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?Wallace Stegner underscored the essence of communal cooperation in the Old West when he observed, ?The Mormons discovered what the cliff-dwellers had discovered centuries before, that the only way to be a farmer in the Great Basin and on the desert plateaus of the Colorado River watershed (where dams had to be built and miles of irrigation ditches had to be dug) was to be a group farmer.?
?Stegner?s apt generalization described not just the Mormon experience but also the experience of native people and pioneer families in the semi-arid areas of the West stretching from the Southwest to Montana and eastern Washington.?
Stewart L. Udall, The Forgotten Founders: Rethinking the History of the Old West
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Introduction
In his history, The Forgotten Founders, Stewart Udall writes that an ?overarching but neglected truth about the settlement of the American West is that, in the crucial early stages, it was the work of groups animated by religious beliefs.? He emphasizes that ?... from the first Spanish Catholic colonists arriving in present-day New Mexico in 1598 to the waves of westbound caravans crossing the Rocky Mountains before the gold rush of 1849, people of faith were in the vanguard of western settlement.?
Mormon pioneers were clearly part of that movement. A battalion of Mormon volunteers were recruited for President Polk in the 1840s by Brigham Young in exchange for their pay going into the meager church coffers. This group, forever known as the Mormon Battalion, was led by Lieutenant-Colonel Philip St. George Cooke who had orders to establish a southern wagon road to California. According to historian Lawrence Clark Powell, Arizona?s destiny emerged from blazing the Gila Trail during this operation. The harrowing crossing was a heroic achievement that included four hundred men and their mules, cattle and sheep moving over an arid, forbidding landscape. With pick and shovel, ropes, muscle and sweat, Powell writes that ?the Cooke caravan dug and tugged and cursed its way west.? He likens its achievement to Anza?s three-quarters of a century later. Reluctant soldiers, the Mormon men several times were on the verge of mutiny yet, led by Cooke, they moved from river to river, finally reaching California in 1847.
Mormon pioneers began to migrate to Arizona from Utah in the 1860s, establishing the first Arizona settlement in Littlefield in 1864 in the northwest corner of the state. As more Mormons arrived, they settled the area of the Arizona Strip which lies north and west of the Colorado River. By the 1870s Mormon leaders decided to run a ferry across the Colorado River to expand Mormon settlements from Utah into Arizona. In 1872 leaders sent John D. Lee to run the service across the natural crossing of the Colorado River. The crossing became known as Lee?s Ferry, now a popular destination for fishermen and adventurers who put in at this crossing to navigate the rapids of the Colorado River.
From Lees Ferry Mormon settlers established missions along the Little Colorado River and also headed south to St. David on the San Pedro River in Cochise County. Many of the early settlements later developed into important towns in northeastern Arizona including Springerville, Snowflake, St. Johns and Show Low. In planning these towns Mormon settlers used the ?City of Zion? town plan to survey and divide the town sites. That plan is characterized by large square blocks separated by 132 foot wide streets. According to tradition, the streets were to be made wide enough for ox-drawn wagons to turn around without having to drive to the edge of town to make the loop. Remnants of this unique town plan can still be seen in Eagar, Snowflake and Mesa. Where Indians dominated, Mormon settlers were instructed to establish enclosed forts rather than townsites. Forts were established at Pipe Spring, Brigham City (now renamed Winslow) and Fort Utah (which is now called Lehi ) near the later site of Mesa. Because Lehi was prone to flooding and had fewer irrigation ditches, Mesa eventually outgrew Lehi. Because the land reminded them of a table top, the first settlers named the site Mesa.
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