Today, Friday 24 July, is Pioneer Day. What is that? A Utah state holiday celebrated every year to commemorate the arrival of Brigham Young and the first group of LDS (Mormon) pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. This year, many Utahns get a three-day weekend for parades, fireworks, rodeos, picnics and potlucks, and community events. (Yes, even “Gentiles” (non-LDS) in Utah can and do celebrate this 179th anniversary of Young and his followers looking down into the Great Salt Lake and stating “This is the place.”

Actually, due to the severe and widespread wildfires in the Beehive State, many places may not have public or private fireworks this year. But to many in Utah, Pioneer Day is as important – perhaps even more so – as Independence Day, and fireworks are important. This is shown in part because Governor Cox issued a statewide fireworks ban for Independence Day but revoked it for Pioneer Day. Some cities still ban them: often for purely political reasons. “Progressive” communities like Moab and Blanding still prohibit them, while more conservative, even libertarian places like Monticello and Price do not.

Still, many Utahns consider the State to be burning.

Among others, consider the Babylon Fire in the Blue (Abajo) Mountains of southeast Utah, in sparsely populated San Juan County. Now 95% contained, it has burned off the forest and grasslands on over 107,000 acres (167 square miles!). Fighting the fire has cost more than $57 million dollars. While some structures have been damaged or destroyed, no human lives have been lost. (Three firefighters died in another large fire about a hundred miles north of this one.) Dozens others of various sizes are still burning and still being fought. Even though monsoon rains have finally arrived, the entire State is either in severe or extreme drought. It is very dry.

Of course, it makes sense that politics would be critical in a commemoration like Pioneer Day. And ditto for wildfires.

One of the primary reasons for the severity of wildfires (both forest and grassland fires) in the Western States is due to more than a century of government meddling. Especially by the FedGov. Most congress-critturs and bureaucrats in DC know little about the West, let alone what it means to have a “fire-climax” ecology. So starting in the 1880s, there was as much total suppression of wildfire as possible, growing more and more effective as technology improved. The result? A build-up of fuels – vegetation living and dead – that was once (due to natural causes, mostly lightning) burned off every few years. So in these areas, the fires burn hotter and longer, consuming not just dead and weaker plants and leaves and pine needles, but crowning and killing healthy mature trees and sterilizing the soil.

Of course, as the environists have grown in political power, using timbering and other methods of clearing dead and overgrown timber and grass has become more difficult due to federal regulations. And also to the expansion of rural and suburban development into frontier areas: the wildland-fire interface. And the cost of the fires, both from the destruction of homes and businesses and fighting the fires, has skyrocketed.

Better technology and better training, often from bitter experience, has helped a lot, but stolen taxpayer funds are limited, and politicians have different priorities than protecting small rural and frontier communities with only a few hundred voters.

Of course, we must also remember that is was politics, back in the 1840s and on to the present, that created that first Pioneer Day and make its commemoration important today.

We here at TPOL are no fans of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the LDS and its General Authorities. Neither its theology nor its organization and practices are matters we find acceptable, or even tolerable. We have all lived and worked in areas with significant LDS populations, and indeed even been mistaken now and then for LDS – as well as studying with them. They are good neighbors when in the minority, but difficult to live with when they are in the majority.

But we do believe that long before the War Between The States, the LDS endured incredible amounts of abuse by multiple State governments and the FedGov. And we admire their perserverence and willingness to die (and fight) for their beliefs, wrong though they are. Starting in upstate New York, they were driven into Ohio, later Missouri and then Illinois, and after the killing of Joseph Smith Junior, Brigham Young (in what amounted to a coup in the LDS church) took command and led them west to found the State of Deseret, in the middle of the war between the States and Mexico over Texas. That first emigrant party was followed by tens of thousands, many actually walking across the Great Plains, pulling hand-carts, to make it to Salt Lake.

Where they continued to face persecution from both individuals and groups, as well as Congress and the entire FedGov. Including the little-known and relatively bloodless “Mormon War” of 1857. Salt Lake City has a special historical designation: the only city inhabited by and under the control of Americans which had a US Army post openly constructed and operated to be able to use artillery stationed there to bombard the city in case of rebellion. (Fort Douglas, Utah, now part of the campus of the University of Utah on the east edge of the city, high above the smaller city of the 1800s.)

Young and the LDS would have been content to establish an independent nation, as Texas had been for nearly a decade. But they accepted rule from DC, and became one of the last Territories to be admitted to the Union in 1896, after 45 years of efforts, and at a terrible price for the LDS, by their standards.

Which is a story for another day, how freedom and liberty can be compromised and stolen, but not completely obliterated.