On June 26, 1846, a detachment of U.S. soldiers rode into the campsite of Mormon refugees at Mt. Pisgah, Iowa. Captain James Allen carried orders from Colonel Stephen W. Kearny to recruit up to five companies of volunteer infantry from among these displaced Americans for the war with Mexico. The commemoration of the service and subsequent 2,100-mile march of this “Mormon Battalion” has been a part of the collective memory of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ever since. During the battalion's 175th anniversary, a year marked by the global Covid-19 pandemic, members of the church commemorated their volunteer forebears with living history demonstrations, marches, site dedications, and a symposium.1The Mormon Battalion remains by far the most celebrated American unit in the U.S.-Mexican War, a fact made more fascinating considering that the soldiers never once engaged in fighting with Mexicans. Given that gallantry under fire is the usual measure of a soldier's accolades, how did volunteers who served as a peaceful occupying force merit such a singular distinction? This study seeks to understand the evolving memory of the battalion in the century that has passed since its last veteran died. While the basic events of the unit's history remain largely fixed in Mormon consciousness, a closer look reveals that the collective memory of the battalion—specifically as it is expressed through commemorations—has evolved, serving a number of social, political, and religious needs across generations of Latter-day Saints.2Collective memory (frequently shortened to “memory”) as a field of study has blossomed over the last few decades. Early in the twentieth century, French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs coined the term during his pioneering research into the ways that groups remember their pasts. In his highly influential book, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture, historian Michael Kammen expanded upon Halbwachs's theories, stating that “societies in fact reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them, and that they do so with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind—manipulating the past in order to mold the present.” Sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger noted that “collective religious memory is subject to constantly recurring construction” that draws upon its “foundational events.” The collective memory of Latter-day Saints is, therefore, a deliberate and malleable force that can be shaped to meet contemporary needs.3A group's collective memory is a complex interplay of many parts including individual experiences, popular culture, folklore, and commemorations of the past. While all elements of memory building deserve analysis, this study focuses on the latter component. Commemoration differs from other aspects of memory due to its ceremonial function, performative role, and, in the case of erecting memorial structures, its permanence in public space. In this article, I examine four commemorative forms: monuments, heritage groups, historical reenactments, and museums. Along with many other theological and cultural influences, each of these expressions played a role in how generations of Latter-day Saints considered themselves in the context of American history, society, politics, and the views of their time.The shaping of Mormon Battalion memory began a few years after the U.S.-Mexican War. Like many veterans of the conflict, battalion members returned home to subdued welcomes. The war was not universally embraced by church members, and some had hoped that a Mexican victory might chasten the United States. Some returning battalion members had adopted habits that their peers found alarming. Furthermore, having missed the formative experience of crossing the Great Plains with Brigham Young, many of the veterans felt like outsiders. John Doyle Lee, a close associate of Young, recalled him complaining about the soldiers, “the lowest scrapings of Hell were in that (battalion), notwithstanding there was some good men among them.” Lee later recalled, “The Battalion Boys since returning from the Army, have become Idol, Lazy & indolent & with a very few exceptions disapated, indulging in vice & wickedness.” Veteran John Riser noted in his memoir that the community “despised” the returning soldiers, and authorities warned the single women to stay away from them. Within a decade, however, church leaders, under increasing federal scrutiny for establishing a quasi-theocracy in the Rocky Mountains, harnessed the battalion's memory in the political defense of the church, leading to a significant rehabilitation of the veterans’ status in Mormon society.4Beginning in 1855, a number of reunions and celebratory events served both battalion veterans and the church. Ecclesiastical leaders praised the soldiers for their honorable service to a government that persecuted them. At the first reunion, President Brigham Young claimed that past slights between him and the