A Journey of Discovery

Abstract

the DUP Museum in Salt Lake City. While there, I was struck by the hundreds of pioneer portraits assembled by those inveterate collectors of Utah history, the Daughters of Utah Pioneers. Most of the silent faces lining the walls of four floors of the museum stared sternly into space, barely a shadow of a smile softening their earnest expressions. The men appeared awkward in their tightly collared shirts and high buttoned suits. The women were hardly less so in their modestly adorned silk dresses, their hair almost uniformly parted in the middle and combed severely to the back into a braid or bun. Only occasionally did a wayward curl or soft wave individualize the otherwise uniform pattern of portraits. As artifacts of the past and tangible evidence of lives once lived, these portraits hold intrinsic value to families and museum collectors alike. But as I came to one I recognized—that of my own progenitor, Joseph Cornwall—I thought how well those fixed and impassive expressions masked the panorama of human experience each one represented. The Irish potato famine of the 1840s drove my great-grandfather to Scotland, but once there he encountered some Mormon missionaries with a life-changing message. On the ship that brought him to America he met his future wife, Charlotte, alone and very homesick. Their courtship began on that hazardous journey. Disaster waited, however, until he crossed the plains, where an accident crushed one of his legs, making him a permanent cripple. But joy followed his dismay when he reached the Zion of his dreams, married his beloved Charlotte, and, for the first time in his life, owned the land he worked. It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but, in this instance, I think the 76 words I used to describe Joseph Cornwall were far more telling than his picture. As a historian I readily admit my bias toward the written word, and it is only when I put words with faces do portraits come alive to me. It is the lives of ordinary people—like those represented in that gallery of faces—recorded in honest and compelling detail in their own writings, that are the stuff of history today. No longer is it concerned only with affairs of state—the economic, military, political, and diplomatic decisions made by men in power—