The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781607816546
Publisher: University of Utah Press

“THERE ARE MILLIONS OF ACRES IN OUR STATE”

Mormon Agrarianism and the Environmental Limits of Expansion

Brian Q. Cannon

AMERICANS HAVE A LONGSTANDING AFFINITY for agriculture as a wellspring of character and democracy. Thomas Jefferson famously articulated American perceptions of the link between a virtuous citizenry and farm life when he wrote, “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” Jefferson believed that small-scale farming fostered industriousness and resourcefulness. Due to their economic self-sufficiency, he reasoned, yeoman farmers were more likely to resist political bribery or coercion.1

Mindful of the Biblical commission to Adam and Eve to till the soil, many Latter-day Saints born in the nineteenth century espoused Jefferson’s affinity for farming. “If you want virtue, go into the farming country,” advised Apostle Heber C. Kimball in 1857. Apostle John A. Widtsoe articulated the Jeffersonian bias when he proclaimed, “Strength, vitality and power, and rich form of living come to those who deal with the earth as the Lord gave it to man.” Many Mormons regarded farm life as the ideal laboratory for nurturing religious faith, morality, and industriousness. Church president Heber J. Grant declared, “There seems to be strength, physical, moral and religious, which comes to those engaged in cultivating the soil, which, on an average, is far superior to that of any other occupation.”2

Mormons’ conviction that agriculture was ennobling and divinely ordained intertwined with their belief that God had tempered the Great Basin climate to enable the Latter-day Saints to farm there. Thus abundant agricultural harvests in the Mormon heartland reified the Latter-day Saints’ special relationship to God. Broader cultural convictions undergirding American agricultural expansion—including the notion of divinely ordained manifest destiny and the belief that rain would providentially follow the plow—reinforced the Saints’ perceptions of divine approbation. Combining these strands, Mormon settler and autobiographer William Farrington Cahoon asserted that Providence “made the wilderness we came to inhabit to blossom as the rose,” proving that God was the Latter-day Saints’ “friend.” Similarly, Nancy Tracy, who trekked west in 1850, credited “God’s blessing” with the transformation of the Salt Lake Valley from a “barren desert” into “fine orchards and beautiful dwellings.” Some asserted that God had extended the growing season in Utah’s mountain valleys. Edward Phillips, who established a farm east of the Great Salt Lake in 1850, recalled, “At the time of my first settling here, we could not raise a peach tree, but the elements are so softened that now we can raise any kind of fruit.” Similarly John Taylor reminisced in 1865, “Remember the time when we could not raise peaches to eat, and it was a doubt whether an apple tree would grow or not?” The climate had been too unpredictable, the killing frosts too frequent. But God “blessed the elements for our sakes, and also the earth” to the point where “there is not a better peach growing country in the world than this.

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