Brigham Young was through the worst of it. For much of the past two weeks, he was nearly delirious with pain from the “mountain fever” he had contracted from a tick bite around the time his wagon train entered what is now the state of Utah.

But by this point, July 24, 1847, the fever was subsiding. Slowly recovering, he rode in the back of Wilford Woodruff’s carriage, near the rear of more than 70 wagons of emigrants from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Three days earlier, the party’s advance scouts had reached the Salt Lake Valley – the place many hoped would be the end of a journey that had taken them 1,073 miles over the past 3 ½ months. Young, their leader, was the one who said he had seen their final destination in a vision; while he could not point to its location on a map, he would recognize their new home when he laid eyes upon it.

Young rode the final 6 miles down Emigration Canyon that day. When the carriage reached the mouth of the canyon and rounded Donner Hill, the vast expanse of the Salt Lake Valley unfolded in a panoramic vista. Woodruff turned the carriage so Young could get a clear view. The Church leader gazed out in silence for some minutes.

Woodruff recorded Young’s reaction in his journal that night: “President Young expressed his full satisfaction in the appearance of the valley as a resting place for the Saints and was amply repaid for his journey.”

Addressing a crowd gathered at the spot on the 33rd anniversary of that day, celebrated in Utah as Pioneer Day, Woodruff recalled the exact words Young said when he broke his silence: “It is enough. This is the right place. Drive on.”

 

Young’s pronouncement did not mark the start of Utah history. The state was no blank slate in 1847; people had been living here and making their mark on the land for 12,000 years. At the time Young and the Latter-day Saint settlers appeared on the scene, there were at least 20,000 people of various American Indian tribes living within the state’s present-day borders.

Yet the pioneers’ arrival 175 years ago did signal the start of a new chapter of Utah history – the beginning of the version of Utah we know today. It is a chapter that began half a continent away.

Joseph Smith, the president and founding prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, spent nearly 15 years seeking a place where his people could worship freely. It was a journey that took the Saints – then commonly known as Mormons – from upstate New York, to Ohio, to Missouri, and then to Illinois, where they founded the city of Nauvoo in 1839.

Within five years, Nauvoo grew to 12,000 residents, rivalling Chicago as the largest city in Illinois. But anti-Mormon sentiment in neighboring communities grew increasingly intense, and in 1844, a vigilante mob assassinated Smith and his brother Hyrum. The remaining Saints held on in Nauvoo for another two years, but when given an ultimatum to leave the city or be driven out by force, they fled west across Iowa in early 1846.

Smith had no designated successor as Church president. Leadership fell to the Church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles; though decisions were made by the quorum as a whole, Brigham Young, as president of the quorum, became the Church’s de facto leader. He was to guide his people to a new home somewhere in the American West.

From the early days of the Church, Smith had predicted its members would eventually settle across the Rocky Mountains. Though he and Young claimed to experience divinely inspired visions of the Saints’ ultimate destination, they did not know exactly where this place might be. Texas, California, Oregon and Vancouver Island were all possibilities.

The valley of the Great Salt Lake rose to the top of the list of possible new Mormon homelands in 1845. That year saw the publication of explorer John C. Fremont’s account of his expedition to the valley, as well as Lansford Hastings’ Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California, which touted a route through the same area. Though it was officially part of Mexican territory and inhabited by American Indians, the Saints believed this place might offer the chance to build a home free from government intrusion.

But if the Saints departed Nauvoo in 1846 with hopes of reaching the Great Basin by year’s end, those hopes were dashed when terrible weather and disease stalled their trek across Iowa. They decided to stop their journey for the year along the banks of the Missouri River, near present-day Omaha, Nebraska, centered around a makeshift town they called Winter Quarters.

The final push west would have to wait until spring arrived the next year.

On April 5, 1847, the first elements of the Saints’ western exodus departed Winter Quarters. Young personally led this vanguard company of 143 men – including three enslaved African-Americans  – three women and two children. They brought with them 72 wagons, 93 horses, 52 mules, 66 oxen, 19 cows, 17 dogs and some chickens.

The vanguard company’s route would follow the still sparsely traveled Oregon Trail, which had seen its first emigrant wagon trains only five years earlier. Rumors about the Saints abounded among their fellow pioneers. One Oregon Trail traveler wrote that Mormons were thought to be “inveterately hostile to the emigrant parties,” and that when they encountered non-Mormons, “they intended to attack and murder them, and appropriate to themselves their property."

While the Oregon Trail went along the south side of the Platte River, Young decided his party would take the north side to avoid potential conflict with other emigrants.

Far more worrisome to the Saints were the Pawnee, Lakota, Cheyenne and other Plains Indians peoples whose land they were now traversing. To ensure their party’s safety, the pioneers organized into military companies of 10 men, each commanded by a captain. The Council of Captains drew up strict rules and regulations outlining the daily routine.

