“Contents,” Ensign, July 2000, 1
Ensign
July 2000
Volume 30 Number 7
On the covers: Front: Council Bluffs Ferry and Cottonwood Trees, Iowa, by Frederick Piercy. One of Piercy’s finest works shows pioneers repacking wagons to board the Council Bluffs Ferry. Back: Elk Horn River Ferry, by Frederick Piercy. Items courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, LDS Church Archives, and Museum of Church History and Art. In 1853 Frederick Piercy, Latter-day Saint British artist, chronicled the emigration from Liverpool, England, to the Salt Lake Valley. Above: Piercy’s engraving of the camp at Elk Horn Ferry. The other two items, not by Piercy, came across the plains with Latter-day Saint pioneers: a journal and a plate bearing a drawing of the Nauvoo Temple.
Inside front: Brigham’s Last Creek Camp, by Bruce Clovis Smith, oil on canvas, 24″ x 36″, 1999. Courtesy of Museum of Church History and Art, Fifth International Art Competition. On 23 July 1847, the day before he entered the Salt Lake Valley, President Brigham Young camped at Last Creek in Emigration Canyon. Most of the 148 pioneers in the main company entered the valley on the 23rd, but President Young and others who were ill or attending to them lagged one day behind. Here we see President Young in Wilford Woodruff’s carriage (upper right). President Young had suggested that some of the men gather firewood, as we see them doing here, instead of cutting down trees.
Inside back: “Hurrah, Hurrah for Israel,” by Robert T. Barrett, oil on canvas, 4′ x 6′, 1997. On 18 September 1839, Elders Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles left Nauvoo to start their mission to England. Both were sick, as were their families. Elder Kimball’s wife, Vilate, could not get out of bed. He tells of the parting: “I … said to Brother Brigham, ‘This is pretty tough, isn’t it; let’s rise up and give them a cheer.’ We arose, and swinging our hats three times over our heads, shouted: ‘Hurrah, Hurrah for Israel.’ Vilate, hearing the noise, arose from her bed and came to the door. … After this I felt a spirit of joy” (in Orson F. Whitney, The Life of Heber C. Kimball [1945], 266).