Mormon Settlement in Arizona | Page 5

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.
First Farmers in Many States
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