Thousands celebrate Days of ’47 Parade in nod to Utah’s pioneer heritage

Thousands thronged Monday’s route for the Days of ‘47 Parade and its sparkling slice of Utah Americana.

Marching bands, intricate floats of dazzling colors, clowns on tricycles, antique cars and horseback riders of assorted stripes intermingled with faith and frontier values as the two-hour rolling party filed raucously down Salt Lake City’s 200 East from South Temple toward Liberty Park.

Utah’s Pioneer Day celebrates the July 24 arrival in the Salt Lake Valley 176 years ago by Brigham Young and a company of trail-weary members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The 2023 parade’s 150 or so entries, including 115 floats, this year followed a theme of “Pioneer Stories ... Values to Build On!” — culminating a stream of weekend events, social gatherings, pageantry and fireworks displays to mark the state holiday.

A gentle cloud cover brought temperatures down from their forecast of 101 degrees to the high 90s, after topping 100 degrees three consecutive days before. Shade trees, tents and lots of ice cream, watermelon, sodas, bottled water, mist sprayers, squirt guns and handheld fans all helped keep Monday’s spectators cool.

Droves of runners in the Deseret News Marathon, Utah’s oldest road race, got underway at 5:30 a.m., and stragglers still threaded their way through city streets overlapping the parade by midmorning.

Mexican horse riders with wide sombreros demonstrated the equestrian traditions of Charreria, and several community groups with Pacific Islander heritage marched in traditional wraparound skirts, along with Scottish bagpipers that sent wailing tunes aloft to cheers from the crowd.

Many Utah cities, Latter-day Saint groups, prominent businesses and other community institutions also made appearances.

Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall waved to observers with her husband, Kyle LaMalfa, followed not far behind by Yoshinao Gaun, mayor of Matsumoto in Japan, part of a delegation visiting to mark 65 years as a sister city to Utah’s capital.

Mendenhall and Guan planned a ceremonial tree planting at the Japanese section of the city’s International Peace Gardens later Monday.

Road closures on crosstown traffic had largely lifted by midafternoon.

Earlier in the day, Salt Lake City police arrested a 53-year-old woman at the parade for allegedly grabbing an 8-year-old boy by the head and pulling him out of a wagon while he traveled into the street with his mother and 9-year-old sibling to avoid a transient camp.

An affidavit filed by police said the woman, who later said she’d been confused about the wagon’s color, was booked at the Salt Lake County jail on a charge of child abuse with injury after the boy suffered small bruises.

Hundreds of families kept up a tradition of camping along the 13-block parade route the night before to secure a choice spot, a pattern continuing since the storied parade ran down Main Street.

Large multigenerational clans, spread out on blankets and folding chairs and often totting toddlers in wagons, lined the celebratory circuit days in advance, positioning themselves several families deep on both sides.

Many feasted Monday from well-provisioned picnics, ice chests and tables filled with snacks as they watched.

The first parade of its kind was held in 1849, two years after Latter-day Saint pioneers arrived in the valley. By the 1930s, a version called “Covered Wagon Days” had become an annual event, renamed Days of ’47 sometime in the 1940s.

While the festivities reflect the growing diversity of Utah, the parade and adjoining Days of ‘47 Rodeo also commemorate agrarian and frontier values that bind many Utahns together through pioneer ancestry.

Children scurried nearby on a patch of grass along 200 East while Grant Holland, a family patriarch from Layton, chuckled as a wave of bubbles washed over onlookers from a passing float and a cowboy asked them all to yell, “Yahoo!”

Holland’s original pioneer ancestor, John Holland, ventured westward across the Plains to Utah as a 13-year-old orphan in 1853, the man said, with no shoes and wearing a straw hat with the top worn through.

Generations later, the extended clan of John Holland’s descendants — now including the Holland, Johansen and Fingerle branches of the family — make a yearly pilgrimage for the Salt Lake City parade, Holland said, and this year they brought visitors from Iceland and Germany.

“We’re having a wonderful time,” Holland said with a smile.