soldiers were a “misunderstanding.” He then recalled the federal government's “unjust demand upon us for troops” before asking the gathered crowd “is there in the whole United States, a more loyal and patriotic band of men?” Basking in the reflected glory of his heroic battalion, Young had tangible evidence of the fealty of his church. Such memories would dominate the next fifty years, giving veterans opportunities to enjoy and promote their newfound respect.5While veterans remain alive, their physical presence carries great meaning and power. Studies of the collective memory of war show a distinct shift, however, once soldiers age and die. Recognizing the value and power of heritage in the present, new groups assume control of old legacies to continue anew the process of memory making. Those who inherit the memory of the dead often seek more permanent reminders of their accomplishments. One popular means of creating memory is the erecting of monuments and markers. Mormon commemoration of the battalion followed this pattern.6At the turn of the twentieth century, women's organizations largely created these monuments. Groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution, Native Daughters of the Golden West, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy worked within the narrow public sphere allowed them by society to commission memorials for perceived heroes and historic events. The Utah-based Daughters of the Mormon Battalion served this purpose for Latter-day Saints. In 1905, the organization promoted a battalion monument but struggled to raise money from among its small membership. The idea languished until 1915 when the group declared that the legacy of the battalion belonged to Utah and the nation and turned to the state government for help.7Governor William Spry supported the women's idea and appealed to the legislature to fund the project declaring: “No other state in the Union has such a unique incident to celebrate as this Battalion incident . . . one of the largest events contributed by any state to the history of our country. Utah owes it to the state and the Nation to build their monument that memory of this greatest march of infantry in the world, and the heroism of those who made it shall not perish from among men.” In 1917, with only five battalion veterans still living, Utah lawmakers allocated $100,000 for the monument, contingent upon raising matching funds from private sources. To raise the needed money, the women joined with church and civic leaders to form the “Utah Mormon Battalion Monument Commission” led by church authority and historian, Brigham H. Roberts. A promotional pamphlet reminded readers that “most of its members have passed to the great beyond. So this monument should be built at once.”8The matter became more urgent when on October 21, 1920, the Salt Lake Tribune announced the death of ninety-eight-year-old Harley Mowrey, the last surviving veteran of the Mormon Battalion. Weeks later, his widow, Martha Jane Sergeant Mowrey, the last surviving woman on the march, also died. With no living reminders of the greatness of the Mormon Battalion and the 1921 semisesquicentennial approaching, promoters had growing urgency to complete the monument.9After an eight-year $250,000 fundraising campaign, the commission agreed upon a sprawling ten thousand-square-foot sculpture and reflecting pond on the grounds of the state capitol in Salt Lake City. The group hired famed Chicago artist Gilbert Riswold who had just sculpted a tribute to Stephen A. Douglas at the Illinois State House. The commission finally unveiled the nation's largest monument dedicated to the U.S.-Mexican War, on May 30, 1927. The centerpiece was a towering carved granite peak that featured sculpted scenes of battalion history including its enlistment, trek through the desert, and discovery of gold in California. Jutting from the bow of the artificial mountain was a larger-than-life battalion volunteer. The bronze soldier promised a permanence that the now extinct veterans could not. The inclusion of an American Indian woman and child known as the “Evanishment of Race” graphically demonstrated that the pioneers supplanted the indigenous people and cultures of Utah. On Utah's Capitol Hill, Mormon memory was dominant.10This monument represented a Latter-day Saint initiative toward a good neighbor policy that sought common ground and inclusion with other Americans. Roberts proclaimed at the dedication ceremony that the “march of that battalion is an incident which connects that band of pioneers with the general movement of the American people.” Over the next century, Mormons erected dozens of monuments and markers to their soldiers, creating physical testaments of their essential inclusion into the narrative of the American experience.11Mormon Battalion monument building continued during the 1930s and corresponded with a larger interest in commemorating historical spaces and events in the American West. On February 21, 1930, U.S. president