Part 1 (2/2)

Of later years there has been much community commingling of the Mormon and the non-Mormon. There even has been a second immigration from Utah, usually of people of means. The day has pa.s.sed for the ox-bowed wagon and for settlements out in the wilderness. There has been left no wilderness in which to work magic through labor. But the Mormon influence still is strong in agricultural Arizona and the high degree of development of many of her localities is based upon the pioneer settlement and work that are dealt with in the succeeding pages.

First Farmers in Many States

It is a fact little appreciated that the Mormons have been first in agricultural colonization of nearly all the intermountain States of today. This may have been providential, though the western movement of the Church happened in a time of the greatest s.h.i.+fting of population ever known on the continent. It preceded by about a year the discovery of gold in California, and gold, of course, was the lodestone that drew the greatest of west-bound migrations. The Mormons, however, were first. Not drawn by visions of wealth, unless they looked forward to celestial mansions, they sought, particularly, valleys wherein peace and plenty could be secured by labor. Nearly all were farmers and it was from the earth they designed drawing their subsistence and enough wherewith to establish homes.

Of course, the greatest of foundations was that at Salt Lake, July 24, 1847, when Brigham Young led his Pioneers down from the canyons and declared the land good. But there were earlier settlements.

First of the faith on the western slopes of the continent was the settlement at San Francis...o...b.. Mormons from the s.h.i.+p Brooklyn. They landed July 31, 1846, to found the first English speaking community of the Golden State, theretofore Mexican. These Mormons established the farming community of New Helvetia, in the San Joaquin Valley, the same fall, while men from the Mormon Battalion, January 24, 1848, partic.i.p.ated in the discovery of gold at Sutter's Fort. Mormons also were pioneers in Southern California, where, in 1851, several hundred families of the faith settled at San Bernardino.

The first Anglo-Saxon settlement within the boundaries of the present State of Colorado was at Pueblo, November 15, 1846, by Capt. James Brown and about 150 Mormon men and women who had been sent back from New Mexico, into which they had gone, a part of the Mormon Battalion that marched on to the Pacific Coast.

The first American settlement in Nevada was one of Mormons in the Carson Valley, at Genoa, in 1851.

In Wyoming, as early as 1854, was a Mormon settlement at Green River, near Fort Bridger, known as Fort Supply.

In Idaho, too, preeminence is claimed by virtue of a Mormon settlement at Fort Lemhi, on the Salmon River, in 1855, and at Franklin, in Cache Valley, in 1860.

The earliest Spanish settlement of Arizona, within its present political boundaries, was in the Santa Cruz Valley not far from the southern border. There was a large ranch at Calabasas at a very early date, and at that point Custodian Frank Pinkley of the Tumacacori mission ruins lately discovered the remains of a sizable church. A priest had station at San Xavier in 1701. Tubac as a presidio dates from 1752, Tumacacori from 1754 and Tucson from 1776. These, however, were Spanish settlements, missions or presidios. In the north, Prescott was founded in May, 1864, and the Verde Valley was peopled in February, 1865. Earlier still were Fort Mohave, reestablished by soldiers of the California Column in 1863, and Fort Defiance, on the eastern border line, established in 1849. A temporary Mormon settlement at Tubac in 1851, is elsewhere described. But in honorable place in point of seniority are to be noted the Mormon settlements on the Muddy and the Virgin, particularly, in the very northwestern corner of the present Arizona and farther westward in the southern-most point of Nevada, once a part of Arizona. In this northwestern Arizona undoubtedly was the first permanent Anglo-Saxon agricultural settlement in Arizona, that at Beaver Dams, now known as Littlefield, on the Virgin, founded at least as early as the fall of 1864.

The Wilderness Has Been Kept Broken

Of the permanence and quality of the Mormon pioneering, strong testimony is offered by F. S. Dellenbaugh in his ”Breaking the Wilderness:”

”It must be acknowledged that the Mormons were wilderness breakers of high quality. They not only broke it, but they kept it broken; and instead of the gin mill and the gambling h.e.l.l, as corner-stones of their progress and as examples to the natives of the white men's superiority, they planted orchards, gardens, farms, schoolhouses and peaceful homes.

There is today no part of the United States where human life is safer than in the land of the Mormons; no place where there is less lawlessness. A people who have accomplished so much that is good, who have endured danger, privation and suffering, who have withstood the obloquy of more powerful sects, have in them much that is commendable; they deserve more than abuse; they deserve admiration.”

Chapter Two

The Mormon Battalion

Soldiers Who Sought No Strife

The march of the Mormon Battalion to the Pacific sea in 1846-7 created one of the most picturesque features of American history and one without parallel in American military annals. There was incidental creation, through Arizona, of the first southwestern wagon road. Fully as remarkable as its travel was the const.i.tution of the Battalion itself. It was a.s.sembled hastily for an emergency that had to do with the seizure of California from Mexico. Save for a few officers detailed from the regular army, not a man had been a soldier, unless in the rude train-bands that held annual muster in that stage of the Nation's progress, however skilled certain members might have been in the handling of hunting arms.

Organization was a matter of only a few days before the column had been put into motion toward the west. There was no drill worthy of the name.

There was establishment of companies simply as administrative units.

Discipline seems to have been very lax indeed, even if there were periods in which severity of undue sort appears to have been made manifest by the superior officers.

Still more remarkable, the rank and file glorified in being men of peace, to whom strife was abhorrent. They were recruited from a people who had been driven from a home of prosperity and who at the time were encamped in most temporary fas.h.i.+on, awaiting the word of their leaders to pa.s.s on to the promised western Land of Canaan. For a part of the way there went with the Battalion parts of families, surely a very unmilitary proceeding, but most of people, whom they were to join later on the sh.o.r.e of the Great Salt Lake of which they knew so little. They were illy clad and shod, were armed mainly with muskets of type even then obsolete, were given wagon transportation from the odds and ends of a military post equipment and thus were set forth upon their great adventure.

Formation of the Mormon Battalion came logically as a part of the determination of the Mormon people to seek a new home in the West, for in 1846 there had come conclusion that no permanent peace could be known in Illinois or in any of the nearby States, owing to religious prejudice.

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