History of Utah, 1540-1886 - Brigham Young University

THE UNIVERSITY OF DESERET. 323
the mountains roamed the deer, elk, antelope, and
bear, and on the marshy flats amid the plains were
smaller game. 4 Timber was scarce and of poor quality,
except in places difficult of access; 5 but with this exception
there was no great lack of resources in the
territory which the saints had made their abode.
During the first years that followed their migration,
while yet engaged in building houses, fencing lands,
planting crops, and tending herds, the Mormons provided
liberally for the cause of education. In the
third general epistle of the twelve, dated the 12th of
April, 1850, it is stated that an appropriation of $5,000
per annum, for a period of twenty years, had been
made for a state university 6 in Salt Lake City,
branches to be established elsewhere throughout the
territory as they were needed. In the curriculum the
Keltic and Teutonic languages were to rank side by
side with the Romanic, and all living languages spoken
by men were to be included. Astronomy, geology,
chemistry, agriculture, engineering, and other branches
of science were to be studied; for having sought first
the kingdom of heaven, the saints were now assured
that knowledge and all other things should be added
unto them. 7 The world of science was to be revolu-
where he will find abundance of the pike, the perch, the bass, and the chub.
Gunnison's The Mormons, 20.
4 Wild ducks and geese were abundant in 1852. Ibid. There were also
quail and herons. In summer, boys filled their baskets with eggs found among
the reeds on the banks of streams or on the islands in the Great Salt Lake.
5 • Hidden away in the profound chasms and along the streams, whose
beds are deeply worn in the mountain-sides, are the cedar, pine, dwarf-maple,
and occasionally oak, where the inhabitants of the vale seek their fuel and
building timber, making journeys to obtain these necessaries twenty to forty
miles from their abodes.' Id., 21.
6 Under the supervision and control of a chancellor, twelve regents, a secretary,
and a treasurer. Frontier Guardian, June 12, 1850.
7 ' But what,' says Phelps in an oration delivered July 24, 1851, 'will all the
precious things of time, the inventions of men, the records, from Japheth in
the ark to Jonathan in congress, embracing the wit and the gist, the fashions
and the folly, which so methodically, grammatically, and transcendentaily
grace the libraries of the elite of nations, really be worth to a saint, when our
father sends down his regents, the angels, from the grand library of Zion
above, with a copy of the "history of eternal lives, the records of worlds, the
genealogy of the gods, the philosophy of truth, the names of our spirits from