Herbert Hoover proclaimed a nine month “Observance of the Covered-Wagon Centennial” to celebrate the “great westward tide which established American civilization across a continent.” Throughout the decade, heritage societies erected dozens of monuments noting the accomplishments of pioneers west of the Mississippi River. These included the American Pioneers Trails Association and the Utah Pioneer Trails and Landmarks Association, both of which included prominent Mormons in their ranks. In addition, a number of local Latter-day Saint groups in Arizona joined in the movement and dedicated three modest monuments to the battalion between 1933 and 1937.12Another organization looking for national recognition was the Mormon-dominated hereditary organization Daughters of Utah Pioneers (DUP). In 1938, its members petitioned the federal government to construct a tribute to its battalion ancestors. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) had been building monuments since the mid-1930s, and the DUP expressed its willingness to cosponsor an appropriate project in San Diego. They realized their hopes when the WPA Federal Artist Program proposed the installation of a stone mosaic “petrachrome” in Presidio Park. The freestanding wall, known as “The Grand March,” portrayed a brightly colored scene of eight battalion members pulling a cannon. On January 28, 1940, government and church leaders dedicated the mural. Church president Heber J. Grant used the occasion to predict that the church population would someday grow large enough to merit a temple in San Diego.13During this same era, the Utah Pioneer Trails and Landmarks Association continued an ambitious monument-building agenda. In New Mexico, a stone pillar adjacent to U.S. Route 66, the legendary “Main Street of America,” commemorated the passage of the battalion through the area and further promoted Latter-day Saints in the popular narrative of the nation's history. The twenty-foot-tall monument, crowned with an iron wagon wheel, featured a bronze plaque with a map of the battalion's march through the Southwest and commander Philip St. George Cooke's account of the unit's accomplishments. Thousands of locals watched civic dignitaries and church leaders from Salt Lake City dedicate the monument in June 1940. The New Mexico Department of Transportation demolished the pillar in 1982 during the expansion of Interstate 25, although it warehoused the plaque in hopes of a later restoration.14Following World War II, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continued to remember the Mormon Battalion in its bid for wider public acceptance and inclusion. The 1945 death of Heber J. Grant marked the passing of the church's last polygamous president. His heir, George Albert Smith, stood at a cultural crossroads for the church. Utah was critical to the United States’ defense efforts during the conflict and witnessed a significant wave of migration to the state. Likewise, thousands of Mormon men and women served the armed forces throughout the nation and overseas. Americans’ attitudes toward the Mormons were changing, and Smith was poised to guide his church into a more inclusive future. While forward-thinking, Smith also had a tremendous love of history, particularly that of the American West. With one foot firmly rooted in the past and another stepping into the present and beyond, Smith became “a personified bridge between the early and modern eras in Church history.” As such, he sought to modernize the Mormon public image by promoting the contemporary church as a patriotic institution with deep roots in American history. While still an apostle of the church, he joined the Sons of the American Revolution and rose to become a vice president of the group. In addition to helping organize the American Pioneers Trails Association, he was also a founding member and president of Utah Pioneer Trails and Landmarks Association that erected 120 monuments and markers in his beloved West.15California's statehood centennial in 1950 provided an opportunity for George Albert Smith to promote the role his church played in the early settlement of the state. The Sons of Utah Pioneers (SUP) chartered buses and traced the march of the Mormon Battalion through the Southwest. Latter-day Saints, including Smith, founded the SUP in 1933 to preserve “the memory and heritage of the early pioneers of Utah Territory and the western U.S.” In 1950, three hundred costumed members participated in parades, flag raisings, and other commemorations between Mesa, Arizona, and San Bernadino, California. The weeklong “Pioneers Trek” allowed the SUP to promote a forgotten aspect of American history while engaging in some beneficial memory making along the way.16The Pioneers Trek exceeded expectations. Over thirty thousand people showed up for “Mormon Day” festivities in San Bernardino. A Mormon Battalion parade drew ten thousand to downtown Los Angeles. Governor Earl Warren presided over the march from the steps of city hall. He spoke about the battalion's role in the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill. Elevating both the importance of his state and the church, Warren claimed that California gold bankrolled the Union's war effort thereby saving the nation from slavery and dissolution. Church president Smith concluded the ceremony extolling the battalion's accomplishments and recounting his family ties to the arrival of the Mayflower and the American Revolution. The implications were clear, a church with such connections to the founding of the nation was quintessentially American.17Throughout the Pioneers Trek, SUP members wore replica 1870s Indian Wars uniforms. Not only did these costumes not match the uniforms worn by soldiers in the U.S.