The Mormon Settlers Had a Very Easy Life in Utah Desert
IN A CORNER OF UTAH, A PIONEER PAST
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August 3, 1986
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When the Mormon explorer Parley P. Pratt first approached the Virgin River basin in 1850, he was justifiably intimidated by the fierce and alien landscape.
''Huge hills, sandy deserts, cheerless, grassless plains, perpendicular rocks, loose, barren clay, dissolving beds of sandstone'' typified the surroundings, he wrote to Brigham Young, leader of the Mormon Church and Governor of the Utah Territory.
Brigham Young was not easily intimidated. He dispatched hundreds of pioneers from Salt Lake City to do battle with the cheerless land and establish towns and villages throughout the southwestern territory.
It is almost impossible to overestimate the difficulties early pioneers encountered as they arrived in the late 1850's and early 1860's and attempted to domesticate the Virgin River basin. Drought, flood, wasted soil, stifling heat, disease and malnutrition battered and drained the community.
St. George, the most important settlement growing from those rough times, has since become a thriving community, and with several national parks nearby, the region is now a tamed and potent lure for visitors, campers, hikers and climbers. Zion National Park is only 45 minutes northeast of St. George; the intricate, eroded spires of Bryce Canyon rise another hour beyond that; Grand Canyon and Glen Canyon are farther south and east, but are still easy day trips. For most travelers, however, St. George remains a way station of meals and motel beds amid rock and wind-seared cliffs. But there is a human and historical landscape here as compelling as any desert display. St. George is steeped in the past of the Mormon Church and Brigham Young's vision of an expansive -some might say imperial - and self-sufficient community beholden to no one, least of all the United States Government.
A weekend spent poking around St. George, a two-hour drive north of Las Vegas and about five hours south of Salt Lake City, can uncover much of this largely hidden past of physical and spiritual conquest, economic dreams and disaster, warfare, prophecy, greed, murder, ingenuity and courage.
A walking tour of the historic district takes a couple of hours and introduces a visitor to the old Washington County Courthouse, the Pioneer Museum, Brigham Young's winter home, the St. George Tabernacle and the first Mormon temple built following the great exodus west in 1846-47.
Short drives to sites in Santa Clara, Pine Valley and Silver Reef round out a visit, lending a sense of early Mormon missionary efforts among the Indians, failed hopes for vast fields of cotton covering the desert floor and the often hostile relations between Mormons and their mining neighbors.
The Pioneer Museum, a welter of early artifacts, documents and photographs crammed into a 1930's red-brick building, sits behind the old courthouse just off St. George Boulevard. Run by the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, what the museum lacks in order it makes up for in charm. What is thought to have been the only clock in Santa Clara during the 1860's is there, as are a grand piano carted by prairie schooner from St. Louis in the 1870's; an Orchestrone player piano used in the dance hall at Silver Reef, a nearby silver-mining boom town of the 1870's and 1880's; and several early newspapers, one of which reported the sighting in 1868 of a ''curious looking quadruped'' with ''a human head which resembles a beautiful young lady, a body the size of an elephant, but shaped like an ostrich.''
The museum, which is run by descendants of the original settlers, also contains many fine examples of locally produced cotton, linen and silk - testimony to one of Brigham Young's great hopes. In his desire to make the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as self-contained as possible, Young wanted St. George to become the center of a major textile industry.
Silk production never amounted to much, although mulberry trees still grow all over the area; there were greater hopes for cotton. In fact, for a time during the Civil War, it looked as though a cotton industry might take hold in southwestern Utah. Land was irrigated, crops were grown, the desert bloomed white and St. George cloth was peddled on both coasts. But the revival of the South after the war destroyed the industry.
The old cotton factory in Washington, 10 minutes from the Pioneer Museum, remains an evocative relic of the early cotton industry. Built in 1865, the two-story factory sits abandoned and closed, its roof partially collapsed, rows of windows shattered, red standstone bricks chipped and decayed. A for-sale sign stands in front.
