Arrival

Parley P. Pratt (1807-1857) missionary, apostle, and explorer for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Utah State Historical Society.

In 1847, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints founded a settlement in the Salt Lake Valley.[1] From the beginning, these early settlers sought to expand and form new communities as they recognized many more immigrants would be following them west. Brigham Young, the President of the Church and first governor of the Utah Territory, sent out parties to explore the outlying regions.[2] Parley P. Pratt led an expedition from 1849 to 1850, and pinpointed several promising settlement locations throughout modern-day Iron and Washington Counties.[3] Pratt recounted his entrance into Washington County with details of “chaotic” geography:

Southwardly for about eighty miles there appeared a wide expanse of chaotic matter, huge hills, high sandy deserts, grassless, waterless plains, perpendicular rocks, loose, barren clay and dissolving beds of sandstone; in short a country in ruins, dissolved by the pelting storms of ages, or turned inside out, upside down by terrible convulsions.[4]

As they continued into the area around Washington City and St. George, the report continued more favorably: “loose, sandy, fertile soil easily watered sometimes subject to over flow; some cotton woods along the river they soon encountered a range of hills which divided this valley from another, both containing some three or four thousand acres of desirable land”[5]

Robert Lang Campbell, an expedition member, reported that Parley stated the area around present day St. George "would make a good settlement."[6]

Following Pratt’s favorable reports, Brigham Young began encouraging and “calling” individuals and families to settle these regions. The following years, 1851 and 1852, Parowan and Cedar City were established. The earliest settlements by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Washington County, such as Fort Harmony and Santa Clara, were founded shortly after Cedar City and were considered part of the “Southern Indian Mission.”[7]