By ERIC ANDERSON
Elder John K. Carmack, of the First Quorum of Seventy and Assistant Executive Director of the LDS Church Historical Department, will be the keynote speaker at a symposium “They Gathered To Zion,” Friday.
Bill Hartley, associate professor of history and research historian at the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History and the co-chairman of the symposium, is excited about having Elder Carmack as the keynote speaker.
Elder Carmack “has vital interest in LDS history and is a brilliant mind and insightful speaker,” he said.
“The symposium is an effort to bring academic and scholarly attention to the Mormon Trail,” Hartley said.
Two academic conferences have been held in the last two years about the Mormon Trail and the trek west of the pioneers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These conferences were held in Iowa and Nebraska.
“This symposium is BYU’s effort to have academic discussion on the whole gathering to Zion,” he said.
Hartley said that members of the LDS Church have two images of the Mormon Trail: the 1847 pioneers and the Martin and Willie handcart company disasters.
“Both are misleading,” he said. “Neither of these images correctly show what some 70,000 saints experienced who crossed the Mormon Trail to Zion between 1847 and 1868. Also, the story that Church members have of the Nauvoo exodus is two-thirds incomplete. And so symposium papers will offer several historical corrections.”
Craig Ostler, assistant professor of Church History and Doctrine and co-chairman of the symposium, said he has been working with Hartley on the symposium since May.
“With the Church’s Sesquicentennial year, we brought together the foremost scholars on the Pioneer Era with special emphasis on the gathering,” Ostler said. “Our expectations are that this will be the capstone symposium to the Sesquicentennial celebration.”
According to the symposium schedule, during the symposium more than 22 presentations will be given by scholars from six different states. The symposium begins this Friday at 9 a.m. and ends with a banquet and program that goes from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m.
The program at the banquet will feature remarks from individuals who walked the Mormon Trail this year. Brian Hill was set apart by Elder Marvin J. Ballard of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles as the ecclesiastical leader of this years’ exodus. This makes him the first such leader since the original pioneers. His wife, Karen, also made the trek west and took her small children along. They will both offer remarks.
Registration for the symposium is $7.50 fo?MDNM?r the general public, but is free for BYU students with a valid ID.
There will be a banquet during the evening. The cost is $8.00 in addition to the registration fee. Those wishing to attend the banquet should contact Smith Institute this morning.
The evening will end with a concert by a reconstituted Pitt’s Nauvoo Brass Band in the Harmon Conference Center.
Anyone who would like to see just the band need not pay the banquet fee.
Anyone with questions about the symposium or registration can call the Smith Institute for Church History at 378-4023.
