The Pioneer Monument's Measure

Look at the pedestal under that statue.

It is twenty-two feet tall. That number was chosen deliberately. When the designers of the Pioneer Monument gathered here in nineteen eighteen to plan what would stand at this site, they reached for the one fact about the winter of eighteen forty-six to forty-seven that needed no argument, no interpretation, no survivor account that anyone could dispute. Twenty-two feet was the recorded depth of the snow. The cabin walls of the Breen family, who sheltered here, were still standing when the first rescue party arrived in February of eighteen forty-seven. The upper logs of the walls were visible above the snow line. That is how the rescuers found the structure. The snow was twenty-two feet deep.

The architects encoded the disaster in stone rather than words. The family at the top of the pedestal, a man, a woman, a child, looks west toward California. West is the direction the emigrants were trying to go. West is where the snow came from.

The monument was dedicated in nineteen eighteen, seventy-one years after the rescue. By that point most of the survivors were dead. McGlashan had published his eighteen seventy-nine history, based on interviews with survivors while they still lived. He had spent years collecting their accounts, reading their letters, pressing them for details. The monument that came after that work is quieter than the history. It says pioneer. It says westward. It says the snow was twenty-two feet deep. What it does not say is what happened at the end of the fifth month, when the food was gone and the next rescue party had not come.

That silence is also a choice. The monument's designers made it. The twenty-two-foot pedestal is the only honest measurement on this entire site.