The Great Salt Lake is the immense, landlocked body of water that gave its name to the valley where Mormon emigrants founded their new Zion in 1847. More than a striking feature of the landscape, it helped define the destination of their arduous westward migration and the strategic geography through which they imagined a Kingdom of God on earth.

Geography and Setting

The lake has no outlet and is saltier than the Pacific Ocean. Its waters formed the western landmark of a valley whose eastern margin offered a sharp contrast: streams of fresh snowmelt descended from the Wasatch Range, while the mountains themselves stood as a natural barrier. To the emigrants who surveyed the area, the lake and surrounding terrain made the valley both a distinctive home and a defensible setting for a new capital.

The lake was visible from a ridge reached by an advance party on July 21, 1847. From there the emigrants saw its broad waters in the distance; the following morning they descended the western slope of the Wasatch through Emigration Canyon and entered the valley near the lake’s southern end. After touring the immediate area for two hours, they returned through the canyon to report their news to Brigham Young.

The Emigrants’ Destination

The Great Salt Lake became the central landmark of the Saints’ arrival after a migration of approximately 1,300 miles from Nauvoo. The journey had brought frostbite, disease, hunger, and the deaths of more than six hundred emigrants during the first winter. Against that history of hardship, reaching the valley beside the lake marked the end of a long pursuit of a permanent home.

Brigham Young arrived with the main company on July 24, 1847, later commemorated as Pioneer Day. Before nightfall, the settlers had planted potatoes and diverted City Creek’s water to irrigate them. They began laying a temple foundation nearby, at the center of what would become Salt Lake City. The lake thus belongs to the account of arrival not as a site of construction itself, but as the defining geographical presence beside which the new settlement took shape.

A Landscape of Isolation and Connection

The valley’s geography initially seemed to promise separation from outside threats. The Wasatch mountains were understood as a barrier against the godless, and the distant lake helped give the settlers’ new home a clear physical boundary. The book presents this setting alongside the emigrants’ growing cohesion: surviving the migration made those who reached Utah more devoted to their church and leader.

That relative isolation did not last. In 1869 the ceremonial driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, near the Great Salt Lake’s northern end, marked completion of the transcontinental railroad. The railway made the journey between Utah and the wider nation relatively short and comfortable, turning the lake’s vicinity from the edge of an isolated settlement into a landmark along a newly connected corridor.

The same year, John Wesley Powell’s expedition set out from Green River Station, Wyoming, and traveled down the Green River to its confluence with the Colorado River before continuing through the Grand Canyon. The railroad and the river expedition together mark a change in the book’s geographical frame: the Great Salt Lake region had once represented refuge at the end of a punishing migration, but by 1869 it was no longer beyond the reach of the wider country.