Faced with bleak economic prospects and defecting settlers, Brigham Young formulated a series of public-works projects to stabilize St. George. In 1862, he directed residents to erect ''a good, substantial, commodious, well-furnished meeting house.'' Work on the St. George Tabernacle commenced the following year.
In 1866, construction began on the Georgian-style Washington County Courthouse, which stands in front of the Pioneer Museum and now houses the Chamber of Commerce. Then in 1871, Young directed the community to begin its third and most ambitious effort - the first Mormon temple in the West.
Hundreds, even thousands, of people were employed in construction for nearly two decades. Master craftsmen - Mormon converts from Europe, Canada and the United States -were brought in to work as masons, glaziers, carpenters, painters and artisans of all kinds. They passed their skills along to the town's young men.
The courthouse is worth noting primarily for its simple Georgian design. Exterior walls are made of locally fired red brick fronted by a two-story white portico (added later) and topped by an octagonal white cupola. Completed in 1876, the courthouse housed the town jail, where at least one miner, accused of murder, was taken for protection only to be attacked and lynched by the dead man's friends.
Two blocks from the courthouse, the St. George Tabernacle rises. Built of hand-cut sandstone and crowned by a tapering white spire and bell tower, the Tabernacle could fit comfortably in a New England town. In St. George, surrounded by the red hills that yielded the stone for its walls, it blends into the environment.
Ponderosa pine for beams and frame were carted with great difficulty from the Pine Valley Mountains more than 30 miles away. Iron for nails, braces and joints was smelted at the Mormon forge in Cedar City, the first forge built west of the Mississippi River. Two circular staircases designed by the Mormon architect Miles Romney flank the entrance hall, and a simple grape-and-leaf gypsum frieze decorates the interior walls. Nearly 2,000 panes of glass were shipped from New York City to Los Angeles and then carted over land for the graceful two-story windows, and the clock in the tower was imported from Britain.
The Tabernacle was, and is, a social center for the community. Concerts and theatrical events are staged there year round, and every Mormon leader except Joseph Smith has spoken there.
While the Tabernacle is warm in appearance and open to all, the Temple, only six blocks away, is cool and exclusive, open only to Mormons. It is here, in a building that visually dominates St. George, that church members participate in their most sacred rituals of marriage and baptism. Visitors are barred from the Temple, but a slide show depicting church history and Temple rituals may be viewed in a kiosk on the grounds.
Begun in 1871 and finished six years later, the St. George Temple was designed by Truman O. Angell - later the architect for the Salt Lake City Temple - in a curious style that might be called Mormon Norman. The building features formidable white walls, a castellated roof and a Georgian-style tower that is visible for miles around St. George.
Brigham Young kept tabs on construction of the Temple from his winter home only a few blocks away. His house, in the town's historic residential district three blocks from the courthouse, is a simple two-story affair with wraparound porch and balcony. The rear of the house was outfitted with telegraph equipment so Young could administer affairs in Salt Lake City. The front living area is now furnished with fine period pieces, including Young's organ. He had a taste for elegant interiors and, like many of the settlers, a love of music.
The house is the centerpiece for the historic district. Many of the homes built by early settlers and civic and religious leaders are here and have been restored within the last decade by their current owners. Young's residence is the only house in the neighborhood open for public tours, but residents and volunteer guides, many of whom are descendants of pioneers, are quick to impart local lore.
About five miles west of this district, in the town of Santa Clara, is the dusty-red sandstone house of Jacob Hamblin, one of the area's first settlers and an important early Mormon explorer and Indian missionary. Hamblin preached among
Indians all over the Southwest and tirelessly explored the Grand Canyon and the land south of the Colorado River. His Santa Clara home was constructed in 1862 and reflects the early Mormon way of life. Two bedrooms, absolutely identical down to fireplaces and bed frames, flank the front hall and dining room in the carefully restored house. These rooms served as quarters for Hamblin's two wives, Rachel and Sarah.
Recent studies indicate that polygamy was much more prevalent in the St. George area than has been thought. Hamblin was not unusual. He eventually fathered 24 children by four wives.
