The Mormon authorities made a determined effort from the outset to bring converts from Europe, the first one arriving from Liverpool in 1849. At that time the English mission was said to have 30,000 members. In the fall of 1849 the Mormon leaders established the famous Perpetual Emigrating Fund which was used thenceforth to aid the transport of converts.
The Mormon Utah settlement by 1850 had a population of 11,000. The number of converts brought from abroad during the first ten years is put at 17,000, mostly from England. By 1887 the Mormons are said to have brought more than 85,000 of the working classes from England and northern Europe to the Great Basin of the Rocky Mountains.
Brigham Young in 1849 organized his territory as "The Provisional State of Deseret," including what is now Utah and Nevada, and parts of Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. This had but a short existence even on paper, for in 1850 Congress passed a law organizing the territory of Utah which also included what is now Nevada.
Toward the end of this period the discovery of rich silver mines in the Nevada section began to attract a miscellaneous population from all parts of the West. By 1863 a Mormon census of Utah gave the territory a population of 88,206, of whom probably a majority were foreigners. The great bulk of these were English, particularly from the factory towns, but Brigham Young boasted that fifty nationalities were represented in his territory a few years later. On the whole, however, the population was almost entirely Nordic.
Idaho's first settlement is supposed to have been made by a party of Mormons in 1855 when it was still a part of Washington territory. At the close of the period here considered it was still a part of Washington and was just beginning to get a population of its own because of a gold rush in 1860.
Its early settlers were from Oregon, Washington, and northern California, and included an unusual proportion of men bred in the Southern and Southwestern States.
Montana had scarcely begun to receive settlers at this time.
Meanwhile the tides of colonization were flowing over the "great plains" to deposit their load on the Pacific Coast.