History of Utah, 1540-1886 - Brigham Young University

320 SETTLEMENT AND OCCUPATION OF THE COUNTRY.
of ammunition. Among them there should be five
carpenters and joiners, a millwright, a surveyor, and
two blacksmiths, shoemakers, and masons. Thus
equipped and selected, the settlers, with their marvel-
lous energy and thrift, made more progress and suffered
less privation in reclaiming the waste lands of
their wilderness than did the Spaniards in the garden
spots of Mexico and Central America, or the English
in the most favored regions near the Atlantic seaboard.
A company was organized in March 1851, at the
suggestion of Brigham, to go to California and form
the nucleus of a settlement in the Cajon Pass, where
they should cultivate the olive, grape, sugar-cane,
and cotton, gather around them the saints, and select
locations on the line of a proposed mail route. 47 The
original intention was to have twenty in this company,
with Amasa M. Lyman and C. C. Rich in charge.
The number, however, reached over five hundred, and
Brigham's heart failed him as he met them at starting.
"I was sick at the sight of so many of the
saints running to California, chiefly after the god of
this world, and was unable to address them." 48
17 In Hist. B. Young, MS., 1851, 85, it is stated that, at the next session
of congress, it was expected that a mail route would be established to San
Diego by way of Parowan. At this date there was, as we shall see later, a
monthly mail between S. L. City and Independence, Mo. There was also a
mail to Sacramento, leaving that and S. L. City on the 1st of each month, a
bi-monthly mail to The Dalles, Or., a weekly mail to the San Pete valley, and
a semi-weekly mail to Brownsville.
48 Hist. B. Young, MS., 1851, 14. The object of the establishment of this
colony was that the people gathering to Utah from the Islands, and even
Europe, might have an outfitting; post. In 1853, Keokuk, Iowa, on the Mississippi
River, was selected by the western-bound emigrants as a rendezvous
and place of outfitting.