A party of twenty pioneers was sent over to the San Joaquin Valley, to
found the settlement of New Hope, or Stanislaus City, on the lower
Stanislaus River, but the greater number for a while remained on the bay,
making San Francisco, according to Bancroft, "for a time very largely a
Mormon town. All bear witness to the orderly and moral conduct of the
Saints, both on land and sea. They were honest and industrious citizens,
even if clannish and peculiar." There was some complaint against Brannan,
charged with working the Church membership for his own personal benefit.
New Hope had development that comprised a log house, a sawmill and the
cultivation of eighty acres of land. It was abandoned in the fall, after
word had been received that the main body of the Saints, traveling
overland, would settle in the valley of the Great Salt Lake. Brannan
pushed with vigor his idea that the proper location would be in
California. He started eastward to present this argument and met the
western migration at Green River in July, and unsuccessfully argued with
Brigham Young, returning with the vanguard as far as Salt Lake. His
return to San Francisco was in September, on his way there being
encounter with several parties from the Mormon Battalion, to them Brannan
communicating rather gloomy ideas concerning the new site of Zion.
It is one of the many remarkable evidences of the strength of the Mormon
religious spirit that only 45 adults of the Brooklyn party, with their
children, remained in California, even after the discovery of gold. The
others made their way across the Sierra Nevadas and the deserts, to join
their people in the intermountain valley. A few were cut off from the
Church. These included Brannan, who gathered large wealth, but who died,
poor, in Mexico, in 1889.
There might be speculation over what would have been the fate of the
Mormon Church had Brannan's idea prevailed and the tide of the Nauvoo
exodus continued to California. Probably the individual pilgrims thereby
might have amassed worldly wealth. Possibly there might have been
established in the California valleys even richer Mormon settlements than
those that now dot the map of the intermountain region. But that such a
course would have been relatively disruptive of the basic plans of the
leaders there can be no doubt, and it is also without doubt that under a
condition of greater material wealth there would have been diminished
spiritual interest.
Possibly even better was the grasp upon the people shown in Utah at the
time of the passage of the California emigrants, in trains of hypnotized
groups all crazed by lust for the gold assumed to be in California for
the gathering. The Mormons sold them provisions and helped them on their
way, yet added few to their numbers.
In after years, President Lorenzo Snow, referring to the Brannan effort,
stated his belief that it would have been nothing short of disastrous to
the Church had the people gone to California before they had become
grounded in the faith. They needed just the experiences they had had in
the valley of Salt Lake, where home-making was the predominant thought
and where wealth later came on a more permanent basis.