Most likely pioneers didn't find desolate, barren valley

Pioneer legend paints a grim picture of the Salt Lake Valley — barren, harsh and a desert, save a lone cedar tree.

In reality, say historians, the valley was well watered, with tall grasses and trees along the many stream banks.

"One of the greatest myths of the church is that the valley was total desolation," said the late Dr. Stanley Kimball, a Utah historian. No pioneer diary accounts he ever found supported the desolate valley idea.

Most of the paintings depicting the valley when the Mormon pioneers arrived look more like the west desert area than the Wasatch Front.

Richard Jackson, professor of geography at Brigham Young University, did extensive research in the 1970s on what the Salt Lake Valley was really like when the pioneers arrived.

"Briefly, there was not a lot of timber in the valley according to pioneer diarists, but there was clearly some, especially along the creeks," he said.

But regardless, the pioneers did not have an easy time in Utah, and some people still feel the desert of Salt Lake did "blossom like a rose."

"Settling the Utah area in the 1840s and '50s was a challenge," Glen Leonard, director of the LDS Museum of Church and Art, states on the church Web site, www.lds.org.

"They had left a lush farm area and came to an arid region. The soil was good, but the water was scarce. The seasons were short. So, Brigham Young wisely scattered the people out into small communities so that they had the natural resources — the water and the soil — and the community resources, the well-organized communities with different skills and talents, and then he just challenged them to make the desert blossom like a rose. And they did," Leonard concluded.

Comments by Young, Heber J. Grant and other church leaders made the desert comparison of the valley blossoming like a rose, too.

Many diary accounts support that the Salt Lake Valley was more green that history paintings illustrate:

William Clayton's journal for July 22, 1847, records his first view of the Salt Lake Valley and comments on the land between the mountains and the Great Salt Lake:

"The intervening valley appears to be well supplied with streams, creeks and lakes, some of the latter are evidently salt. There is but little timber in sight anywhere, and that is mostly on the banks of streams and creeks of water, which is almost the only objection which could be raised in my estimation to this being one of the most beautiful valleys and pleasant places for a home for the Saints which could be found."

Jackson said on Sept. 9, 1847, Brigham Young cautioned the Saints before he left to return to Winter Quarters that in "selecting your firewood, it will be wisdom to choose that which is dry and not suitable for timber of any kind, and we wish all the green timber and shrubbery in the city to remain as it is . . ."

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