THE CONQUEST OF ARID AMERICA 



The problem can be summed up in two questions 

 which have doubtless already occurred to the reader : 

 Was the Utah experience possible without Brigham 

 Young ? Was Brigham Young possible without the 

 Church ? 



The first of these questions may be answered unhesi- 

 tatingly in the negative. Without a Brigham Young 

 there could have been no such record of achievement in 

 the deserts of Utah. He was the brains and the soul of 

 the enterprise. He planned with extraordinary sagacity 

 and wrought with tremendous vigor. Leave out that 

 brain and soul that sagacity and vigor and we can 

 conceive of no emigration from Nauvoo ; of no success- 

 ful march over plain and mountain ; of no triumph over 

 the almost insuperable difficulties which intervened be- 

 tween the arrival of the people in Salt Lake Valley in 

 1847 and the firmly established community of fifty years 

 later. But what of that ? The concession of the indis- 

 pensable fact of Brigham Young amounts only to the 

 concession, equally applicable to all human undertak- 

 ings of magnitude, that leadership is absolutely essen- 

 tial. 



This brings us to the other and more complicated 

 question: Was Brigham Young possible without the 

 Church ? First let us see what manner of man he 

 was. 



Born in Vermont, A of good native stock, he had the 

 characteristics of the place and the race in a pre-eminent 

 degree. He was shrewd and thrifty, far-seeing and in- 

 tensely practical. He was of coarse fibre, deficient in 

 the finer feelings, and devoid of all imagination of the 

 poetic kind. Of his innumerable sermons and speeches 



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