Wheels 17

the Wagon Wheels of the Latter-Day Saints

“He’s a flinger,” Mr. Newton growled.

Then a teenage bit of skirt dressed head to toe in black hefted a tomahawk and stepped into her bring out with absolute assuredness. Her hatchet sailed into the target with a resounding “thwock.”

“Now that,” Mr. Newton declared, “is learned.”

Despite its temporary invasion by mountain men (two more were wandering around and sticking up trains at gunpoint), the commons, Utah ’s version of Colonial Williamsburg, commemorates the take the first step history of the Mormons. Chased out of Nauvoo, Ill., by vigilantes and fired with a apparition of a divine kingdom on earth, Brigham Young and 147 members of his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints endured a 1,300-mile, canvas-topped, hardtack-fueled, cholera-racked prove of faith to reach the Wasatch Front in 1847.

Source: New York Times