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U T A H HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
customs through religious services and newspapers and denominational schools in the mother tongue. A final reason the immigrant as such has not been spotlighted in Utah is that here the two great themes of American history, the frontier and immigration, happen to run together. Mormon pioneering in the valleys and Mormon proselyting abroad, where conversion was practically synonymous with emigration, founded the state and peopled it. T h e pioneer was more than likely an immigrant, and every immigrant a pioneer. The story of the immigrant as such has simply been absorbed in the pioneer story, lost in the dust of covered wagons. A n d perhaps because Yankee and Briton dominated the old-stock membership and provided the leadership which determined the pattern of settlement, Utah's history, actually recorded in several tongues, has been told exclusively from the English-language sources. For all these reasons, Utah's foreign-language record as a source of history and literature has suffered a singular obscurity. Since the state is admittedly Anglo-Scandinavian in population, the Scandinavian record may serve to illustrate how rich is the source. This is not to slight other immigrant groups, who deserve their spokesmen. W h a t is said of one might be said of all 8
"Dumb Swede" was long the synonym for foreigner in Utah, yet in his own tongue the "dumb Swede" was articulate enough. He felt a mortal need to express himself in the only way he could, to have a life of the spirit without which he would surely die, And there was considerably more life of the spirit than is commonly believed. T h e mother tongue was the natural basis of association and organization. Every settlement had its Scandinavian Meeting, auxiliary to regular ward affiliation, through which the local meetinghouse where the immigrants met with their English and American brethren and sisters for Sunday services 8
By 1900, die golden jubilee of Mormonism's beginnings in Scandinavia, over 12,000 converts had emigrated from Denmark, nearly 7,000 from Sweden, and about 2,300 from Norway, not counting children under the baptismal age of eight, estimated at another third, or about 30,000 all together. Andion H. Lund, a Dane who rose to a position in the First Presidency of the Mormon Church, could tell a great reunion of Scandinavians at Brigham City in 1902, "We are now 43,000 in Utah and a power in the state." His figure includes all diose of Scandinavian stock, that is, children born in Utah of Scandinavian parents as well as the foreign-born tiiemselves.