THE CONQUEST OF ARID AMERICA 



holiness to the Lord." It is above this spot that Sculp- 

 tor Dallin's graceful figure of the Angel Moroni now 

 looks down from a stately pile of Utah granite, reared 

 at a cost of forty years' lahor and six million dollars. 



The pioneers possessed very little cash capital when 

 they arrived in the valley which was to be the heart of a 

 future commonwealth. This was not a serious misfort- 

 une, since there was little that money would buy in 

 Utah at that time, or anywhere within one thousand 

 miles east, west, north, or south. They had located at 

 almost the exact geographical centre of that great arid 

 region whose modern agricultural era they were destined 

 to inaugurate. Surrounded by extraordinary wealth, 

 there was but one thing which could pass current as a 

 medium of exchange in this primeval wilderness. This 

 one thing was labor, and the free and unlimited coinage 

 of labor has been the cardinal doctrine in Utah's econom- 

 ic faith from the beginning down to the present hour. 

 Besides their willing industry, the Mormons had brought 

 with them the contents of seventy-two wagons, about 

 one hundred horses, less than half as many mules and 

 oxen, nineteen cows and a few chicken. It was with this 

 capital that they began the making of Utah. But at the 

 very threshold of their life in a new country they were 

 confronted by something utterly strange to them in the 

 conditions of agriculture. 



First of the Anglo-Saxon race, the Mormons encount- 

 ered the problem of aridity, and discovered that its suc- 

 cessful solution was the price of existence. Brigham 

 Young had lived in Vermont, Ohio, Missouri, and Il- 

 linois. Neither he nor any of his followers had ever 

 seen a country where the rainfall did not suffice for agri- 