The bugle would blow at 5 a.m. to rouse the camp for prayers and breakfast; a second bugle call at 7 a.m. signaled the start of the day’s advance. The procession stopped at noon for one hour, then continued until nightfall, when all 72 wagons would form a circle with interlocked wheels to create a corral for the animals.

The bugle blew at 8:30 p.m. for evening prayers; all fires were extinguished by 9 p.m. People would either sleep in wagons or tents outside the circled wagons. Fifty armed men stood guard from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m.; another 50 men took over from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m.

Each wagon was to have an armed driver, as well as a partner who walked alongside, a loaded gun on his shoulder. No one was allowed to stray more than 20 rods – 110 yards – without permission. While traveling, the wagons formed two columns. The rear wagon towed a small cannon — not much use as an actual weapon, but a strong deterrent to potential attackers.

The wagon train traveled almost 24 miles per day at its fastest, though it averaged just 10 miles per day. Many people grew weary of the seemingly unchanging prairie landscape and diet of cornbread, porridge and water.

On May 1, the company spotted its first three bison grazing atop a bluff on the Nebraska plains. Soon, they were in the midst of countless thousands.

“The river and land upon both sides of it was one dark spectacle of moving objects,” Wilford Woodruff wrote. “It looked as though the face of the earth was alive and moving like the waves of the sea.”

Hunters set out and, after three hours, returned having taken down one bull bison, three cows and six calves. All were grateful to feast on meat, though Young admonished the hunters not to kill more than was necessary.

On June 1, Young’s 46th birthday, the vanguard company arrived outside the frontier trading post Fort Laramie, the first white settlement they had encountered in 600 miles of travel. As they set up camp for the evening, two riders approached from the fort. To the company’s surprise, they turned out to be fellow Saints from Mississippi who had been searching for the main pioneer camp since the previous year.

The Mississippi Mormons had wintered to the south in Colorado. With them had been U.S. Army soldiers from the Mormon Battalion, who had marched from Winter Quarters to fight in the Mexican-American War in California but were left behind due to poor health. This sick detachment, along with some of the other Mississippians, was now en route to the fort.

Joined by 13 people and seven wagons from the Mississippi group, the vanguard company set out again on June 4. Their goal was to travel 375 miles across what is now Wyoming to reach the next trading post, Fort Bridger, by July 1, and from there to their ultimate stopping point in the Great Basin by July 15.

Time was of the essence. While they carried one year’s provisions in their wagons, they needed to arrive with time enough to plant wheat and other crops to sustain the much larger group, known as the emigration camp, that in two weeks would depart Winter Quarters to follow their trail.

Having gained expertise in the art of wagon travel, Young’s company increased their average to more than 16 miles per day along the Wyoming stretch of the Oregon Trail. The only major holdup emerged when it came time to cross the North Platte River.

Swollen by spring snowmelt, the river was too high and swift to ford. They decided to lash together the wagons and float them across; each wagon’s livestock would have to swim. After 16 hours of exhausting and highly dangerous work, they only managed to get 23 of their 79 wagons across. The next day, the river’s current was so strong, the animals refused to even attempt swimming it.

What the company needed was a ferry. Since there was no ferry, they decided to build their own. It helped that Young, prior to joining the Church, had been a master carpenter. The pioneers spent two days building two 24-foot canoes from nearby cottonwoods, which were placed parallel and overlain with pine cross timbers to create a raft big enough to accommodate two wagons.

The Saints were soon safely across. Even before they completed their crossing, non-Mormon Oregon Trail emigrants started asking to use the ferry and offering to pay $1.50 to $2 per wagon – significant sums at a time when the average farm laborer made $10 per month. Nine men stayed behind to operate the ferry as a commercial enterprise, as well as to help their comrades following in the emigration camp.

A few days out from Fort Laramie, vanguard company clerk Thomas Bullock wrote, "We are now about 300 miles from Bridger, but where we go, we know not."

Most knew they were headed to the Great Basin, but exactly where they would stop there was yet to be determined – and neither had they decided whether it would be a waystation or a permanent home.

On June 27, the party encountered mountain man Moses Harris near the summit of South Pass. Harris argued against settling at the Great Salt Lake, advising them to aim instead for Cache Valley, which he thought more fertile.

However, the Saints got a second opinion just hours later when they ran into mountain man Jim Bridger, founder of Fort Bridger. The Great Salt Lake would be an excellent place to start a settlement, he said, adding that the valley to the south at Utah Lake would be even better. The problem with Utah Lake was that the Ute people were already present in great concentrations, while the Great Salt Lake was more thinly populated, as it was on the nebulous border between the territory of the Utes and the Shoshones.

