A Pioneer Spirit

Maria (Mary) Bonelli Eyring, circa 1890.

In December 1853 the first group of Swiss Saints prepared to emigrate. Thirty-six members from nine families, who had introduced the Church to each other, were leaving their green mountains and valleys to build Zion in Utah. “The work of the Lord in Italy and Switzerland will feel greatly the absence of these good men [and women],” wrote Elder T. B. H. Stenhouse. They joined Italian and British Saints aboard the John M. Wood in Liverpool on March 6, 1854, and arrived in New Orleans on May 2.

The 1854 group was the first of what would become a steady stream of emigrants over the next century. The inn Rothen Ochsen in Basel was a rallying point. From there they set out on their long journey by train, by boat, and on foot into the valleys of the Rocky Mountains. “There toward the setting sun lives a people who know God [and] call themselves after His name,” one migrant, Johannes Huber, wrote.

The Swiss Saints settled throughout Utah and Nevada. At the October 1861 general conference, Church President Brigham Young called Daniel Bonelli to lead 85 Swiss Saints—including Daniel’s sister, Maria, and her husband, Henry Eyring—to southern Utah. From makeshift shelters, they built a dam and homes and planted gardens, orchards, and vineyards. The Saints persisted through arid conditions and devastating flooding in 1862 to build Santa Clara, and they helped build the St. George Utah Temple—the first completed since the temple in Nauvoo, Illinois. Another group established themselves in Midway, Utah, sometimes referred to as “Little Switzerland.”