“Contents,” Liahona, Feb. 1997
Liahona
February 1997
Volume 21, Number 2
On the cover: Members of the Mormon Battalion had to leave their loved ones just as the Saints were beginning their great 2,000-kilometer exodus from Iowa to the Rocky Mountains. One battalion member, Henry Standage, wrote: “I felt willing to leave my friends and enlist according to council, though at this time my wife was without house or tent, and with but little provisions, 3 dollars in money, one cow” (in Franklin Alfred Golder, Thomas A. Bailey, and J. Lyman Smith, The March of the Mormon Battalion from Council Bluffs to California: Taken from the Journal of Henry Standage [1928], 138–39.
Back cover: When the Saints were expelled from Nauvoo, Louisa Barnes Pratt faced the prospect of moving to the Rocky Mountains alone. Her husband had been sent to the South Pacific as a missionary. When she wondered why “those who had sent my husband to the ends of the earth did not call to inquire whether I could prepare myself for such a perilous journey,” she was told that they considered her capable enough to go herself and even to assist others. “The remark awakened in me a spirit of self-reliance,” she wrote. In short order she had a team and wagon and drove out of the city feeling “comparatively happy.” Such was—and is—the courage and faith of the Mormon pioneers.
The back cover quotation comes from “Autobiography of Louisa Barnes Pratt,” Heart Throbs of the West, compiled by Kate B. Carter [1947], 235–36). (Cover photography by Welden Andersen. See “A Legacy of Faith,” page 32.)
Inside back cover: The First Vision, by Del Parson. In the spring of 1820, God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to the boy Joseph Smith in a grove of trees. “When the light rested upon me,” Joseph said, “I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!” (JS—H 1:17).