This is the right place
I’m not going to provide you with an extensive biography of Brigham Young (possibly to the relief of many) but rather will concentrate on his leadership in getting the LDS settlers from Missouri to Utah.
As I noted previously, Young was a shrewd and effective leader. He was also exceptionally well organized in planning the long journey to what he hoped would be a final safe haven for the flock of the church he now led. So extraordinary was Young’s planning that it wouldn’t be a stretch to call this migration the largest and best organized westward trek of pioneers in American history.
After setting up the winter camp in Iowa, which included preparing for the eventual arrival of most, if not all of the 12,000 people who had been living in Nauvoo, he began developing a plan to cross the country in stages. He sent out his reconnaissance teams to plan the route across Iowa and Nebraska, dig wells at camping spots, and sometimes, plant corn so the emigrants could replenish their food stores when the arrived in a summer season.
In April 1847, Young led a party of 25 wagons headed toward the Rocky Mountains traveling along the Platte River. In part, Young chose to create a new route along the Platte’s north bank to avoid encounters with other settlers on the Oregon Trail who might assault them. He, too, had a continuing fear of encountering the sort of religious bigotry that had forced the Mormons to leave Nauvoo.
The early part of the journey across the plains was relatively easy and the pioneers eventually arrived at Fort Bridger, Wyoming – the trading post established by the same Jim Bridger you met when I visited the Daughters Utah Pioneers Museum. At that point, they followed the same route south into Utah as the Donner-Reed Party had just months earlier.
By this time, Young had contracted an illness – likely Rocky Mountain spotted fever – and had to be transported by wagon. On 21 July 1847, an advance team of nine horsemen passed through Emigration Canyon and entered the Salt Lake Valley.
The Donner-Reed Party had passed this spot a year before but the LDS scout team chose a different path. Donner Hill sits about a mile and a half northeast of This is The Place Park. Reaching this very narrow spot, both parties faced the choice of trying to either go up and around it or continue to try to hack their way through the brush and over the boulders on the on the canyon floor. While the Donner Party chose the former, the LDS advance team chose the latter. Orson Pratt, one member of the party described the scene in his journal (from history.lds.org),
Bro. Erastus Snow, (having overtook our camp from the other camp which he said were but a few miles in the rear) & myself proceeded in advance of the camp down Last Creek 4 _ miles to where it passes through a Kanyon & issues into the broad open valley below. To avoid the Kanyon the waggons last season had passed over an exceedingly steep & dangerous hill. Mr Snow & myself asscended this hill from the top of which a broad open valley about 20 miles wide & 30 long lay stretched out before us at the N. End of which the broad waters of the great Salt Lake glistened in the sunbeams, containing high mountainous Islands from 25 to 30 miles in extent. After issuing from the mountains, among which we had been shut up for many days & beholding in a moment such an extensive scenery open before us we could not refrain from a shout of joy which almost involuntarily escaped from our lips the moment this grand & lovely scenery was within our view.
Three days later, on 24 July 1847, 111 days after he set out, Young entered the valley in his wagon and, according to legend, Young lifted himself from his sickbed, looked out and said, “It is enough. This is the right place.” (Although some accounts report him as saying, “This is the right place. Drive on.”) According to the website cited and linked above, this is what he wrote in his journal.
We have been kicked out of the frying-pan into the fire, out of the fire into the middle of the floor, and here we are and here we will stay. God has shown me that this is the spot to locate His people, and here is where they will prosper. . . . I have the grit in me and will do my duty anyhow.
The rather elaborate monument most visitors see today,
was dedicated during Utah’s pioneer centennial celebration in 1947. It’s complex and detailed.
However, if you know where to look, you’ll find it’s not the only arrival memorial on the site. (This is the fourth memorial I mentioned in the first post.) Tucked away a few hundred yards to the east of the Visitor’s Center is a much smaller, simpler marker. It’s a 10-foot-tall white obelisk that was installed by the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association and dedicated by LDS Church President Heber J. Grant on 25 July 1921. For some reason, although there’s little, if any, documentation to support it (there are even no contemporaneous accounts of Young making his famous proclamation) many historians believe the placement of this marker is more accurate in its location than the centennial marker.
