Walked and walked and walked and walked.

In 1847, my great-great grandfather Hezekiah Thatcher and his first wife buried their infant son at Winter Quarters, Nebraska and headed west in the first wave of Mormon pioneers to the Great Basin. Hezekiah went on to become one of the most prominent early settlers; only Brigham Young was wealthier. In the late 1850s he made the largest tithing payment to that point in Church history and he and his sons formed the financial backbone of Cache County, establishing mills, stores, a bank, and an opera house. Brigham Young said of Hezekiah's remarkable sacrifices of personal wealth for the good of the Church, "I do not believe that any other man in the Church would have done it." His son, Moses, was called as an apostle and was known for his powerful speaking. Moses boldly reminded Brigham Young that it was not in keeping with the Word of Wisdom for ZCMI, the church's mercantile chain, to sell booze. Brigham Young agreed with Moses's forward-thinking and unpopular observation, and the practice ended as a result.

A typical Pioneer Day ancestral tribute, and every word is true.

I love Pioneer Day. I love Church history, and particularly the Utah chapter of Church history. I love the stories, I love the heritage, I even love the creepy Victorian decorations made of human hair and the jars full of flies in the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum. But the question in studying your own religious history is: can you handle the truth?

In studying church history, many of my sacred cows have been tipped. The story of the heroic rescue of the 1856 handcart companies, for instance:

"The teenaged boys carried most of the exhausted company over the Sweetwater River." False. They carried many, but most of them walked across or rode across in wagons.

"The icy river was up to their thighs and they labored most of the day." False. The river was about ankle-deep and the crossing more likely took a few hours since they reached the river in the afternoon and were all over before the early winter dark set in.

"All the boys later died of complications due to their ordeal." False. They all went on to live healthy, productive, and long lives by frontier standards and there was no evidence that they died of causes related to the river incident.

"Brigham Young declared that that one act of kindness would assure those boys salvation." False. There is no proof that he ever said such a thing.

"None of the members of the Martin or Willie Handcart companies ever left the church." False. Many were furious, and some did leave the church, concluding that the Church leaders were uninspired.

In telling faith-promoting stories, we seek to understand our heritage. We want to know why embarrassing or disastrous events happened if God was at the helm. We seek for the best moments and magnify them. Sometimes we magnify them until they become false.

Back to my own family story -- here are the parts I left out. Hezekiah Thatcher arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 and thought it looked like a miserable wasteland. Two years later, directly defying Brigham Young's orders to stay and help build Zion, he took off for the Gold Rush and quickly made a huge fortune in the hotel and restaurant businesses. Ten years later he returned to the fold in Utah and was obedient to the end of his life, but the family tradition of independence that he had begun was not always a blessing in the communally-minded Utah Territory. His son Moses, who was later made an apostle, was crippled by his addiction to opium as a painkiller. He defied the prophet Wilford Woodruff by publicly and vociferously refusing to sign the Political Manifesto. Though he was not excommunicated for his disobedience, he was subsequently un-apostled and died in semi-disgrace.

I didn't hear this half of the story until I was in college, and I was dismayed. These were not my "blessed, honored pioneers"! These were a bunch of stubborn cranks. They were so....ordinary.

But as I've allowed myself to absorb the entire truth, something new has happened. I realized that these cranky mere mortals somehow managed to make remarkable sacrifices in the midst of all their pettiness. One day they were like me, whining about the unreasonable demands of Sainthood, and the next day they were bravely playing their part in the miracles. And the day after that -- who knows?

The details of my family myth are no longer those of my childhood. No longer can I allow myself to believe that great epic suffering automatically forges men into heroes for the ages, as we often imply in our Pioneer Day tributes. But at the same time, I can no longer allow myself to believe that because I do not live in a time of great epic suffering, I am destined to be spiritually mediocre next to my ancestors. No longer are they more than human. No longer can I hold them at arm's length as freaky-good and say, "Whew -- I'm glad it was them and not me, because I just don't have what it takes to do something like that." Knowing their very ordinary shortcomings makes their accomplishments and sacrifices all the more powerful because the people doing them are like me. And the most powerful messages of their lives remain, even in the full light of truth.

"Great suffering has the power to amplify our goodness if we choose to let it." True.

"Ordinary people can do extraordinary things in the midst of their ordinary lives." True.

"God is at work, even in moments of disaster, confusion, and doubt." True.

"Sacrifice is not measured by agony, but by willingness." True.

"Your great acts of faith become the guideposts for your descendants, in spite of your warts." True.

So I honor these ordinary people who, with greater or lesser motivations, walked 1,300 miles to this desert and became my ancestors. I don't know if they traveled cheerfully or grumpily (no family history ever says, "Great-Grandpa George whined his way to Zion"), but I do know that they ultimately chose their faith over creature comforts. They may have first chosen the church because it offered them a ticket to America where they could escape poverty and own land. Many European converts joined the church for this reason, just as many people join the church today because of its remarkable welfare system. But somewhere along the way they all found their faith and taught it to their children, and that faith has dripped down to me, purer and more satisfying because it was filtered through the plain gray rocks of their ordinariness. Plow, plant, harvest, repeat. Swallow your pride. Keep your cow out of Brother Hyde's garden even though his pigs ate your lettuce patch last week. Try to not smoke your pipe so often so you don't smell bad in the temple. Teach your children to be better than you are.

These are some other ordinary heroes of my family who walked across the plains between 1847 and 1869.

Robert Reeder who was part of the Willie handcart company and lost his father, David, and sister, Caroline, on the journey. George Seamons, who at age 15 lost both parents and a brother in his trek to Utah. Anna Cajsa and Charles Anderson Frank from Sweden, who were married on the plains. Jonathan, Abigail, and Nancy Jane Taylor Smith, Elizabeth Patrick Taylor, George and Alice Hancock Done from England; Johann, Anna, and Elisabeth Naef from Switzerland.

I don't know their whole stories or what they were really like. I don't know if they were better or stronger than your pioneers. But they are mine, and their best moments have become my mythology. One day I will get all of their stories straight, from their very mouths. Until then, most of the details will remain hazy, but the picture is clear -- it is a picture of faith, hard won.