When you think about it, Las Vegas is the one place these folks may not stand out. But they will be easy to spot at any other point along the 800-mile trail between Salt Lake City and San Bernardino.
Just look for more than 200 Mormons dressed in pioneer garb and traveling in covered wagons.
The arduous trek this spring and summer will replicate the Mormon journey to Southern California 150 years ago, when 437 pioneers traveled across the vast deserts of southern Utah, Nevada and California to settle at the base of the Cajon Pass in what is now San Bernardino.
The wagon train is scheduled to leave Salt Lake City on April 25 and arrive in San Bernardino at the end of June for a three-day festival at Glen Helen Regional Park. Organizers said Southern California Mormons will make up the majority of the "pioneers."
"This is a unique story in the history of the West, yet nobody knows about it," said Marilyn Mills, co-director of the Heritage Trails Celebration. The San Bernardino woman will participate in part of the trek.
In 1851, Brigham Young, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sent colonists to establish a western outpost that would serve as a major link in the church's supply line between San Pedro's harbor and Salt Lake City. The community would also be a way station for missionaries and converts from the Pacific islands.
"This was the first Anglo American settlement in Southern California," said Nick Cataldo, a past president of the San Bernardino Historical and Pioneer Society.
The boom town also included freed slaves, former slaveholders, Jewish merchants, trappers, prospectors, Spanish landowners and Native Americans, according to Edward Leo Lyman's book, "San Bernardino: The Rise and Fall of a California Community."
Heritage Trails organizers said their reenactment will underscore the community's diversity and its ability to come together.
"It's the most unlikely group you've ever imagined," Mills said. She quoted a passage in a pioneer's diary: "They worked almost as one family, they were so united."
Cataldo called it "an amazingly cohesive group."
Even more amazing when you consider the times and church history. Though always antislavery, Mormons didn't allow blacks into the priesthood until 1978. The belief, since rejected, was that African Americans were descendants of Cain and carried the curse of the man who killed his brother Abel.
