This Is the Right Place, What Brigham Young Actually Said

The wagon carrying Brigham Young crested the last ridge of the Wasatch Range on July twenty-fourth, eighteen forty-seven, and he looked down at the valley for the first time. The Great Salt Lake glittered in the distance. Alkali flats stretched to the horizon. The Wasatch peaks rose behind him. And according to the story that most schoolchildren in Utah learn, he said: "This is the right place. Drive on."

The problem is that nobody wrote that down in eighteen forty-seven.

Wilford Woodruff, who was driving Young's wagon that day, recorded in his journal that Young "expressed his full satisfaction in the Appearance of the valley as a resting place for the Saints." That is the contemporaneous account. No journal from the summer of eighteen forty-seven contains the famous phrase. The words "this is the right place" first appear in an eighteen eighty speech by Woodruff, thirty-three years after the event, when the memory of a founding moment had already been shaped by decades of retelling.

This is not an unusual story in the history of founding phrases. What matters for understanding Salt Lake City is what the settlers believed they were doing when they arrived: building a new Zion, a sacred city in the desert, far enough from the United States government that they could govern themselves by their own lights. The city they laid out in the following days was not improvised. It was a theological document made of streets and blocks, oriented to the cardinal directions, centered on a temple site chosen before a single house was built.

One hundred forty-eight people entered the valley in the advance party. Within three years, more than eleven thousand would follow across the same trails. The phrase that launched them is a later invention. The ambition was real from the first day.