Mormons Enter Salt Lake Valley: A City Founded

Brigham Young rose from a sickbed in the back of a covered wagon, surveyed a desolate valley of sagebrush and salt flats ringed by mountains, and reportedly declared: "This is the right place." After a 1,300-mile journey from Nauvoo, Illinois, the first Mormon pioneers had reached the place where they would build a city, a temple, and one of the most distinctive religious communities in the Western Hemisphere. The migration was born from violence. Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had been murdered by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, in June 1844. Anti-Mormon hostility in the Midwest had been escalating for years, fueled by the church's communal economics, bloc voting, and the practice of plural marriage. Young, who assumed leadership after a bitter succession struggle, concluded that the Saints would never be safe among their neighbors and began planning an exodus to territory so remote that no one would follow. The advance company of 148 pioneers, including three enslaved Black men, left Winter Quarters near present-day Omaha in April 1847 and followed the north bank of the Platte River to avoid conflict with emigrants on the Oregon Trail. Young chose the Salt Lake Valley partly because it was technically Mexican territory, beyond the jurisdiction of the United States government, and partly because its harsh environment discouraged casual settlement. Within days of arrival, the pioneers dammed City Creek, diverted irrigation ditches, and planted crops in soil that had never been cultivated. Young laid out a grid of wide streets centered on the future site of the Salt Lake Temple, which would take forty years to build. Over the next two decades, roughly seventy thousand Mormon converts migrated to Utah by wagon, handcart, and eventually railroad. The Mexican-American War, concluded just months later, transferred Utah to American control, and the isolation Young sought proved temporary.