Dressed for the West

In 1840, 12-year-old Sarah Hurdie took a length of homespun material and made a pair of pants for her brother. Over the next few years, those pants likely received a lot of wear, but they were still in good enough shape by the late 1840s that they were worn across the plains with the Mormon pioneers.

And then, said Edith Menna, curator of the International Society Daughters of Utah Pioneers museum, once they arrived in Salt Lake City, "practically every man's pants in the territory was cut from that pattern."

Such a simple thing as a pair of pants can tell you a great deal, she said.

Look at a wedding dress made in 1802, and then worn by three generations of brides. Each time, alterations had to be made, but extra material was carefully tucked inside in case it was needed later. It's an elegant dress, trimmed with lace and flowers, and you can almost feel the hopes and dreams of the brides who wore it.

On the other hand, a sense of adventure is evoked by the buckskin outfit that Luke S. Johnson's wife made for him. It is easy to imaging him trudging through the wilderness in that outfit.

There's something about clothes, said Mary Johnson, president of the DUP, that make the people who wore them seem more real. "You see how many of them were handmade, and know they they were probably made by firelight or candlelight.

You see how skilled the women were." You know the clothes were stitched with love, she said, "and you see how important lovely things were."

And, she added, "you see the clothes, and you think of the culture. You think of the opera, the dances, the social life." Often, the clothes that have been saved were those worn for special occasions.

"I look at these clothes, and I can actually picture my grandmother dressed up like that," said Colette Liddell, public relations chairwoman for the DUP.

That's one reason why the museum wanted to expand its permanent gallery of pioneer clothes. "We have three walk-in closets that are filled, floor-to-ceiling, with boxes of clothes," said Menna. "Many of them have never been displayed."

The biggest problem, she said, is "that we didn't have mannequins that were small enough."

The pioneers may seem like they were bigger than life — and on the inside, they were, said Johnson — but "on the outside, most of them were very small."

Commercial mannequins were simply too big. "To display clothes, we had to take off arms and legs and patch and piece the best we could," said Menna.