Emigration Canyon is the passage down the western slope of the Wasatch Range into the Great Salt Lake Valley. In the book, it is both a physical route through mountain terrain and a threshold into a place imagined as a new home: the advance party descended it in 1847, and the Fancher company entered the valley by the same canyon in 1857.

Route into the valley

After an advance party crested a ridge and glimpsed the Great Salt Lake Valley, it descended the Wasatch Range the following morning, with scout Porter Rockwell leading the way. The travelers went down what is now called Emigration Canyon and emerged at its mouth into the Saints’ new Zion, near the southern end of the lake. The canyon thus connects the mountain crossing to the valley below; the account locates it by the movement of the party rather than by a detailed physical description.

The 1847 arrival

The advance party toured the surrounding area for two hours, then rode back up Emigration Canyon to report its findings to Brigham Young and the others. The next day, July 24, 1847, Brigham arrived in the valley with the main company. Before sunset, the settlers had planted potatoes and diverted City Creek to irrigate them; nearby, they began laying a temple foundation. The canyon’s place in this sequence is as the route by which the advance party reached the settlement site and returned with news that it could serve as a new home.

A route revisited

On August 3, 1857, the Fancher company’s wagon train crested the Wasatch Range and rolled down Emigration Canyon into the Great Salt Lake Valley. The Arkansans encountered a territory in which hostility toward Gentiles had intensified; after resting for two days in the capital, they continued south and west along the Old Spanish Trail. The account’s return to the canyon links the Saints’ earlier arrival with a later passage by a group of outsiders, placing the route at the threshold of two sharply different journeys into the valley.