The Best Free Tourist Attraction in San Diego?

I had heard of the Mormon Battalion. I’m sure that at least once over the years I’ve read about it, only to forget everything I read a day later.  But that’s now changed forever. On Monday I finally visited the new Mormon Battalion-themed visitor’s attraction in Old Town. Do I hear you yawning? I was ready to yawn too, to doze on my feet. But I walked out thinking this was one of the best historical presentations I’ve experienced anywhere. Amazingly, it’s open every day of the year, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., with the tour presentations running every 15 minutes. And it doesn’t cost a cent.

I visited the center as part of a San Diego Professional Tour Guide Association group, so we were given a brief introduction before we started our tour. An elder from the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints explained that a Mormon Battalion visitors’ center first opened on this site (2510 Juan Street, directly north of Heritage Park) in the early 1970s. But the nondescript building “wasn’t appropriate for this area,” he said. Certainly it didn’t suggest that anything exciting might be happening within.

For the recent $5 million renovation, the structure was essentially gutted and rebuilt in the style I think of as High Disney: faux Spanish Colonial, with simulated crumbling and deteriorated stucco but actually clean and new and offering polished entertainment within.

Two fresh-faced female missionaries in 19th-century garb led us to antechamber under an arbor bearing fake bougainvillea and began to talk about the black and white photos of old-timers on the wall. That’s when the real fun began and the Battalion members in the pictures started talking — arguing with each other, interjecting opinions, sneezing, and generally carrying on.   

When the video characters got up and walked out of their picture frames, heading off to the left, our group followed them through a door, emerging into a replica of one of the Iowa campsites where the Mormons fled after being chased out of Illinois. We settled onto replica logs to watch the Battalion’s story play out on tent walls and sheets (cum movie screens).

The Encampment Room

We later moved to two more chambers, the first a recreated storehouse at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, one of the stops on the battalion’s march. There some of the digital Battalion characters talked to us through one of the windows, until a lightning storm caused them to hurry away for cover. As the storm raged, we all got to heft life-like replicas of the flintlock rifles borne by the Battalion members.

Our final stop was a replication of the old San Diego courthouse interior, where we learned about the remainder of the Battalion’s journey and final arrival in San Diego late in January, 1847. The surviving participants had covered about 2,000 miles — one of the longest infantry marches in American history (and accomplished by the only unit in US history ever created solely on the basis of religious affiliation.)

The production values of the films that told all this history were Hollywoodesque, and after the 40-minute group “tour” was over, there was more to experience: touch-screen video displays, participatory gold-panning and brick-making exhibits, and authentic artifacts from the march (e.g. journals, baskets, a gold pouch, a cannon). Visitors can even have their photo taken in front of a historical backdrop and have it instantly made into a professional-looking postcard (again all free.)

When I got home I found that Wikipedia’s entry on the Batallion presents its inception a bit differently, suggesting that Brigham Young was the catalyst for the adventure (he was actively hustling the US government for help in moving his flock west) rather than President Polk. (The new attraction has Polk approaching the Mormons, calling for volunteers to serve in the Army of the West and fight in the newly declared war against Mexico, and Young seeing in this invitation the will of God.) But I’m quibbling; the two versions cohere in more ways than not.

It also struck me that the new center was no doubt intended in part as a proselytical tool and that it probably will be a powerful one. We were told that the lowest daily attendance since it opened five months ago has been about 150 visitors — compared to the 10-20 per day it was averaging before the renovations. How many of those visitors will wind up being converted to the religion? I have no idea, but I’d wager that, like me, a high percentage at least will have been entertained.