Heavens Below by W.H.G. Armytage

Author:W.H.G. Armytage [Armytage, W.H.G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Reference
ISBN: 9781134529438
Google: OdhXAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-15T01:19:29+00:00

Brigham Young, the Lord’s anointed,

Loved of Heav’n and fear’d of hell;

Like Elijah’s on Elisha,

Joseph’s mantle on him fell.

Secessions and quarrels within and without led Brigham Young to organize an exodus to the West. Like the Voortrekkers of South Africa, the Mormons struck out. The first long column of wagons crossed the Mississippi on 15 February 1846. Over prairies and mountains they went, travelling for seventeen months, till they found a new Jordan issuing from a mountain lake and losing itself in the salt waters of a Dead Sea. Brigham Young christened it Deseret, the land of the Honey Bee. In this tremendous operation the spirits of some 12,000 Saints were sustained by an English brass band, recruited by a missionary in England.

In less than a year after occupying Deseret, the Mormons built an adobe town of 5,000 inhabitants. Each communal holding was irrigated by canals and lakes. The town they called Salt Lake City and the surrounding desert of Deseret was formally renamed the State of Utah in 1850.

Others followed them, not for paradise but for gold. The 35,000 pilgrims on the Oregon trail in 1849, and the 55,000 who rushed to the goldfields in California in 1850 helped to build up Salt Lake City still further as a transport terminal. They also drew the eyes of Englishmen to the West.

In England, the news of the founding of Salt Lake City stimulated a fresh call for recruits. On 23 December 1847 a trumpet-tongued proclamation was issued ‘To the Saints in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales and adjacent islands and countries’. It ran :–

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