III.
"Therefore will I make solitary places to bud and blossom, and to bring forth in abundance, saith the Lord."—Doctrine and Covenants.
Sixty years ago the facts of plant feeding, as just outlined, were practically unknown. The erroneous ideas of the preceding century still held full sway. In 1840 Liebig published his treatise on agricultural chemistry which threw a faint light on the relation of the plant and the soil. During the twenty years following, the indispensable nature of some of the plant foods was ascertained; and it is only within the last ten or fifteen years that the superiority of arid districts over humid ones, for the purpose of supporting man, has been demonstrated. Even today it is a new light which has not been fully received.
In 1842 Joseph the Prophet wrote: "I prophesied that the saints would continue to suffer much affliction and would be driven to the Rocky Mountains * * * and some of you will live to go and assist in making settlements and build cities and see the saints become a mighty people in the midst of the Rocky Mountains." Why did Joseph Smith speak of the Rocky Mountains as a gathering place for his people? Was it simply because the place was far off and offered, apparently, good security? If so, he builded better than he knew. But what prompted Brigham Young to plant his cane by the shore of an alkali lake and say, Here we shall remain? That certainly was not for security only. Perhaps he was tired of wandering? Though he may have been so, yet he was not the man to give up when near something better. Perhaps he thought the valley fair, and the blue mountains may have rested his eyes? If that was the motive of settlement, he, too, builded better than he knew. Certainly it is that these two men who historically hold the responsibility for bringing the Latter-day Saints here, did not know, by the world's learning, that the valleys of Utah are filled with the richest soil, waiting only to yield manifold to the husbandman; for the world did not yet know, and had no means for predicting it. These men were not scientists. They had no laboratories in which, by long hours, over long drawn fires, and among a hundred fumes, to draw out for themselves the law of the fertility of arid soils, which has but recently become the property of modern science. It is not likely that the records of a lost learning, unknown today, taught them this fact. Though they had had such records, they were unlettered men, and the ancient tongues would have been dead indeed to them, had they attempted an interpretation by their own efforts. Why then, did they bring the people here? Was it a chance move? A blind effort, acting out the desperation that comes from long persecution? If an element of chance entered into the location in the valleys of Utah, it was akin to wisdom.
And it was wisdom of the highest kind; at which the world ever stands in reverent wonder; inspiration from the living God. The logic that science, itself, applies to facts in the deduction of its laws, makes it impossible to believe that the settlement of the pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley was a chance move. Nothing, from the point of view of human wisdom, encouraged the pioneers to remain in Utah—they were in the center of a desert; the leaders were urged by many of the company to go on, for there were fairer climes to the west or the south, or on the islands of the sea. But the leaders were possessed of a wisdom higher than that of men, and founded an empire on the wastes of the Great American Desert.
Now, let every reader of this paper consider these wonderful facts: Of the vast possibilities of agriculture in Utah being the same with those of the countries where the great nations of the world have lived; of a people, claiming that the nations shall in the future flee to it for safety, making its home in a place which possesses the capabilities of supporting the nations; and of the choice of that country when it was named a desert; when science, the world's knowledge, did not dream of the fertility of that desert any more than it was able to give a correct explanation of the fertility of the valley of Mesopotamia: and every honest heart will recognize the unseen hand of the God of Israel, guiding the people of God to the destined land.
End of Project Gutenberg's Joseph Smith as Scientist, by John A. Widtsoe