-Mexican War, they had nothing to do with actual battalion clothing. As part of an irregular force, battalion volunteers opted to return a portion of their uniform allowances to their families and wore civilian dress. This proved a tremendous sacrifice as their clothes quickly wore out on the rough trail, leaving them sometimes barefoot and wearing an assortment of animal skins, indigenous apparel, Mexican accoutrements, and anything else they could procure for themselves. Such a rustic appearance, however, conflicted with the neat image that the SUP wanted to promote. The sharp-looking uniforms of the 1870s avoided this reality. Ultimately though, the Pioneers Trek was about constructing cultural bridges, and a carefully molded collective memory of the battalion made for better building material than a literal retelling of historical fact.18While the SUP marched through the streets of Los Angeles, plans were already underway for an expansive monument to the Mormon Battalion in the city. In 1949, civil engineers hoped to expand the Cahuenga Pass Freeway into downtown, bisecting the hill where the ruins of Fort Moore stood. This was where the Mormon Battalion and other U.S. troops raised the American flag over Mexican Los Angeles. Aside from radically altering the historical landscape, the freeway construction necessitated a large concrete retaining wall. DUP members convinced the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to turn the large wall into a Mormon Battalion monument. To help fund the project, the church pledged to pay for half of the sculptural elements commemorating the battalion and to encourage local members to fund the rest. With financial commitments from Utah, city officials organized the Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial Advisory Committee and expanded the proposal to include other Anglo-California pioneer groups.19While the advisory committee labored on its monument, church authorities considered organizing a new heritage society to promote the Mormon Battalion to the American public. During the late 1940s, apostle and later president of the church David O. McKay suggested to World War I veteran Fred M. Reese that he organize a group of battalion descendants. In 1954, Reese and other Latter-day Saints founded the U.S. Mormon Battalion, Inc. to “perpetuat[e] the memory of the Battalion, fulfilling the prophecy of Brigham Young that the soldiers would be held in honorable remembrance, marking the graves of Battalion members, and marking the Battalion's trail.” Similar to the 1950 Pioneers Trek, the organization adopted the frontier-style Indian Wars uniform as its ceremonial dress, a tradition that continues into the twenty-first century. Since its founding, the group has been a fixture at parades, monument dedications, religious devotionals, and academic symposia, both promoting and protecting the legacies of their battalion ancestors. Its first order of business, however, was identifying additional battalion sites and supporting the commemorative work at Fort Moore.20On July 3, 1958, after four years of fundraising followed by four years of construction, the Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial Advisory Committee unveiled its massive $373,887 monument. Designed by local California architects Kazumi Adachi and Daisuke Dike Nagano, the installation included a sixty-eight-foot-tall concrete pylon and forty-seven-foot-tall waterfall that spread approximately four hundred feet along historic Hill Street. The retaining wall featured a forty-five-foot-tall terra cotta relief sculpture highlighting the coming of Anglo-American culture to Los Angeles including agriculture, ranching, and modern technology. The dramatic centerpiece featured a scene of soldiers from the Mormon Battalion, U.S. Dragoons, and New York Volunteers raising the Stars and Stripes over the city on July 4, 1847.21Like the monument at the Utah State Capitol, the Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial marked the “evanishment of race.” Agriculture, ranching, and technology all existed in California before 1847, but, as implied by the monument, it was the arrival of Americans that proved the modern genesis of “this land of promise.” Historian Phoebe S. Kropp described