* Tullidge says: "The land portion of each family, as a rule, was
the acre-and-a-quarter lot designated in the plan of the city; but the
chief men of the pioneers, who had a plurality of wives and numerous
children, received larger portions of the city lots. The giving of
farms, as shown is the General Epistle, was upon the same principle as
the apportioning of city lots. The farm of five, ten, or twenty acres
was not for the mechanic, nor the manufacturer, nor even for the farmer,
as a mere personal property, but for the good of the community at large,
to give the substance of the earth to feed the population.... While the
farmer was planting and cultivating his farm, the mechanic and tradesman
produced his supplies and wrought his daily work for the community."
He adds, "It can be easily understood how some departures were made from
this original plan." This understanding can be gained in no better way
than by inspecting the list of real estate left by Brigham Young in his
will as his individual possession.
On August 22 a General Conference decided that the city should be called City of the Great Salt Lake. When the city was incorporated, in 1851, the name was changed to Salt Lake City. In view of the approaching return of Young and his fellow officers to the Missouri River, the company in the valley were placed in charge of the prophet's uncle, John Smith, as Patriarch, with a high council and other officers of a Stake.
When P. P. Pratt and the following companies reached the valley in September, they found a fort partly built, and every one busy, preparing for the winter. The crops of that year had been a disappointment, having been planted too late. The potatoes raised varied in size from that of a pea to half an inch in diameter, but they were saved and used successfully for seed the next year. A great deal of grain was sown during the autumn and winter, considerable wheat having been brought from California by members of the Battalion. Pratt says that the snow was several inches deep when they did some of their ploughing, but that the ground was clear early in March. A census taken in March, 1848, gave the city a population of 1671, with 423 houses erected.
The Saints in the valley spent a good deal of that winter working on their cabins, making furniture, and carting fuel. They discovered that the warning about the lack of timber was well founded, all the logs and firewood being hauled from a point eight miles distant, over bad roads, and with teams that had not recovered from the effect of the overland trip. Many settlers therefore built huts of adobe bricks, some with cloth roofs. Lack of experience in handling adobe clay for building purposes led to some sad results, the rains and frosts causing the bricks to crumble or burst, and more than one of these houses tumbled down around their owners. Even the best of the houses had very flat roofs, the newcomers believing that the climate was always dry; and when the rains and melted snow came, those who had umbrellas frequently raised them indoors to protect their beds or their fires.
Two years later, when Captain Stansbury of the United States Topographical Engineers, with his surveying party, spent the winter in Salt Lake City, in "a small, unfurnished house of unburnt brick or adobe, unplastered, and roofed with boards loosely nailed on," which let in the rains in streams, he says they were better lodged than many of their neighbors. "Very many families," he explains, "were obliged still to lodge wholly or in part in their wagons, which, being covered, served, when taken off from the wheels and set upon the ground, to make bedrooms, of limited dimensions, it is true, but exceedingly comfortable. In the very next enclosure to that of our party, a whole family of children had no other shelter than one of these wagons, where they slept all winter."
The furniture of the early houses was of the rudest kind, since only the most necessary articles could be brought in the wagons. A chest or a barrel would do for a table, a bunk built against the side logs would be called a bed, and such rude stools as could be most easily put together served for chairs.
The letters sent for publication in England to attract emigrants spoke of a mild and pleasant winter, not telling of the privations of these pioneers. The greatest actual suffering was caused by a lack of food as spring advanced. A party had been sent to California, in November, for cattle, seeds, etc., but they lost forty of a herd of two hundred on the way back. The cattle that had been brought across the plains were in poor condition on their arrival, and could find very little winter pasturage. Many of the milk cows driven all the way from the Missouri had died by midsummer. By spring parched grain was substituted for coffee, a kind of molasses was made from beets, and what little flour could be obtained was home-ground and unbolted. Even so high an officer of the church as P. P. Pratt, thus describes the privations of his family: "In this labor [ploughing, cultivating, and sowing] every woman and child in my family, so far as they were of sufficient age and strength, had joined to help me, and had toiled incessantly in the field, suffering every hardship which human nature could well endure. Myself and most of them were compelled to go with bare feet for several months, reserving our Indian moccasins for extra occasions. We toiled hard, and lived on a few greens, and on thistle and other roots."
This was the year of the great visitation of crickets, the destruction of which has given the Mormons material for the story of one of their miracles. The crickets appeared in May, and they ate the country clear before them. In a wheat-field they would average two or three to a head of grain. Even ditches filled with water would not stop them. Kane described them as "wingless, dumpy, black, swollen-headed, with bulging eyes in cases like goggles, mounted upon legs of steel wire and clock spring, and with a general personal appearance that justified the Mormons in comparing them to a cross of a spider and the buffalo." When this plague was at its worst, the Mormons saw flocks of gulls descend and devour the crickets so greedily that they would often disgorge the food undigested. Day after day did the gulls appear until the plague was removed. Utah guide-books of to-day refer to this as a divine interposition of Heaven in behalf of the Saints. But writers of that date, like P. P. Pratt, ignore the miraculous feature, and the white gulls dot the fields between Salt Lake City and Ogden in 1901 just as they did in the summer of 1848, and as Fremont found them there in September, 1843. Gulls are abundant all over the plains, and are found with the snipe and geese as far north as North Dakota. Heaven's interposition, if exercised, was not thorough, for, after the crickets, came grasshoppers in such numbers that one writer says, "On one occasion a quarter of one cloudy dropped into the lake and were blown on shore by the wind, in rows sometimes two feet deep, for a distance of two miles."
But the crops, with all the drawbacks, did better than had been deemed possible, and on August 10 the people held a kind of harvest festival in the "bowery" in the centre of their fort, when "large sheaves of wheat, rye, barley, oats, and other productions were hoisted on poles for public exhibition."* Still, the outlook was so alarming that word was sent to Winter Quarters advising against increasing their population at that time, and Brigham Young's son urged that a message be sent to his father giving similar advice.** Nevertheless P. P. Pratt did not hesitate in a letter addressed to the Saints in England, on September 5, to say that they had had ears of corn to boil for a month, that he had secured "a good harvest of wheat and rye without irrigation," and that there would be from ten thousand to twenty thousand bushels of grain in the valley more than was needed for home consumption.
* Pratt's "Autobiography," p. 406.