In general, the Mormon (and the word will be used without quotation
marks) always has been agricultural. The Church itself appears to have a
foundation idea that its membership shall live by, upon and through the
products of the soil. It will be found in this work that Church influence
served to turn men from even the gold fields of California to the
privations of pioneer Utah. It also will be found that the Church,
looking for extension and yet careful of the interests of its membership,
directed the expeditions that penetrated every part of the Southwest.
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.