Brigham Young: This is the place

A community is rarely founded on the spot where it had intended to settle. More often it is founded on the spot it reaches at the limit of its endurance, after the journey has gone on six weeks longer than the maps suggested, after the leader has been carried in a wagon for the last three hundred miles, after the only thing left to decide is whether the broad treeless basin spread below the canyon is the place or whether the next ten miles will show a better one. Brigham Young decided in seven words at the head of Emigration Canyon, and the religion he led decided with him.

THE LATTER-DAY SAINTS

Brigham Young was born on the first of June 1801 at Whitingham in southern Vermont, ninth of the eleven children of John Young, a Vermont small-farmer of long English-Young Massachusetts colonial stock (the Young line had emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635 from Lowestoft in Suffolk and from there into the New England small-farmer colonisation of Vermont in the 1780s), and Abigail Howe. He was raised on the Whitingham farm, was schooled at the local district school to about the eighth-grade level, and from sixteen worked as a journeyman carpenter, glazier and joiner across the Burned-Over District of upstate New York and central Vermont, building the timber-frame farmhouses, churches and meeting-rooms that were the standard small-rural-American construction of his generation.

He converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in his thirty-first year on the second of April 1832 at Mendon in New York, on the preaching of the Mormon missionary Samuel Smith (Joseph Smith's younger brother) at a small Mendon meeting in his log-cabin home. He met Joseph Smith personally at Kirtland, Ohio, in 1833, was ordained an Apostle of the Mormon Twelve at the inaugural Mormon Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1835, served the long missionary tour of England 1840 to 1841 (he opened the British mission in Liverpool and presided over the 1841 Conference at Manchester that brought five thousand British Mormons into the church), and on the assassination of Joseph Smith at Carthage, Illinois, on the twenty-seventh of June 1844 succeeded as the senior Apostle and effective head of the church.

THE NAUVOO EXODUS

The Mormon community had been driven westward across the previous decade from Kirtland to Independence Missouri (1831, expelled by Missouri state militia 1838), to Far West Missouri (1836-39, expelled), to Nauvoo, Illinois (1839 to 1846). The Nauvoo community of approximately fifteen thousand Mormons had become by 1844 the second-largest city in Illinois after Chicago and the largest Mormon concentration in the world. The murder of Joseph Smith at Carthage on the twenty-seventh of June 1844 and the subsequent passage of the Illinois Anti-Mormon Acts of 1845 made the further survival of the Nauvoo community in Illinois impossible.

Young announced at the Nauvoo Conference of October 1845 that the church would emigrate west to a location beyond the western boundary of the United States, where the community could establish a self-governing settlement out of reach of the state-government persecution that had driven them across five states across the previous fifteen years. The emigration began in February 1846 with the crossing of the frozen Mississippi from Nauvoo into Iowa Territory. Approximately twelve thousand Mormons left Nauvoo across the spring of 1846 and wintered out 1846 to 1847 at Winter Quarters near Council Bluffs on the Missouri River.

THE PIONEER COMPANY

Young organised the spring 1847 advance Pioneer Company at Winter Quarters: a hundred and forty-three Mormon men, three women, two children, seventy-three wagons, ninety-three horses, fifty-two mules, sixty-six oxen, nineteen cows, seventeen dogs, and a substantial herd of chickens. The Company left Winter Quarters on the seventh of April 1847 with Young in personal command. The route ran west along the north bank of the Platte River across the unsettled Nebraska prairie to Fort Laramie (arrived first of June 1847), south-west across the Rocky Mountains by the South Pass route, across the Green River into the Wasatch Range, and finally over the Wasatch into the Great Salt Lake basin.

Young contracted what was later identified as Rocky Mountain spotted fever in mid-July 1847 in the Wasatch Range and was carried for the last three hundred miles of the journey in the bed of his own wagon, too ill to ride or walk. The main column of the Pioneer Company arrived at the head of Emigration Canyon on the western slope of the Wasatch at the morning of the twenty-second of July 1847 under the field command of Orson Pratt and Erastus Snow; Pratt and Snow descended the canyon on the twenty-second, scouted the upper basin, and ploughed the first three acres and planted the first potato crop on the afternoon of the twenty-third before Young's wagon caught up.

THE HEAD OF EMIGRATION CANYON

Young's wagon, with Lorenzo Snow at the reins and Wilford Woodruff riding beside it (Woodruff's diary is the central source for the moment), came up to the head of Emigration Canyon on the morning of the twenty-fourth of July 1847. The Salt Lake Valley was spread below them across the broad sage-brush basin, the Great Salt Lake itself visible as a silver line to the north-west, the Oquirrh Mountains as the western horizon. Young, by Woodruff's account, raised himself on his elbow in the wagon-bed, looked out for perhaps two minutes, and spoke the seven-word sentence to Woodruff: This is the right place; drive on. The wagon descended the canyon through the rest of the day; by evening Young had personally selected the site for the future Temple at the centre of the new city (the spot is now Temple Square in central Salt Lake City) and had marked it with a single tap of his cane.

AFTER THE TWENTY-FOURTH

The Pioneer Company built the first stockade, dug the first City Creek irrigation system, and planted the first crops across the rest of the summer of 1847. The first Mormon emigrant trains began arriving from Winter Quarters in September 1847 and the population of the new settlement reached approximately seventeen hundred by the end of the year. Young returned to Winter Quarters in the autumn of 1847 to organise the subsequent emigration waves, was unanimously elected President of the Church at the Council Bluffs Conference of December 1847, returned permanently to the Salt Lake Valley in September 1848, and held the presidency of the Church and the practical governorship of the settlement until his death in 1877.

Under his leadership the Mormon settlement of the Great Basin took in approximately seventy thousand emigrants across the next twenty years (the great majority of them from the British Mission he had opened in 1840), founded over four hundred Mormon settlements across the territories of modern Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and the northern Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, and built the cooperative-irrigation economy that became the foundational economic structure of the modern American Mountain West. The Utah Territory was organised in 1850 with Young as its first Governor; the State of Utah was admitted to the Union in January 1896 (nineteen years after Young's death). The Mormon Church today numbers over seventeen million members worldwide and is the fourth-largest Christian denomination in the United States.

Pioneer Day (the twenty-fourth of July) has been a State of Utah holiday since 1849, the year after the settlement's founding, and the only American state holiday that commemorates the arrival of a religious community at its eventual home. The This-is-the-Place Heritage Park at the head of Emigration Canyon stands on the spot of Young's wagon halt of the twenty-fourth of July 1847. The Brigham Young statue at the centre of the park bears the seven-word inscription Young spoke to Woodruff that morning. The Young name in modern American religious-and-civic memory carries the weight of the morning at the head of Emigration Canyon.