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But the Mormons pressed on. The world had seldom seen anything to compare with this epic migration: here were a whole people with their newborn and their aged, their cattle, their faded wedding dresses, their precious hoards of gunpowder and nutmeg, unfalteringly crossing half a continent to find a kingdom in a desert.
The exodus was no haphazard expedition. Advance parties of armed men went ahead to build and garrison forts, plant crops along the route, prepare the road. Wagon trains were spaced to conserve grazing land, and the flock was cheered at night by Captain Pitts's Brass Band, which had been converted en masse in England and had come to join the trek. ^
One day at last they moved down Emigration Canyon to the Great Salt Lake, to a sagebrush Zion on the River Jordan flowing into the Dead Sea. The day after the first group arrived they diverted a creek for irrigation, and plowed. Under Young's relentless driving a city was laid out, farms established, dams raised, smithies, tanneries, crude flour mills set up. Young knew what the Mormons needed for survival: isolation and a chance to sink their roots. When the Mormons heard the news of the gold strike at Sutter's Mill, he cried: "Gold is for paving streets," and rallied the faithful to their toil.
The Golden Spike. The Mormon State of Deseret,* which encompassed Utah, a corner of California and a piece of Wyoming, prospered. But Mormon isolation was never complete. A golden railroad spike driven at Promontory, only 70 miles from their capital, shattered it almost before it had begun.
Once again, even across the distance of the great plains, Mormons felt the hostility of the U.S. people. Once more the cause was polygamy. Actually plural marriage was not widespread. Only 3% of
Mormons ever practiced it, and those who embraced it did so soberly and only after consulting the church.
Young, who could count a score of wives and 56 children, was a stern but benign husband and father. He conferred with his wives once a day. He held a daily "juvenile court" at his gabled adobe Lion House on East South Temple Street to settle differences between the children.
Although he did not object to the brigades of young men who invaded his parlor to call on his daughters, he kept a lamp burning high and terminated the courting in good time by confronting the visitors with his arms full of hats.
But, good or bad, polygamy was doomed. U.S. agents came in to hunt down "cohabs." Wrote one Mormon: "The hounds of hell were laying in wate for me. How long will the Lord allow these wicked reches to gain power over us?"
The Government made the polygamy issue an excuse for political and economic pressure and the church was finally threatened with bankruptcy. In 1890 Wilford Woodruff, the third president in the succession from Joseph Smith, announced that by divine revelation polygamy was ended. It was the last revelation. Utah was admitted to the Union, the old enmity between Mormon and Gentile disappeared, and the modern history of the church began.