Abstract:
THE NATION; A slow-moving, day-after-day re-enactment attests to the pioneer spirit of the fastest-growing religion in the USA

EMIGRATION CANYON, Utah -- For 91 days and more than 1,000 miles, Roger and Lisa Holgreen have pulled a two-wheeled handcart in the footsteps of their ancestors.

Dressed in 19th-century pioneer garb, the brother and sister will trudge 24 more grueling miles today before pitching their final camp, with about 700 other people, in this mountain gap outside Salt Lake City.

After that, it's all downhill for the Mormon Pioneer Trail wagon train, a 150th anniversary re-enactment of the cross-country exodus to an earthly Zion in the not-so-Godforsaken Utah desert.

At midday Tuesday, they'll reach the historic site, now a state park, where church leader Brigham Young spied the Great Salt Lake Valley and told his persecuted followers, This is the right place.

Tens of thousands of Mormons, or members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, will line the route to cheer the arrival of trekkers on horseback and on foot, in nearly 70 covered wagons and pulling 15 handcarts.

"I'm getting butterflies. It's finally hit me," says Roger Holgreen, 30, who has shed 51 of his 352 pounds along the trail from Omaha.

"I'm still the heaviest pioneer. People did not think I could finish this trip," says Holgreen, a soft-spoken, 6-foot-3 youth prison counselor from Bountiful, Utah. "My body has shrunk. But I've had spiritual experiences inside that have made my soul grow."

So have many of the 10,000 others who have traveled at least part of the route west through Nebraska, Wyoming and Utah from the Mormon pioneers' 1847 ``winter quarters'' outside Omaha.

The original pioneers had fled there the previous year after mobs murdered church founder and prophet Joseph Smith and torched the Mormons' thriving settlement at Nauvoo, Ill. Until the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, 70,000 Mormons followed the original 148 by wagon or on foot. About 6,000 died on the way, most of them children.

A century and a half later, the re-enacted trek to religious freedom has become a powerful missionary message for the 9.7 million-member church.

The participants, including 222 who have gone every mile, have survived cold, heat, wagon rollovers, blisters upon blisters -- and interviews upon interviews, with more than 120 news organizations from around the world.

"We had no idea (the wagon train) would catch the world like it has," says M. Russell Ballard, one of the 12 Apostles atop the church's lay hierarchy.

But evangelical and fundamentalist Christians still consider Mormonism a dangerous sect, even campaigning on the Internet against Mormon cult beliefs. "I would simply call it counterfeit Christianity," says Phil Roberts of the Southern Baptist Convention, which plans to evangelize in Salt Lake City next June when it holds its 1998 convention there.

The Latter-day Saints is the fastest-growing denomination in America, swelling by 50% each decade. Its conservative, middle-class following has spread far beyond Utah, where three-fourths of the population still claim Mormon ties. About 50,000 lay missionaries toil in 160 countries, and church membership abroad has exploded, now outnumbering those inside the USA.

That's clearly evident on the trail, where foreign converts have come to experience the pioneers' ordeal.

Japanese member Osamu Sekiguchi, 35, traveling with his wife and two young sons, files computer dispatches from his wagon to schools and newspapers back home.

Among the handcart walkers, Englishman Gordon Beharrell's miraculous recovery from a hospital bed en route is the talk of the trek.

Stricken on the trail with excruciating pain from a botched colostomy after cancer surgery 18 months ago, Beharrell went under the knife in Nebraska. Mormon ministers anointed him with oil and gave healing "priesthood blessings." Ten days later, he was walking 25 miles a day again.

"I've captured the spirit of the saints 150 years ago. You've got to suffer," says Beharrell, 60. "If I hadn't walked, I'd have crawled."

As many as a third of the trekkers are non-Mormons, often history buffs or outdoor adventurers. But one, Iowa horse trainer Larry "Turbo" Stewart, 25, is so impressed by the Mormons' faith that he will be baptized into the church Tuesday at trail's end.

Nearly everyone else on the wagon train has numerous pioneer ancestors who made the arduous journey, or died trying. Anna Wintch, was one of them. Wintch, a Swiss emigrant, traveled more than 900 miles in 1863, only to die of sickness in Wyoming. Wrapped in a blanket and crisscrossed with willows, she lay in an unmarked grave that archeologists now believe they have discovered.

"We're going to do DNA testing," says a descendant of Park City, Utah, now on the trail with her daughters.

"I hope she's here, and I hope she knows," she adds, her eyes brimming with tears. "I'm finishing it for her."

©USA Today Information Network; Jul 21, 1997
As told by: Lori Sharn