_The Promised Land_
So far on their march the Lord had protected them from all but ordinary
hardships. True, some members of the company had suffered from a fever
which they attributed to the clouds of dust that enveloped the column of
wagons when in motion, and to the great change of temperature from day
to night. Again, the most of them were for many weeks without bread,
saving for the sick the little flour they had and subsisting upon the
meat provided by the hunters. Before reaching Fort Laramie, too, their
stock had become weakened for want of food; an extended drought, the
vast herds of buffalo, and the Indian fires having combined to destroy
the pasturage.
This weakness of the animals made the march for many days not more than
five or six miles a day. At the last they had fed to the stock not only
all their grain but the most of their crackers and other breadstuffs.
But these were slight matters to a persecuted people gathering out of
Babylon.
Late in June they reached the South Pass. For many hundred miles they
had been climbing the backbone of the continent. Now they had reached
the summit, the dividing ridge between streams that flowed to the
Atlantic and streams that flowed to the Pacific. From the level prairies
they had toiled up into the fearsome Rockies where bleak, grim crags
lowered upon them from afar, and distant summits glistening with snow
warned them of the perils ahead.
Through all this time of marching the place where they should pitch the
tent of Israel was not fixed upon. When Brigham was questioned around
the camp-fire at night, his only reply was that he would know the site
of their new home when he saw it. And it came to be told among the men
that he had beheld in vision a tent settling down from heaven and
resting over a certain spot; and that a voice had said to him, "Here is
the place where my people Israel shall pitch their tents and spread wide
the curtains of Zion!" It was enough. He would recognise the spot when
they reached it.
From the trappers, scouts, and guides encountered along the road they
had received much advice as to eligible locations; and while this was
various as to sites recommended, the opinion had been unanimous that the
Salt Lake Valley was impossible. It was, they were told, sandy, barren,
rainless, destitute of timber and vegetation, infested with hordes of
hungry crickets, and roamed over by bands of the most savage Indians. In
short, no colony could endure there.
One by one the trappers they met voiced this opinion. There was
Bordeaux, the grizzled old Frenchman, clad in ragged buckskin; Moses
Harris; "Pegleg" Smith, whose habit of profanity was shocking; Miles
Goodyear, fresh from captivity among the Blackfeet; and James Bridger.
The latter had discovered Great Salt Lake twenty-five years before, and
was especially vehement in his condemnation of the valley. They had
halted a day at his "fort," two adjoining log houses with dirt roofs,
surrounded by a high stockade of logs, and built on one of several small
islands formed by the branches of Black's Fork. Here they had found the
old trapper amid a score of nondescript human beings, white men, Indian
women, and half-breed children.
Bridger had told them very concisely that he would pay them a thousand
dollars for the first ear of corn raised in Salt Lake Valley. It is true
that Bridger seemed to have become pessimistic in many matters. For one,
the West was becoming overcrowded and the price of furs was falling at a
rate to alarm the most conservative trapper. He referred feelingly to
the good old days when one got ten dollars a pound for prime beaver
skins in St. Louis; but "now it's a skin for a plug of tobacco, and
three for a cup of powder, and other fancies in the same proportion."
And so, had his testimony been unsupported, they might have suspected he
was underestimating the advantages of the Salt Lake Valley. But,
corroborated as he had been by his brother trappers, they began to
descend the western slope of the Rockies strong in the opinion that this
same Salt Lake Valley was the land that had been chosen for them by the
Lord.
They dared not, indeed, go to a fertile land, for there the Gentiles
would be tempted to follow them--with the old bloody end. Only in a
desert such as these men had described the Salt Lake Valley to be could
they hope for peace. From Fort Bridger, then, their route bent to the
southwest along the rocky spurs of the Uintah Mountains, whose snow-clad
tops gleamed a bluish white in the July sun.
By the middle of July the vanguard of the company began the descent of
Echo Canon,--a narrow slit cut straight down a thousand feet into the
red sandstone,--the pass which a handful of them was to hold a few years
later against a whole army of the hated Gentiles.
The hardest part of their journey was still before them. Their road had
now to be made as they went, lying wholly among the mountains. Lofty
hills, deep ravines with jagged sides, forbidding canons, all but
impassable streams, rock-bound and brush-choked,--up and down, through
or over all these obstacles they had now to force a passage, cutting
here, digging there; now double-locking the wheels of their wagons to
prevent their crashing down some steep incline; now putting five teams
to one load to haul it up the rock-strewn side of some water-way.
From Echo Canon they went down the Weber, then toward East Canon, a
dozen of the bearded host going forward with spades and axes as sappers.
Sometimes they made a mile in five hours; sometimes they were less
lucky. But at length they were fighting their way up the choked East
Canon, starting fierce gray wolves from their lairs in the rocks and
hearing at every rod of their hard-fought way the swift and unnerving
song of the coiled rattlesnake.
Eight fearful miles they toiled through this gash in the mountain; then
over another summit,--Big Mountain; down this dangerous slide, all
wheels double-locked, on to the summit of another lofty hill,--Little
Mountain; and abruptly down again into the rocky gorge afterwards to
become historic as Immigration Canon.
Following down this gorge, never doubting they should come at last to
their haven, they found its mouth to be impassable. Rocks, brush, and
timber choked the way. Crossing to the south side, they went sheerly up
the steep hill--so steep that it was all but impossible for the
straining animals to drag up the heavy wagons, and so narrow that a
false step might have dashed wagon and team half a thousand feet on to
the rocks below.
But at last they stood on the summit,--and broke into shouts of rapture
as they looked. For the wilderness home of Israel had been found. Far
and wide below them stretched their promised land,--a broad, open
valley hemmed in by high mountains that lay cold and far and still in
the blue haze. Some of these had slept since the world began under their
canopies of snow, and these flashed a sunlit glory into the eager eyes
of the pilgrims. Others reared bare, scathed peaks above slopes that
were shaggy with timber. And out in front lay the wondrous lake,--a
shield of deepest glittering turquois held to the dull, gray breast of
the valley.
Again and again they cried out, "Hosanna to God and the Lamb!" and many
of the bearded host shed tears, for the hardships of the way had
weakened them.
Then Brigham came, lying pale and wasted in his wagon, and when they saw
him gaze long, and heard him finally say, "Enough--drive on!" they knew
that on this morning of July 24, 1847, they had found the spot where in
vision he had seen the tent of the Lord come down to earth.
Joel Rae had waited with a beating heart for Brigham's word of
confirmation, and when he heard it his soul was filled to overflowing.
He knew that here the open vision would enfold him; here the angel of
the Lord would come to him fetching his great Witness. Here he would
rise to immeasurable zeniths of spirituality. And here his people would
become a mighty people of the Lord. He foresaw the hundred unwalled
cities that Brigham was to found, and the green gardens that were to
make the now desert valley a fit setting for the temple of God. Here
was a stricken Rachel, a barren Sarah to be transformed by the touch of
the Saints to a mother of many children. Here would the lambs of the
Lord be safe at last from the Gentile wolves--safe for a time at least,
until so long as it might take the Lions of the Lord to come to their
growth. And that was to be no indefinite period; for had not Brigham
just said, with a snap of his great jaws and a cold flash of his blue
eyes, "Let us alone ten years here, and we'll ask no odds of Uncle Sam
or the Devil!"
There on the summit they knelt to entreat the mercy of God upon the
land. The next day, by their leader's direction, they consecrated the
valley to the Lord, and planted six acres of potatoes.