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Subduing a Desert-Securing a Destiny

by James R. Christianson

Introduction

For most Latter-day Saints, the study of LDS history in North America has amounted to an introduction to mainstream Mormonism. Beginning in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania, they have followed the Church to Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois; journeyed with Sam Brannan on a 24,000-mile voyage to California; shared in the struggles of the Mormon Battalion on its circuitous route to the Great Basin; and accompanied the pioneer wagons and handcarts from the Missouri River to Fort Laramie, South Pass, and the Valley of the Great Salt Lake.

To those who view their Mormon heritage with more than passing interest, however, a fascination has developed with such windows of history as Cardston, Santa Clara, Fort Lemhi, Franklin, Snowflake, Orderville, and the colonies on the Little Colorado. These and numerous other ventures and events represent significant developments in the adjustment and expansion of the kingdom tent as it not only came to embrace the whole of the great interior basin of the American West, but also spilled over its rim, embracing a variety of habitation sites scattered northward into Oregon, Idaho, and Canada and south and east into Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico.

From the vantage point of contemporary members, early Mormon settlements beyond the limits of Salt Lake City and the Wasatch Front are little-known places from which people escaped in order to make history or to which they were sent or fled into obscurity. A more accurate appraisal of these outlying, at times painfully distant, settlements distinguishes them as being at the heart of the Mormon success story during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Among the goals set by Brigham Young and those who joined him in their mass migration to the West was an overwhelming determination to gather out of and away from Babylon. Initially, the communities established throughout Salt Lake, Utah, and Weber Valley served this purpose. As the migration of the Saints from the Midwest, the South, and the East was further amplified by immigrants from Great Britain and increasingly large numbers from Europe, the settlement plan expanded to the full range of the compass.

The eventual unplanned intrusion of gentile influences into Salt Lake City and neighboring communities coincided with the planned expansion of Mormon settlements throughout the West. The hoped-for and much-sought-after isolation which accompanied early beginnings in the valleys of the mountains was gradually compromised as the United States Army, federal appointees, non-Mormon merchants and miners, and the railroad caused the once-distant East and West to meet in the streets of Salt Lake City.

What the central communities of the Church lost as the veil of isolation withdrew and the confrontation with Babylon resumed, the hundreds of scattered settlements throughout and beyond the Great Basin retained for decades. In these settlements, generation after generation, commitment ran deepest, and values were least compromised.