To reach the Great Salt Lake, Bridger counseled Young to take the Hastings Cutoff. Blazed the previous summer by the ill-fated Donner-Reed Party, this route veered south from the Oregon Trail at Fort Bridger.

Two days later, the company ran into yet another person with strong opinions on where they should go. It was Sam Brannan, a Church member who had one year earlier departed New York with a small group of Saints on the ship Brooklyn, sailed around South America and arrived near what’s now San Francisco, where they established a settlement.

Brannan and some comrades then trekked across present-day Nevada and Utah to find Young. Having just passed through the Salt Lake Valley, Brannan told Young it was a barren desert compared to the verdant glory that was California. He advised the Saints’ leader to keep going until his people reached the Pacific Ocean.

Young had no shortage of options to consider when the company arrived at Fort Bridger on July 7. After resting there two days, Young resumed their advance. They would take the Hastings Cutoff, bound for the Great Salt Lake.

The final push across the mountains of Utah was the most difficult of their journey. Ox teams had to be doubled or tripled to haul wagons up steep ascents, while men worked furiously to clear stones and cut away the dense willow underbrush.

Difficult as it was to go uphill, the steep descents were even more stressful. To get a wagon down without having it roll out of control, they had to lock the wagon’s wheels; a dozen men holding ropes attached to the back of the wagon would then gradually ease it downhill. Company clerk Bullock described one particularly treacherous descent as being “like jumping off the roof of a house.”

To compound matters, many members of the company began to fall terribly ill with what they called “mountain fever,” a potentially lethal tick-borne disease that was most likely either Rocky Mountain spotted fever or Colorado tick fever.

On the morning of July 12, the company was forced to halt near the modern Utah-Wyoming state line when Young became suddenly and violently ill. His fever spiked, and by nightfall he lay in a delirium.

Not wanting to lose time, vanguard company second-in-command Heber C. Kimball ordered Orson Pratt to take 42 men and 23 wagons ahead to scout out the way. Pratt’s advance party determined Weber Canyon was too rocky to traverse but did discover the poorly marked Hastings Cutoff.

Five days after sending the advance party, Kimball proposed sending another 41 wagons ahead as a planting party to sow crops as soon as the pioneers emerged from the mountains. Young, still very weak but slowly recovering, advised them to heed Bridger’s advice and stick close to the Great Salt Lake, avoiding potential confrontation with the Utes at Utah Lake.

The final 35 miles to the Salt Lake Valley were by far the most challenging. Wagons descended 4,000 feet in elevation in just two days. During the vertiginous descent, the wagon of Young’s brother Lorenzo lost control and crashed down the mountainside with his two young sons inside, but the boys soon cut a hole in the canvas and emerged unhurt. Remarkably for the time, no one in the vanguard party died on the journey.

On July 21, Erastus Snow of the planting party rode ahead on horseback and reached Pratt’s advance party. Together, Snow and Pratt climbed Donner Hill, the final barrier between the Saints and the Salt Lake Valley. From the hilltop, the entire wide valley expanded beneath them.

“We involuntarily, both at the same instant, uttered a shout of joy at finding it to be the very place of our destination,” Snow wrote.

When the bulk of the vanguard party arrived the next day, many had similar reactions.

“I could not help shouting, ‘Hurra, hurra, hurra, there’s my home at last,’ ” Bullock wrote.

Though the scarcity of timber was concerning, many instantly sensed the valley was a perfect sanctuary to shield them from would-be persecutors.

“This is the most safe and secure place the Saints could possibly locate themselves in,” pioneer Howard Egan wrote. “Nature has fortified this place on all sides, with only a few narrow passes, which could be made impregnable without much difficulty.”

But not all were impressed with the sight of the dry, treeless expanse. Harriet Young, wife of Lorenzo and one of the three women who traveled the entire distance with the vanguard party, remarked upon her arrival, “Weak and weary as I am, I would rather go one thousand miles farther than stay in such a forsaken place as this.”

Most Saints sensed they had reached their new home. They would know when Young arrived whether it was to be their final destination, but permanent home or not, they needed to start planting crops.

At noon on July 23, Seth Taft plowed the first furrow at what is now the intersection of Main Street and 100 South in Salt Lake City. When the hard earth broke several plows, the pioneers realized they would first have to irrigate the land. By 2 p.m., they had dammed City Creek into irrigation ditches.

They spent their first few days waking up at 4 a.m. to plant, plow and irrigate. Within a week, they had cultivated 53 acres of buckwheat, corn, oats, potatoes, beans and garden vegetables.

Young’s arrival and declaration that this was, indeed, the right place filled the Saints with excitement. Still, the Saints wanted to confirm that there wasn’t some even righter place nearby. Scouting parties fanned out to get the lay of the land; on July 26, Young led a group north from present-day Salt Lake City to the top of Ensign Peak, which offered an expansive vista of the surrounding terrain.

