The Mormon Pioneers
By Elder S. Dilworth Young, Central States Mission
It is not hard to sing the praise
Of men who go to war,
It is not hard to do brave deeds
Amid the cannon’s roar.
Brave deeds are sung the wide world o’er
With great applause and cheers,
But who has writ the epic of
The Mormon Pioneers?
Who tells the tale of trial and death,
Of sorrow and of pain,
The hardships of the desert march
And weary toil made vain;
Of broken hopes, of faith held high,
Of black despair and gloom,
Who tells that still in spite of this
They made the desert bloom?
We cannot hope to tell the tale
In these short measures here,
But may their lesson bring to us
A memory ever dear;
And may we in the future years
The noble message tell –
The lesson of the Pioneers –
“Go forward! All is well!”
(1921)
I just a few days ago ordered a copy of “The Long Road: From Carthage to Nauvoo” by S. Dilworth Young. It’s a (slim) book-length poem about the history of the Church; I owned a copy as a teenager. What I remember most is a refrain that appears (IIRC) several times in the course of the poem, representing the Adversary’s reaction to the Restoration: “Destroy them while they’re few and small./Destroy them while they’re few and small.”
I met Pres. Young once at a stake conference, back when he was President of the First Council of the Seventy, and even got him to autograph my triple combination, alongside my autograph of LeGrand Richards. (The Church sometime later issued a statement asking members to refrain from having Church leaders autograph their scriptures.)
I’m glad to hear you had and remembered that poetry, bfwebster — I still have the copy I had as a teen. It’s in rough shape because of poor storage, but I wouldn’t willingly give it up. Wonderful stuff.