called the missionary period. Then came the prairie schooners that bore,
from Utah, men and women to people and redeem the arid southland valleys.
Most of this colonization was in Arizona, where the field was
comparatively open. In California there had been religious persecution
and in New Mexico the valleys very generally had been occupied for
centuries by agricultural Indians and by native peoples speaking an alien
tongue. There was extension over into northern Mexico, with consequent
travail when impotent governments crumbled. But in Arizona, in the
valleys of the Little Colorado, the Salt, the Gila and the San Pedro and
of their tributaries and at points where the white man theretofore had
failed, if he had reached them at all, the Mormons set their stakes and,
with united effort, soon cleared the land, dug ditches and placed dams
in unruly streams, all to the end that farms should smile where the
desert had reigned. It all needed imagination and vision, something that,
very properly, may be called faith. Sometimes there was failure.
Occasionally the brethren failed to live in unity. They were human. But,
at all times, back of them were the serenity and judgment and resources
of the Church and with them went the engendered confidence that all would
be well, whatever befell of finite sort. It has been said that faith
removes mountains. The faith that came with these pioneers was well
backed and carried with it brawn and industry.

"Mormon Settlement in Arizona" should not carry the idea that Arizona was
settled wholly by Mormons. Before them came the Spaniards, who went north
of the Gila only as explorers and missionaries and whose agriculture
south of that stream assuredly was not of enduring value. There were
trappers, prospectors, miners, cattlemen and farmers long before the
wagons from Utah first rolled southward, but the fact that Arizona's
agricultural development owes enormously to Mormon effort can be
appreciated in considering the establishment and development of the