William Clayton, one of the men who accompanied Young to Ensign Peak, wrote that the more they saw, “the better we were satisfied that it is as handsome a place for a city as can be imagined.”

On July 28, at about 5 p.m., Young and fellow members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles went to a spot in the northeast of the intended city, where Young declared, “Here is the 40 acres of the temple lot.” It would be at this spot, 46 years later – 16 years after Young’s death – that his friend Woodruff finally dedicated the completed Salt Lake Temple.

The apostles also determined each city lot would be 1¼ acres, with streets 8 rods – or 132 feet – wide and sidewalks 20 feet wide.

Later that evening, Young convened a meeting at the newly chosen temple lot.

“Shall we look further or make a location upon this spot and layout and build a city?” he asked. “Shall this be the spot, or shall we look further?”

All but one member of the company voted to make their city here; the lone dissenter suggested there might be a better spot on the other side of the lake.

The Saints had chosen a site for their city – now they had to build it. Some went into the hills to harvest timber to build houses. Members of the Mormon Battalion, who arrived the day after the city-site vote, suggested building homes from adobe, which they had seen during their travels in New Mexico. Before long, they were creating 4,000 adobe bricks each day.

By Aug. 20, surveyors had platted 135 city blocks for future settlement.

Less than a month after arriving in the valley, some of the pioneers began the trek back to Winter Quarters to help shepherd subsequent settlers to their new homeland. Young departed newly founded Salt Lake City on Aug. 26.

On the way back, Young crossed paths with the emigration camp, whose 1,448 men women and children and nearly 600 wagons marked the largest Western emigrant wagon train in American history up to that point. This wave of pioneers began arriving at Salt Lake City on Sept. 19, swelling its population from around 150 to 1,650.

The Saints who had remained at the Missouri River were overjoyed to hear their returned brethren’s accounts of their success in the Salt Lake Valley.

“We have been in the valley to set the big wheel to work, and that sets all the little wheels whirling,” vanguard company member Ezra T. Benson told his comrades in Winter Quarters. “We have now laid the foundation for the coming day.”

Before 1847 was over, two key developments occurred in and around Winter Quarters that would shape the future of Utah.

On Dec. 5, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles unanimously agreed to organize a new First Presidency. Young, having proven his abilities on the long journey, was named Church president; this leadership role led to his eventual selection as Utah’s first territorial governor.

That same month, the quorum sent out a general epistle calling for all Saints worldwide to converge on the Great Salt Lake. Over the next two decades, some 70,000 pioneers would heed the call, forever altering the course of Utah history.

The following spring, on June 5, 1848, Brigham Young once again set out from Winter Quarters, leading 1,891 more pioneers. Like nearly all who traveled with him, he would never again return east. When they arrived in Utah, they were arriving home.

 

This is the Place Heritage Park

On July 24, 1847, Brigham Young declared “This is the place” at the spot now marked by a 60-foot granite monument at This Is the Place Heritage Park – or, at the very least, he said something very similar very nearby.

Young made his remarks to Wilford Woodruff, but neither man recorded his exact words in the journals they kept. Not until 1880 did Woodruff publicly quote Young as saying, “It is enough. This is the right place. Drive on.” If we lack concrete proof Young said “This is the place” the day he entered the valley, we do have evidence he said it four days later. In a diary entry about a meeting held July 28, 1847, pioneer Levi Jackman wrote, “Pres Young said tha(t) he knew that this is the place. He knew it as soon as he came in sight of it and he had seen this vearey spot before.”

The location of the This Is the Place monument was confirmed as correct in 1921 by W.W. Riter, who was 8 years old when he and his family arrived 10 weeks after Young. When his family first entered the valley, Riter said, they passed over the exact spot where Young made his pronouncement. However, evidence suggests the route Young’s vanguard company took on the final approach was slightly different from the one taken by the pioneer companies that followed.

One thing we do know for certain: This Is the Place Heritage Park is the place to be on July 24 to celebrate the 175th anniversary of Pioneer Day. The site of a year-round living history village with historic pioneer buildings, the park adds a host of additional programming July 23-25.

In the Days of ’47 Parade, visitors can pull a decorated handcart through the village’s Main Street. A brass band fills the air with period music, while in Miller Park, guests can play croquet, a popular pioneer pastime. At the monument itself, historical re-enactors interact with visitors while playing the roles of a mountain man, a handcart pioneer, Spanish explorer Father Silvestre Vélez de Escalante and African-American 1847 pioneer Jane Manning James.

These experiences complement the park’s normal activities, which include pony rides, train rides and gold panning. This Is the Place Heritage Park is located at 2601 E. Sunnyside Ave., Salt Lake City. Call (801) 582-1847 or visit thisistheplace.org for more information.