The Mormon Colony That Left Everything Behind

Four hundred and thirty-seven Latter-day Saints crossed the Cajon Pass in eighteen fifty-one, descended into the San Bernardino Valley, and purchased the Rancho del San Bernardino from its Mexican owners for seventy-seven thousand dollars. They were sent by Brigham Young, who wanted a waystation on the route between Salt Lake City and the Pacific, a place where colonists could resupply and converts could rest. The men who led the expedition, Amasa Lyman and Charles Rich, arrived with practical and ambitious intentions.

They built a stockade. They established a grist mill. They surveyed and laid out a town grid. Within six years, they had created the most substantial American settlement in Southern California outside of Los Angeles, a community of roughly two thousand people who had built a functioning agricultural economy in a valley that had previously held only a cattle rancho and the remnants of a failed mission outpost.

In eighteen fifty-seven, Brigham Young recalled the entire colony.

The federal government was moving a military force toward Utah Territory, and Young needed every able-bodied Latter-day Saint back in Salt Lake to defend what he saw as an existential confrontation with federal authority. The order was not negotiated. It was total. Within weeks, virtually the entire population of San Bernardino abandoned what they had built. Some sold their properties at whatever price they could get on short notice. Some simply left. The buyers were non-Mormon settlers who understood exactly what the urgency meant for prices.

The colony's rapid departure is one of the stranger episodes in California settlement history, a community of two thousand people simply vacating a city they had built from scratch, for reasons of theology and loyalty that had nothing to do with California.

The city they built is San Bernardino. Most of its founders are buried in Utah.