The Great Basin became both a refuge and an unfinished political promise for the Saints. Brigham Young chose its sparsely inhabited deserts as a place distant from Gentile settlement, where his people might escape persecution and build a Kingdom of God on earth. Yet the region’s remoteness could not keep it beyond the reach of expanding national power or the traffic of westward migration.

A Refuge Chosen for Its Remoteness

After leaving Nauvoo, Brigham Young considered Oregon, California, and Vancouver Island before settling on the Great Basin. At the time, the region belonged to Mexico. Its deserts seemed repugnant to prospective Gentile settlers, a quality Young regarded as protection: distance and an inhospitable reputation might allow the Saints to live beyond the reach of their opponents.

The advance party’s first view of the Great Salt Lake Valley gave that search a specific destination within the broader basin. The valley was mostly barren, but streams of snowmelt ran along its eastern margin from the Wasatch Range. Those mountains offered a natural barrier, while the scouting party saw the valley as a suitable site for a capital of the Kingdom of God on earth.

Migration and Settlement

The journey west from Nauvoo covered thirteen hundred miles and exacted a heavy toll. Frostbite, disease, hunger, hostile encounters, and the deaths of more than six hundred Saints during the first winter marked the migration. On July 21, 1847, an advance party crested a ridge and saw the Great Salt Lake; the following morning, with Porter Rockwell leading, it descended through Emigration Canyon into the valley. The discovery turned the Great Basin from a chosen refuge into the setting for a new settlement.

The refuge’s political position shifted soon afterward. Following the war with Mexico, the United States annexed the Mormon homeland under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Saints had crossed national borders to get beyond conflict, but the republic followed them west. Young sought statehood as a means of securing greater sovereignty; instead, Utah Territory was established in 1850, leaving federal authorities with greater formal oversight.

Routes, Visitors, and Conflict

The California Gold Rush further changed the Great Basin’s role. Salt Lake City became a crucial way station on the shortest route to the gold fields, and streams of Gentile prospectors passed through the Mormon homeland. Their arrival threatened Young’s vision of dominion over a vast part of the basin, even as their need for provisions gave the Saints an opportunity to raise badly needed capital by charging high prices.

The region’s remoteness also framed a later episode involving a Gentile wagon train bound for California. Mountain Meadows lay in Utah’s remote southwest, high on the rim of the Great Basin. The book presents the episode associated with the valley as one of the American West’s most chilling, linking it to the fanaticism and brutality that Dan Lafferty and his fundamentalist brethren would later idealize.

A Changing Meaning of Isolation

The Great Basin’s significance rests on the contrast between refuge and exposure. Its deserts and mountain barriers initially appeared to offer separation from outside power; in practice, annexation and the gold-route traffic connected the Mormon settlement to the very forces Young hoped to keep at a distance. The narrative also places the Saints’ search for a protected homeland within successive claims of political authority: the basin was Mexican territory when selected, then part of the United States, while its roads and valleys became settings for encounters with Gentile migrants. Isolation was never simply a feature of the landscape; it was a hoped-for condition, repeatedly unsettled by history.