Imagine yourself in the middle of eating breakfast in your home when an officer of the law shows up intending to arrest you. He is armed. You are armed. You have a few moments to consider fleeing out the back door of the house and making a run for it. You decide to play it cool, go back to your breakfast, and let the chips fall where they may. You even invite the arresting officer to read out his warrant while you eat. Maybe there will be a better chance to escape later.

That, at any rate, is what you do if you are Charles Ora Card, a father, husband, missionary, schoolteacher, lawman, builder, polygamist, almost lifelong member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the eventual founder, while in hiding from U.S. authorities, of Cardston, Alberta, Canada.

Pioneer Day, on Monday, specifically commemorates the entry into the Salt Lake Valley of early LDS leader Brigham Young and the first company of Mormon pioneers -- but in a larger sense, it also honors the cooperation of men and women like Card, a Utah Territory settler and 31-year resident, whose community building led directly to the creation of Utah in 1896.

Card's own account of his arrest (for practicing polygamy) by Marshal E.W. Exum, while a resident of Logan in northern Utah's Cache Valley, is just one of thousands of daily entries recorded in 23 diaries that have now been collected in a single volume and published by Brigham Young University's Religious Studies Center as "The Diaries of Charles Ora Card: The Utah Years, 1871-1886."

(Like a lot of sequels, "The Utah Years" is actually a prequel. "The Diaries of Charles Ora Card: The Canadian Years, 1889-1903" was printed by the University of Utah Press in 1993.)

The decision to publish Card's reflections was motivated by his historical stature, said Richard Neitzel Holzapfel , the Religious Studies Center's managing director of publications.

"Diaries are not big sellers," Holzapfel said. But as a key figure in the establishment of two thriving Latter-day Saint communities (in Cache Valley and Cardston), an important builder (construction superintendent of both the Logan Tabernacle and Logan Temple) and an intimate associate of dozens of prominent early LDS Church general authorities, Card is a person whose personal perspective might be of interest to a variety of readers.

Donald G. Godfrey, who edited and annotated "The Utah Years" with Kenneth W. Godfrey (Donald G. Godfrey and B.Y. Card compiled "The Canadian Years"), said that Card's writings provide an informative -- and sometimes intimidating -- ground-level view into 19th-century pioneer living.

"I don't know if I would have the strength to walk to Bear Lake in the snow to attend stake conference," Donald Godfrey said. "I think I would skip it."

For Kenneth Godfrey, the diaries illustrate important similarities between the Mormonism of Card's era and the faith as it is practiced today. "Mormons in the 1870s and '80s were not fanatical," Kenneth Godfrey said.

Card's account, he said, demonstrates that instead of continually discussing doctrinal oddities "they were talking about paying their tithing, living the Word of Wisdom, beautifying their homes and trying to live like Jesus.

"Some might say that's kind of dull, but it's a good kind of dull."

Holzapfel said that the diaries also have contemporary relevance. Cache Valley during the years of its settlement and early growth, he said, has interesting similarities to present-day Utah Valley with its ongoing boom in population. During his tenure as an LDS stake president in Cache Valley, Card observed first hand as a local culture once wholly dominated by Mormons was diversified by the arrival of Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists and others.

"There's nothing new in Utah," Holzapfel said. "It's always been happening."

Donald Godfrey, a communications professor at Arizona State University, has an obvious point of origin for his interest in Card, who is his great-grandfather.

(Another prominent descendant is noted science fiction and fantasy author Orson Scott Card, also a great-grandson. Orson Card, responding via e-mail, said that his favorite story from his ancestor's history is a result of Card's careful observance, while in Canada, of Brigham Young's counsel to feed the Indians rather than fight them. The practice bore fruit when Card's infant son, Orson Rega -- later Orson Card's grandfather -- contracted pneumonia and a treatment administered by the local Blackfoot tribe proved instrumental in saving his life.)

Kenneth Godfrey, a retired LDS Church Educational System teacher and administrator who is not related to his co-editor, joined the project because of his familiarity with local history in Cache Valley, where he has resided for the past 25 years.

In addition to preparing the text of Card's diaries for publication, Donald Godfrey and Kenneth Godfrey researched each entry and created hundreds of footnotes and annotations.

For example, in an entry dated Aug. 27, 1878, Card writes that he spent the balance of his day attending to business at the Temple Fork Sawmill and "instructing the forman (sic) J.G. Kimball what to do as he was a new hand at the business."

A footnote explains that "J.G." is Jonathan Golden Kimball, who became an LDS general authority 14 years after the date of that entry and once related a humorous story about cussing out a team of six oxen while working as a "bull-whacker" at the Temple Fork mill.

In another entry, this one dated Sept. 21, 1879, Card notes that a visiting LDS Church authority decried heirs of recently deceased church president Brigham Young, who were then suing church officials, saying that the heirs had "lost the Spirit of God by listening to Lawyers (sic)."

A footnote fills in the details: The heirs alleged that church leaders had unlawfully seized a property valued at $2.5 million. Executors of Young's estate initiated a countersuit, and the matter was eventually settled out of court with the heirs receiving $75,000.

The original diaries, written in Card's own hand, are stored at BYU's Harold B. Lee Library, which has 51 diaries and several dozen letters -- most of them exchanged between Card and one of his four wives, Zina Young Card -- in its archives. In all, there are 11 boxes of Card documents.

Reference specialist Derek Jensen said that the Card collection, like most of the library's collections, is open to the public. Jensen said that the library has about 10,000 collections that include "anything from one letter to our largest collection, the Cecil B. DeMille Collection."

(Also on file at the Lee Library are the papers of Orson Card. Orson Card said that, unlike his great-grandfather, he's "not much of a journal keeper. I do have a missionary journal, in which my entries are sporadic at best and not interesting even to me." In addition to his many novels, manuscripts, plays, stories and essays, the library may one day be storing the Information Age equivalent of Orson Card's letters -- the vast quantities of e-mail that he has written and, for the most part, kept. His e-mail, Orson Card said, "serves much of the function of a journal, because day to day, with some gaps, it shows what I was thinking and working on and planning.")

Like almost any writer of any daily personal record, Card made plenty of entries that don't seem to amount to much. The substance, if not the exact words, of a brief entry dated Feb. 4, 1879 -- "Passed another busy day in Temple (sic) business," a reference to Card's duties overseeing construction of the Logan Temple -- is repeated on dozens of different days.

And Card's entries are rarely personal, tending much more to be a record of his observations of things said and done by others, along with brief recitations of his own activities.

"You only get a few glimpses of Card himself in the diaries," said Donald Godfrey.

Kenneth Godfrey, who's kept his own diary for "about 50 years," said that he thinks that a personal record of any person's life is invaluable whether or not it overflows with closely kept secrets or revealing confessions.

While working on a previous project compiling diaries kept by early LDS women, Kenneth Godfrey said, "I came to the conviction that there really aren't any unimportant people who have lived. If you get inside them by means of their diaries, you find that their lives were sometimes far more significant than you might have believed.

"I've always felt that if people realized how important they are, maybe everyone would write a diary."