Mormon Pioneers of the San Luis Valley

This high, dry valley was settled by Latter day Saints. In the late eighteen seventies, converts from the Southern states wintered in Pueblo, then pushed south and west into the San Luis Valley, founding the towns of Manassa, Sanford, and Richfield along the Conejos River.

In eighteen eighty-two, an expedition led by Silas Sanford Smith, a first cousin of the church's founder Joseph Smith, arrived in Conejos County. The town of Sanford carries his name. The next year, leaders organized the San Luis Stake here, with Smith as its first president.

The timing was no accident. After Congress passed the Edmunds Act in eighteen eighty-two, many polygamous families left Utah for the isolation of this remote valley. They dug ditches, planted barley, alfalfa, and oats, and turned sagebrush flats into farmland that their descendants still work today.