this as the state's mythic “racial progression” of Indians, Spaniards, and Anglo-Americans. While Californians enjoyed celebrating a romanticized and distant legacy of crumbling missions and raven-tressed señoritas, they viewed it merely as the decayed compost into which they transplanted their superior culture and institutions. The SUP magazine shared this view: “We have long taken pride in honoring the conquistadores and heroic padres . . . who laid imperishable Spanish and Mexican foundations for our California culture. California's pioneers of our American culture and form of government seem not always to have received the recognition they deserve. This monument helps make up for this disparity.” The following year, the Daughters of Utah Pioneers added to California's monumental landscape at Presidio Park by dedicating a polished granite and bronze monolith to the women who marched with the Mormon Battalion to San Diego. Its location, the “Plymouth Rock of the Pacific Coast,” marked the first permanent Spanish settlement on the western seaboard of the United States, further anchoring Latter-day Saints to the cultural and racial progression of California. By the close of the 1950s, Latter-day Saints had earned a place in Anglo-California history—a legacy that previously relegated American Indians, Spaniards, and Mexicans to a mythic and remote past. Mormons had learned to harness a memory of their battalion ancestors that, combined with the popular racist attitudes of the time, established them in the present mainstream of the West.22During the following decade, Mormons erected seven more markers and monuments to the battalion in Arizona and California. The most significant of these began in 1968 when church leaders gave an “assignment” to the Sons of Utah Pioneers to raise money for the placement of a new Mormon Battalion monument in San Diego. When the city celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of its founding in 1969, the SUP donated an $18,000, twelve-foot-tall bronze statue of a battalion volunteer to install next to the two existing monuments in Presidio Park. This impressive piece of civic art, by Utah sculptor Edward J. Fraughton, became the focal point of the space. Elder Hugh B. Brown of the First Presidency delivered the dedication and Apostle Mark E. Peterson offered the invocation at the monument's unveiling ceremony on November 22, 1969.23Although Presidio Park drew some foot traffic, the main tourist attraction was the adjoining neighborhood of “Old Town.” When a building became available in this historical center of San Diego, church officials acquired it with a new project in mind. They developed the Mormon Battalion Memorial Visitors’ Center, a museum dedicated to the role of the Latter-day Saints in the early history and settlement of Southern California. A museum fit well within the church's agenda for mainstream acceptance, but it became clear by the center's opening that its mission, like that of other visitors’ centers, was to proselyte. When church president Harold B. Lee gave the dedicatory prayer on November 6, 1972, he implored God to “set it apart as a place of missionary dedication that it may stand here enriched by thy spirit; that all who come within these walls might feel the influence that shall be found here and go from here sobered in their minds to pray, to listen, and to learn, and hopefully to come into thy kingdom.” The church's rapidly expanding missionary program was now impressing the memory of the Mormon Battalion into the service of saving souls in California.24The new center beckoned tourists strolling the streets of Old Town with a sign promising a “significant chapter in American history.” Instead, guests were met by young missionaries who inquired about their hometowns and knowledge of Mormonism. They provided an array of religious pamphlets for those unfamiliar with the faith. A small selection of reproduction artifacts framed the story of the Mormon Battalion, but the remainder of the center addressed Mormon history in California and the unique belief in Jesus Christ visiting pre-Columbian America. The overt proselytizing mission of the site was not without controversy. In 1980, museum curator and senior planner for the city of San Diego, Terri Virden Jacques, reviewed the visitors center in the context of the historical offerings in Old Town, “Although about twenty-five percent of the displays are related to the history of San Diego, the majority are concerned with the Mormon religion . . . and the visitor should be aware that the material presented runs more along the theological than the historical point of view.”25To promote the Mormon Battalion Memorial Visitors Center, the church began a media campaign in Southern California. Radio commercials invited the public to come learn about the “intrepid band of 500 who marched from Kansas to San Diego in 1846 to 47, during the Mexican War, to help secure California for the nation.” Another radio spot hailed the center