Brigham Young's Arrival and the State of Deseret

On July twenty-fourth, eighteen forty-seven, Brigham Young looked out over the Salt Lake Valley from a wagon and reportedly said, 'This is the right place.' He was ill with mountain fever, propped up so he could see. Behind him stretched a line of one hundred forty-eight pioneers, men, women, and children, who had walked or driven about one thousand miles from Winter Quarters, Nebraska, following the Oregon Trail and then the route the Donner party had cut the year before. Ahead of them lay a treeless desert valley ringed by mountains still carrying snow.

Within days they had planted crops and diverted a creek to irrigate them. Within a year they had built a fort, a school, and the beginnings of a city laid out in ten-acre blocks according to Joseph Smith's plan for Zion. Within two years they had established a provisional government and petitioned Congress for statehood as the State of Deseret, a word from the Book of Mormon meaning honeybee, a symbol of industrious community. The state they proposed was enormous: all of present-day Utah and Nevada, most of Arizona, and corners of five other states.

Congress declined to admit Deseret as a state. Instead, the Compromise of eighteen fifty created Utah Territory, with Brigham Young as its first governor. The honeybee, however, survived as Utah's enduring symbol, it appears on the state seal and the state flag to this day, and the Mormon settlers kept building as if permanence were never in question.

What drew them here was precisely its remoteness. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had been driven from New York, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois by violence and hostility. When the pioneers left Nauvoo, Illinois in the winter of eighteen forty-six, they were leaving the United States. The Mexican Cession of eighteen forty-eight brought Utah Territory back into American jurisdiction almost immediately, but the Latter-day Saints had already staked their claim to a desert they intended to make bloom.