Most of the family's time at home was spent on the second floor of the house, one airy, whitewashed room topped with great beams cut from the Pine Valley Mountains. Here, Rachel Hamblin supervised the spinning and weaving of cloth, taught school, presided over local dances and theatrical events.
About 20 miles beyond the Hamblin home, through rising hills of twisted black and red rock and dormant volcanoes, is the small community of Pine Valley. A drive here gives a sense of the tremendous difficulty settlers must have had in carting timber to the basin for use in construction.
Today, the mountains are greatly denuded, but the small community of Pine Valley remains, and residents still attend the old Pine Valley Chapel, designed in 1861 by Ebenezer Bryce, an Australian shipbuilder who gave his name to the canyon. Bryce had never designed a building before, but he knew his ships, and the chapel is built literally like an upside-down square rigger. The floor corresponds to the deck and the arched roof, made by lashing timbers together with wet rawhide, corresponds to the hull. A hole is cut into the wall and ceiling so visitors can see this ingenious construction.
Immediately north of Pine Valley is the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre where, in 1857, Mormons and Indian allies slaughtered about 120 non-Mormons. The massacre was the most notorious incident of the mostly forgotten Utah War, in which President James Buchanan dispatched a sizable army to seize Federal control of Utah and depose Young as Governor. Negotiations settled the dispute.
Hostility between Mormons and their neighbors was not uncommon, and perhaps no neighbors provoked more hostility than the miners and adventurers attracted to the area by the discovery of silver in 1876.
The town of Silver Reef sprang up 20 miles north of St. George and for a time in the 1880's boasted a population of more than 1,000. Only the redstone Wells Fargo and Company Express building remains nowadays, surrounded by decaying foundations of lost hotels, saloons, dance halls, homes and restaurants.
Mormon residents of St. George played a key role in the demise of Silver Reef, providing manpower to help break a strike in 1881. The town never recovered, and within a decade it was virtually abandoned. By that time, St. George had stabilized. The Mormon Church was on a firm economic footing and had yielded to Federal authority on questions of polygamy and civil control. Utah became a state in 1896. But the unyielding desert landscape and the frail historic buildings - dilapidated and restored - are reminders of past rigors and divisions, signs at once of failure and tenacity. IF YOU GO TO ST. GEORGE St. George lies about 115 miles north of Las Vegas and 300 miles south of Salt Lake City in the extreme southwestern corner of Utah. It is readily accessible by car from either city off Interstate 15, and it also has a small airport. Sky West Airlines (800-453-9417) services St. George. The fare is $95 one way from Salt Lake City; $62 from Las Vegas; $107 from Phoenix. Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks are both short drives from town, as are a number of state parks and camping facilities. WHAT TO SEE The St. George Chamber of Commerce (801-628-1658) is in the old Washington County Courthouse at the corner of St. George Boulevard and 100 East Street. Officials there can provide maps for walking tours that encompass most of the important historic buildings open to the public as well as a number of historic private homes.
All of the Mormon sites are open year round from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M. with the exception of the Old Pine Valley Chapel, which is open Memorial Day to Labor Day 9 A.M. to 6 P.M.
Visitors should note thatthe region is in the high desert; temperatures in August are routinely over 100 degrees. Hats are essential for treks in the sun. WHERE TO STAY There are a number of hotels and motels throughout the area. Camping facilities also abound. Prices listed are for two in a room.
Hilton Inn (1450 South Hilton Drive, 801-628-0463). Prices range from $47 to $74.
Four Seasons Motor Inn (700 East St. George Boulevard, 801-673-4804). Closed for remodeling until mid-September. Prices range from $38 to $46.
Best Western Coral Hills Motel (125 East St. George Boulevard, 801-673-4844). Prices run from $40 to $44. WHERE TO EAT Restaurants in St. George cater to the steak-and-potatoes crowd. At Andelin's Gable House (206 East St. George Boulevard, 801-673-6796), dinner for two is about $45.
Utah has unusual restrictions on the sale of alcoholic beverages; it's best to check with the restaurant on availability. S.S.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/03/travel/in-a-corner-of-utah-a-pioneer-past.html
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