The 1847 Pioneer Arrival: This Is the Right Place
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
July twenty-fourth, eighteen forty-seven. The date is a Utah state holiday now, marked each year as Pioneer Day with parades and fireworks in every town along the Wasatch Front. The pioneers who arrived that day were the vanguard of a migration that would eventually bring approximately seventy thousand Latter-day Saint colonists into the Great Basin. What made the date possible was a sequence of events that had nothing to do with religion: the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in February eighteen forty-eight, would transfer this territory from Mexico to the United States, but the pioneers arrived before that transfer was complete. For a period of months, the valley they settled was legally Mexican territory.
The Goshute people had inhabited the Salt Lake Valley and the desert basin surrounding it for thousands of years. Their documented lifeways, recorded in the Goshute Tribe's own history and in Natural History Museum of Utah collections, show a sophisticated adaptation to an arid landscape: harvesting pine nuts, seeds, insects, and the brine fly pupae of the lake's shallow margins. The pioneer company did not arrive in empty country.
The monument at the mouth of Emigration Canyon, called This Is The Place Heritage Park, commemorates the moment of arrival. The inscription of Brigham Young's reported words, "This is the right place," anchors the site. The monument was dedicated in nineteen forty-seven, one hundred years after the arrival, and has been expanded and updated since.
What the pioneers built in the valley below it is now a metropolitan area of more than one million people. The Goshute Reservation lies to the west, in the desert the settlers found least useful.
