Utah Centennial County History Series - Salt Lake County 1996

T h e day Mormon wagons entered the Salt Lake Valley, life therein began to change. Mountain streams turned in their courses at the command of shovels and spread their waters. Plows struck the soil now expected to yield the crops the newcomers sowed. Certain valley inhabitants, ranging from coyotes to crickets, were decreed "destroyers and wastersm1and would be energetically killed. The Indians living near the Great Salt Lake, and other bands accustomed to moving through the valley, became almost immediately unwelcome.

Descriptions by Orson F. Whitney, a prominent nineteenthcentury historian, convinced future generations that the Mormons entered a desolation with "interminable wastes of sagebrush," a "paradise of the lizard, the cricket, and the rattlesnake."' Yet settlers recorded whooping with joy at sighting "the most fertile valley . . . clothed with a heavy garment of vegetation, . . . with mountains all around towering to the skies, and steams, rivulets and creeks of pure water running through the beautiful alley."^ As they enthusiastically claimed their new home, the Mormons