There was a pioneer Mormon period in Arizona, that might as well be called the missionary period. Then came the prairie schooners that bore, from Utah, men and women to people and redeem the arid southland valleys. Most of this colonization was in Arizona, where the field was comparatively open. In California there had been religious persecution and in New Mexico the valleys very generally had been occupied for centuries by agricultural Indians and by native peoples speaking an alien tongue. There was extension over into northern Mexico, with consequent travail when impotent governments crumbled. But in Arizona, in the valleys of the Little Colorado, the Salt, the Gila and the San Pedro and of their tributaries and at points where the white man theretofore had failed, if he had reached them at all, the Mormons set their stakes and, with united effort, soon cleared the land, dug ditches and placed dams in unruly streams, all to the end that farms should smile where the desert had reigned. It all needed imagination and vision, something that, very properly, may be called faith. Sometimes there was failure. Occasionally the brethren failed to live in unity. They were human. But, at all times, back of them were the serenity and judgment and resources of the Church and with them went the engendered confidence that all would be well, whatever befell of finite sort. It has been said that faith removes mountains. The faith that came with these pioneers was well backed and carried with it brawn and industry.
"Mormon Settlement in Arizona" should not carry the idea that Arizona was settled wholly by Mormons. Before them came the Spaniards, who went north of the Gila only as explorers and missionaries and whose agriculture south of that stream assuredly was not of enduring value. There were trappers, prospectors, miners, cattlemen and farmers long before the wagons from Utah first rolled southward, but the fact that Arizona's agricultural development owes enormously to Mormon effort can be appreciated in considering the establishment and development of the fertile areas of Mesa, Lehi, the Safford-Thatcher-Franklin district, St. David on the San Pedro, and the many settlements of northeastern Arizona, with St. Johns and Snowflake as their headquarters.
It is a remarkable fact that Mormon immigrants made even a greater number of agricultural settlements in Arizona than did the numerically preponderating other peoples. However, the explanation is a simple one: The average immigrant, coming without organization, for himself alone, naturally gravitated to the mines—indeed, was brought to the Southwest by the mines. There was little to attract him in the desert plains through which ran intermittent stream flows, and he lacked the vision that showed the desert developed into the oasis. The Mormon, however, came usually from an agricultural environment. Rarely was he a miner.
Of later years there has been much community commingling of the Mormon and the non-Mormon. There even has been a second immigration from Utah, usually of people of means. The day has passed for the ox-bowed wagon and for settlements out in the wilderness. There has been left no wilderness in which to work magic through labor. But the Mormon influence still is strong in agricultural Arizona and the high degree of development of many of her localities is based upon the pioneer settlement and work that are dealt with in the succeeding pages.
First Farmers in Many States
It is a fact little appreciated that the Mormons have been first in agricultural colonization of nearly all the intermountain States of today. This may have been providential, though the western movement of the Church happened in a time of the greatest shifting of population ever known on the continent. It preceded by about a year the discovery of gold in California, and gold, of course, was the lodestone that drew the greatest of west-bound migrations. The Mormons, however, were first. Not drawn by visions of wealth, unless they looked forward to celestial mansions, they sought, particularly, valleys wherein peace and plenty could be secured by labor. Nearly all were farmers and it was from the earth they designed drawing their subsistence and enough wherewith to establish homes.
Of course, the greatest of foundations was that at Salt Lake, July 24, 1847, when Brigham Young led his Pioneers down from the canyons and declared the land good. But there were earlier settlements.
First of the faith on the western slopes of the continent was the settlement at San Francisco by Mormons from the ship Brooklyn. They landed July 31, 1846, to found the first English speaking community of the Golden State, theretofore Mexican. These Mormons established the farming community of New Helvetia, in the San Joaquin Valley, the same fall, while men from the Mormon Battalion, January 24, 1848, participated in the discovery of gold at Sutter's Fort. Mormons also were pioneers in Southern California, where, in 1851, several hundred families of the faith settled at San Bernardino.
The first Anglo-Saxon settlement within the boundaries of the present State of Colorado was at Pueblo, November 15, 1846, by Capt. James Brown and about 150 Mormon men and women who had been sent back from New Mexico, into which they had gone, a part of the Mormon Battalion that marched on to the Pacific Coast.
The first American settlement in Nevada was one of Mormons in the Carson
Valley, at Genoa, in 1851.