that “commemorates the soldiers who undertook the longest infantry march in U.S. military history to help defend California during the Mexican War.” The message was clear: Mormons were critical to bringing the state into the Union, and ought to be remembered for this contribution. The subtext is equally interesting. In spite of strong evidence that the United States provoked the war as a pretext to wrestle California from Mexico, the advertisement suggested that the state needed the Mormons to “defend” itself from Mexicans. Six weeks before the visitors center dedication, the Brown Berets ended a twenty-one-day occupation of Southern California's Santa Catalina Island. These Chicano activists challenged White hegemony in Southern California, particularly regarding the historical and political interpretations of the U.S.-Mexican War and its aftermath. Whether intentional or not, the media campaign evoked romantic notions of Manifest Destiny that appealed to California's White conservatives during a time of social and racial turmoil.26After battalion supporters erected seven monuments during the 1960s, there was a dearth of new construction until the 1980s. Was it a conscious effort on the part of church leaders who were growing their missionary programs among Latin Americans? Perhaps it was a reaction to the antimilitarism of the 1970s Vietnam War era. Whatever the motivation, commemoration waned until the political pendulum of the nation swung to the right with the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980. Battalion boosters, looking to expand their commemorative geography, collaborated with the Kansas State Historical Society to dedicate a marker to celebrate the starting point of the Mormon trek at Fort Leavenworth. The church invited the newly inaugurated president to dedicate the monument in 1981. Declining the invitation, Reagan sent his special assistant Stephen M. Studdert to deliver his well wishes. He proclaimed, “The dedication of this historical marker reminds us all once more of the great sacrifices exacted of our ancestors as they struggled to win the freedoms we enjoy today.” Reagan confirmed his belief that the Mormon pioneers were part of a shared American heritage. He also reframed the invasion of Mexico as a war for freedom rather than conquest. Battalion members were not part of a conquering army; they were American freedom fighters bringing liberty to the Southwest.27The Fort Leavenworth dedication renewed a passion for Mormon Battalion monument building. The next two decades saw an unprecedented twenty monuments and markers built between Kansas and California. Erected by the church and a variety of Mormon-supported groups, these guardians of memory reminded visitors that the Latter-day Saints had played a role in the history and development of these areas. While the building of monuments was a conventional means of preserving remembrance, battalion memory evolved to take on new meanings during this era. There was a growing supernatural association with the lands where the battalion marched and the growth of the church. President Heber J. Grant first alluded to this connection in 1940 when he prophesied the building of the San Diego Temple while dedicating the WPA monument at Presidio Park.28In 1988, the church broke ground on the long-awaited San Diego Temple. Some residents of the upscale community of La Jolla, however, were upset by the prospect of a towering edifice with an unfamiliar aesthetic in their town. One critic called it more a “cartoonish fantasy than a serious and fresh work of architecture.” Another referred to the rising building merely as “rockets to God.” Such criticism painted the Latter-day Saints as alien and foreign in a land where their ancestors once trod. However, Mormon leaders sought spiritual and historical ties to ground already made sacred by the presence of the Mormon Battalion.29In 1993, local church authority and decorated combat veteran Lance B. Wickman helped plan the dedication of the San Diego Temple. After his promotion to the First Quorum of the Seventy, he reflected on his experience: I felt we could not dedicate this temple without doing something to remember the sacrifice of the Mormon Battalion. I called a friend who was active in one of the Mormon Battalion commemorative associations. I asked him if on the morning of the first day of the open house we could have a color guard of men in battalion uniform and a solitary bugler playing “To the Colors” as the American flag was raised for the first time over these sacred premises. . . . The mesmerizing notes of the bugle floated across the tranquil temple grounds. In that moment I felt them there—the men of the battalion—formed one last time in silent ranks as the flag of the land they had served so valiantly rose above the temple that represented the Zion they had sought so earnestly.30This spiritual muster from beyond the grave may have inspired Mormon Battalion reenactments at temple dedicatory celebrations at th