THE MORMON COMMONWEALTH 



culture, nor ever read of one save in the Bible. But 

 they quickly learned that they had staked their whole 

 future upon a region which could not produce a spear of 

 tame grass, an ear of corn, nor a kernel of wheat with- 

 out skilful irrigation. Of the art of irrigation they 

 were utterly ignorant. But the need of beginning a 

 planting was urgent and pressing, for their slender stock 

 of provisions would not long protect them from starva- 

 tion. 



It was this emergency which produced the first irriga- 

 tion canal ever built by white men in the United States. 

 Mormons are prone to believe that the suggestion of this 

 work was a revelation from God to the head of the 

 Church. Other traditions ascribe it to the advice of 

 friendly Indians ; to the example of the Mexicans ; to 

 the shrewd intuition with which the leader had met all 

 the trials encountered in the course of his adventurous 

 pilgrimage. Whatever the source of the inspiration, he 

 quickly set his men at work to divert the waters of City 

 Creek through a rude ditch and to prepare the ground 

 for Utah's first farm. These crystal waters now furnish 

 the domestic supply for a city of sixty thousand inhabi- 

 tants. The late President Wilford Woodruff, who was 

 one of the party assigned to the work of digging the first 

 canal, related that when the water was turned out upon 

 the desert the soil was so hard that the point of a plough 

 would scarcely penetrate it. There was also much white 

 alkali on the surface. It was, therefore, with no absolute 

 conviction of success that the pioneers planted the very 

 last of their stock of potatoes and awaited the result of 

 the experiment. The crop prospered in spite of all ob- 

 stacles, and demonstrated that a living could be wrung 



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