History of Utah, 1540-1886 - Brigham Young University

414 MISSIONS AND IMMIGRATION.
found more than 2,000 or 3,000 additional members.
If to these figures be added 15,000 converts distributed
throughout the United States, 4,000 in British
America, 3,000 in the Sandwich and Society islands,
and perhaps 2,000 elsewhere in the world, we have a
total of 35,000 latter-day saints scattered among the
gentiles; and estimating the population of Utah at
140,000, a total of 175,000 orofessing the Mormon
faith. 41
Of the present population of Utah, about one third
are of foreign birth, and at least another third of foreign
parentage, converts having been gathered to Zion
as speedily as the means could be furnished, from the
earliest days of Mormon evangelism.
Between 1837 and 1851 about 17,000 proselytes
set sail from England/ 2 among them a considerable
percentage belonging to other nationalities. In the
latter year, not more than 3,000 persons arrived in
the valley of the Great Salt Lake, including converts
from the United States; although at this time it was
published in American and copied in European papers
that proselytes by the hundred thousand were on
their way. In 1852 immigration was on a somewhat
larger scale. 43 During a single month 352 converts
41 Remy, Jour, to G. S. L. City, ii. 212-13, gives a table of the approximate
number of Mormons in each country in 1859. The total is 186,000, of whom
80,000 were in Utah, 40,000 in other states and territories, 32,000 in England
and Scotland, 8,000 in British America, 5,000 in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark,
and 7,000 in the Sandwich and Society islands. His figures are at
least 20 per cent too high. The entire population of Utah, for instance, was
not more than 00,000 at this date. A writer in the Hist. May., March 1859,
p. 85, places the total at 126,000, of whom 38,000 were residents of Utah.
Add 20,000 more for Utah, and we have a total of 146,000 which may be accepted
approximately as the correct figures. Other estimates differ widely,
the Mormons themselves, in an official statement published in the Deseret
News, in 1856, claiming 4S0,000 members of the church in all parts of the
world. See American Almanac, 1858, 338.
42 Linforth gives the number despatched by the British agency between
1S40 and 1S52 at 11,296. Route from Liverpool, 15. The first vessel sent
from England was the North America, which sailed June 16, 1840. The ship
started on another voyage Sept. 8th of the same year. In Burton's City
of the Saints, 361-2, is a list of vessels that sailed between 1851 and 1861.
43 Estimated by Ezra T. Benson at 10,000 souls. It was probably less
than half that number. The census of 1850 places the population of the
territory at a little over 11,000; the reports of the bishops of wards at the
Oct. conference in 1S53, as given in Richards' 1
Hist. Incidents of Utah, MS.,
39, at 18,206.