Mormon Battalion’s Sacrifice Recalled

Speaking at the Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial service in Los Angeles, California, July 4, President Gordon B. Hinckley, First Counselor in the First Presidency, told an audience of more than 3,500 people of the service and sacrifice of the members of the Mormon Battalion.

President Hinckley was the keynote speaker at the service. During the ceremonies, the initial raising of the flag over the city by the Mormon Battalion on 4 July 1847 was reenacted by modern-day members of the Southern California Division of the Mormon Battalion in San Diego.

Other speakers included President William W. Tanner of the Los Angeles California Stake, city councilman Gilbert W. Lindsay, and actress and Church member Larraine Day. Sister Day read excerpts from the journal of Samuel M. Rogers, a member of the Mormon Battalion.

The Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial, which stands 60 feet tall and includes a 406-foot-long wall, was built to honor the Mormon Battalion and other early settlers.

“The Mormon Battalion of the United States Army was a rather motley looking group of soldiers,” President Hinckley said in describing their condition when they arrived in California. “Their clothing was worn and ragged. They were burned and bonesore, having marched more than two thousand miles. Their food had been poor and inadequate. They had known racking thirst, the burning heat of desert days, the cold of desert nights. In times of sickness they had been given medicine that poisoned rather than cured.

“At the conclusion of their long march a fort was established,” President Hinckley said. Fort Moore was built “in the sleepy little Mexican community that went by the name of Ciudad Los Angeles.”

President Hinckley talked of the sacrifice members of the battalion made, leaving loved ones in desperate circumstances to enlist for a year’s service. The volunteers “passed through areas of Missouri where only eight years earlier the Mormons had been mercilessly driven from the state by order of the governor and without protection from federal authorities.” He noted that some Missourians “marveled that under the circumstances, Mormons would enlist in the Army after the treatment they had received. But they were Americans, loyal to the nation.”

After the Mormon volunteers were discharged from the battalion on July 16, they journeyed to the Salt Lake Valley to rejoin their families who had traveled there.

“The enlistment of the battalion, the march of these five hundred men, the patriotic service that they rendered the nation, … all bear eloquent testimony of their love for America, of their willingness to sacrifice for its freedom, of their loyalty to its flag, and of their love for the freedom that came with the Declaration of Independence of 1776,” President Hinckley said.

“May we never forget, and particularly may the people of this Church never forget, the measure of their sacrifice and the depth of their loyalty,” President Hinckley concluded.

President Gordon B. Hinckley, First Counselor in the First Presidency, praises the Mormon Battalion during a July 4 memorial service. (Photo by Rocky Kemp, Church News.)