, she refused to do so and walked the whole way. I can just imagine her final deathbed words:
“I hiked all the way across this country behind a Conestoga and all I got to show for it was a damn chair!”
But getting back to the piano lesson if there is one to be learned. Either the Mormons were much tougher than my wife’s ancestors (unlikely!) or the trek across the country was much easier than those old Jimmy Stewart movies have led me to believe. As I have a hard time believing Jimmy Stewart could ever mislead the American movie going public, I am faced with a dilemma. Then the answer hit me like a rock thrown from a sling by a bible character. The Mormons did not bring those pianos across the Great Plains at all! Stupid pioneers of other Christian sects did it for them, but when they got to the steep part of the trail they were too heavy to carry over so they dumped them and the Mormons picked them up, claiming that they had trucked them across all by themselves!
I wanted to go up to the curators of the museum and point this out to them and claim one of them for my wife’s family, as they are all music lovers, and likely had planned on coming back for anything that they had left behind on the trail. One of those pianos was hers damn it and I wanted it back! However, it then occurred to me that Judy’s great-great-grandmother would have probably carried one of those pianos on her back across the Rockies if she had really wanted it. Years later I found out that they are pretty awful pianos anyway. My brother-in-law bought a house where someone had left one. It was going to cost him hundreds of dollars to have it tuned, if it could be tuned. He tried to sell it as an antique, but nobody wanted it. He advertised it for free, no takers. So he had to pay someone to have it hauled off. Apparently the room has been built around the piano as it would not fit through the door. He had used fencing pliers to cut the strings and a Sawzall to cut out the harp and then partially demolish the rest of it. So I guess that the final laugh was on the Mormons. Although one man’s junk is another man’s trash, the Mormons at least could get rid of their junk by donating it to a museum where they got their name mentioned as a donor.
It soon became apparent that donation cards were really what this museum was all about. The historical value of the objects was not as important as who donated it. Judy for example was all excited about viewing the quilts. There were lots of them, too many of them in fact. All were neatly folded down to the smallest volume possible so that all the donation cards could be viewed but the quilt could not. This donation fetish carried over into every aspect of the museum. There were several strange sewing machines each with a donor card. But when Judy asked about how they worked she was told by a volunteer in the area to go to a library and look it up. There was a sea shell collection from the South Seas. Why was that in a Mormon Pioneer Museum at all? There was a chair room with hundreds of chairs neatly placed next to each other like you were standing in the middle of a convention before the attendees showed up. No explanation as to what these were about, but each had its donor card attached.
We had come looking for pioneer history. The museum did have “pioneer” in its title. But most of the exhibits of Mormon life were from the turn of the century. There were several dioramas of parlors with Victorian furniture and mannequins dressed in fancy duds all of which seem to be donated by “the queen of Silver City”. Excuse my impertinence but isn’t that a hooker’s name? There was a golden railroad spike in an armored glass case. Was that one of the golden spikes that was used to lay track on the final railroad tie of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah? Who knows! And if it was, how did it get here? What happened to the other spikes? I went on the internet and found out that there had been four golden spikes and one is missing. Was this the one and somebody just forgot to label it so it is lost to history? There was a room that had some silkworm cocoons and a sign about the Mormon silk industry. What Mormon silk industry? When, where, how, what happened to it, or is it still there? But the one exhibit that really got me the most is that every square inch of wall space was covered with pictures of pioneers from 1847 to May 10, 1869. I figured that 1847 was probably the first wave of Mormon immigrants to Salt Lake City. But why end it on May 10, 1869? I had to go to the museums web site to have that one cleared up:
“A pioneer is an ancestor who came to the Utah Territory/State of Deseret; died crossing the plains; or was born in the Utah Territory/State of Deseret before May 10, 1869 and the coming of the railroad. If your ancestor does not fit into this (sic) criteria, you will not have a history.”
So after May 10, 1869 you are a nobody? And what to hell is the State of Deseret?
The pictures of these pioneers were austere; grumpy looking men with plain faced women who wore their hair in tight buns, sternly glowering at the camera. I had had it.
I yelled across the room to Judy “hey babe no wonder these guys had so many wives, these broads are so damn ugly!”
Judy grabbed me by the arm and marched me right out of the place past the open mouths of the volunteers and other visitors. I could tell that she wasn’t really mad at me as it was my arm not by my ear or other handy appendage that she grabbed. I have never again been to, nor likely will I ever visit a museum that was so badly curated. Unless the curation has changed of the last decade or so this is not a place where non Mormon’s should go as it was clearly for those that already know the answers to their life’s questions. But if you do decide to visit do me a big favor and ask one of the volunteers if the Queen of Silver City was a hooker and drop me a line with the answer. I think that information may have been censored from the internet.
PS: I copied the image off the internet from David Holt. Seems like we lost all of our museum photo. I tried to put this info under the picture but I am still learning how to use this tool.
