fertile areas of Mesa, Lehi, the Safford-Thatcher-Franklin district,
St. David on the San Pedro, and the many settlements of northeastern
Arizona, with St. Johns and Snowflake as their headquarters.

It is a remarkable fact that Mormon immigrants made even a greater number
of agricultural settlements in Arizona than did the numerically
preponderating other peoples. However, the explanation is a simple one:
The average immigrant, coming without organization, for himself alone,
naturally gravitated to the mines--indeed, was brought to the Southwest
by the mines. There was little to attract him in the desert plains
through which ran intermittent stream flows, and he lacked the vision
that showed the desert developed into the oasis. The Mormon, however,
came usually from an agricultural environment. Rarely was he a miner.

Of later years there has been much community commingling of the Mormon
and the non-Mormon. There even has been a second immigration from Utah,
usually of people of means. The day has passed for the ox-bowed wagon and
for settlements out in the wilderness. There has been left no wilderness
in which to work magic through labor. But the Mormon influence still is
strong in agricultural Arizona and the high degree of development of
many of her localities is based upon the pioneer settlement and work that
are dealt with in the succeeding pages.


First Farmers in Many States

It is a fact little appreciated that the Mormons have been first in
agricultural colonization of nearly all the intermountain States of
today. This may have been providential, though the western movement of
the Church happened in a time of the greatest shifting of population ever