Early Utah History: Difference between revisions

It is estimated that about 1,800 people spent the winter of 1847-1848 in the Great Salt Lake Valley. Pres Brigham Young and a number of pioneers had returned to Winter Quarters, on the Missouri River, too call together the members of the Church residing temporarily in Iowa and other places in the east and prepare for their migration westward the following year. As these and other converts to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from the Eastern States and Europe, year by year, gathered with their co-religionists, the population steadily increased and Brigham Young, who was a natural colonizer, called many of the older settlers to locate in the outlying districts and establish settlements to which newcomers might be sent. Thus the area of colonization increased and thirty years after the arrival of the first pioneers of Utah, or at the time of the demise of Pres Brigham Young in 1877, nearly three hundred settlements of saints had been established in the Great Basin and vicinity. In due time other people, not members of the church, located in the various settlements and took part in the development of the country.  

The acquisition of the territory ceded to the United State by Mexico in 1848 placed the Mormon pioneers in Great Salt Lake Valley, where they desired to be, namely, within the limits of the United States, and steps were taken to draft a constitution for a proposed state, to which the title of “Deseret” was chosen, the name, taken from the Book of Mormon, meaning a honey bee. In 1849 Almon W. Babbitt was sent as a delegate to Washington D. C. and with the splendid assistance of Dr. John M. Bernhisel presented before Congress of the United States a petition asking for admission of the state of Deseret into the Union. This action resulted, however, not in the organization of a sovereign state, as had been hoped, but in the passing, on Sept 9, 1850, of an act of Congress providing for the organization of the territory of Utah, that name being suggested because of the Indian tribes who for many years previously had roamed in the vicinity of the great Salt Lake. But the desire of these pioneers in regard to the name has been perpetuated in the section of a beehive as the state emblems and Utah is often referred to as the “Beehive state.”