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.
In Wyoming, as early as 1854, was a Mormon settlement at Green River,
near Fort Bridger, known as Fort Supply.
In Idaho, too, preeminence is claimed by virtue of a Mormon settlement at
Fort Lemhi, on the Salmon River, in 1855, and at Franklin, in Cache
Valley, in 1860.
The earliest Spanish settlement of Arizona, within its present political
boundaries, was in the Santa Cruz Valley not far from the southern
border. There was a large ranch at Calabasas at a very early date, and at
that point Custodian Frank Pinkley of the Tumacacori mission ruins
lately discovered the remains of a sizable church. A priest had station
at San Xavier in 1701. Tubac as a presidio dates from 1752, Tumacacori
from 1754 and Tucson from 1776. These, however, were Spanish settlements,
missions or presidios. In the north, Prescott was founded in May, 1864,
and the Verde Valley was peopled in February, 1865. Earlier still were
Fort Mohave, reestablished by soldiers of the California Column in 1863,
and Fort Defiance, on the eastern border line, established in 1849. A
temporary Mormon settlement at Tubac in 1851, is elsewhere described. But
in honorable place in point of seniority are to be noted the Mormon
settlements on the Muddy and the Virgin, particularly, in the very
northwestern corner of the present Arizona and farther westward in the
southern-most point of Nevada, once a part of Arizona. In this
northwestern Arizona undoubtedly was the first permanent Anglo-Saxon
agricultural settlement in Arizona, that at Beaver Dams, now known as
Littlefield, on the Virgin, founded at least as early as the fall of
1864.