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"It Is An Excellent Place to Serve the Lord"

We have now fulfilled the mission on which we were sent, by selecting and pointing out to you a beautiful site for a city, which is destined to be a place of refuge for the oppressed, and one that is calculated to please the eye, to cheer the hearts and fill the hungry soul with food.1

Having reached the Salt Lake Valley behind schedule, the Mormon pioneers had much to accomplish-and in short order. The burden of their moment was to prove the purpose of their entire westward journey-to lay stake to their future in this desolate and remote wilderness, to raise an ensign to waiting Latter-day Saints everywhere, to signal the construction of a new temple, to blunt the pretensions of Strang and others, to explore the territory, and to plant sufficient crops to test the soil and preserve the lives of coming settlers. To succeed they needed speed of action, decisiveness, and abundant industry, qualities they manifested in rich supply. Now was the time and this was the place.

Plowing Planting and Irrigating

The valley had withheld its secrets long and well. The Great Salt Lake, some 100 miles long and up to 40 miles wide, had lain undiscovered by modern civilization until Jim Bridger first looked on it in 1824. Not until Captain B. L. E. Bonneville and his crew explored the lake eight years later, in 1832-33, was it proven that the Salt Lake was part of a vast geological basin without outlet to the Pacific. The valley's reputation as a great wilderness desert, incapable of cultivation, had only recently begun to surrender to the plow of Miles Goodyear and to the sanguine observations of other recent passersby.

Writing in 1846, Heinrich Lienhard, on his way west to California, remarked on the majesty of the scenery and the richness of the soil in the land east of the Salt Lake as few fur traders and mountain men ever did. "The soil is deep, rich, black, and mixed with sand," he confided to his journal,

and is doubtless potentially highly productive. The clear sky-blue surface of the lake, the warm, sunny atmosphere, the high mountains with the beautiful countryside at their base . . .-all this put me in a very happy mood. All day long I felt like singing and whistling; and if there had been a single white family there, I believe I would have stayed. What a pity that the magnificent countryside was uninhabited.2

The scarcity of timber throughout the valley floor masked the fact that it was "clothed with a heavy garment of vegetation" and that wheat grass grew 6 to 7 feet high, in some places as high as 10 or 12 feet. The lines of small bush growth and greenery following the creeks from the canyons onto the floor of the valley led Clayton and others to defy the arid, desert sight with their optimistic predictions: "We can easily irrigate the land at all events, which will be an unfailing and certain source of water, for the springs are numerous and the water appears good."3 What nature had long withheld, perhaps ingenuity and irrigation could now provide.