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Show 7 Third, the pioneer mode relied heavily on direction from church leaders for the initial colonizing decisions, which included the locations of potential water development. 16 Fourth, disagreements were settled by mediation within the community ( often church officials were against utilizing federal courts for adjudicative purposes). Fifth, pioneer systems of water distribution and the methods employed in using the water in the fields were simple in nature and scope. As applied, they may be said to have made an extensive or superficial rather than intensive or exhaustive use of water resources. The Importance of the Repeated Pioneer Experience Dealing with irrigation created a common experience for Utah's pioneers. Whether a settler opened up a new area in 1847 or 1887 made little difference in the initial experience each had with water development, because the essential elements of the colonizing process remained unchanged even though there were many social, legal, and political changes in the established areas of the territory. After gathering to Utah, later groups of settlers were directed to start new settlements throughout the Great Basin and beyond. The pioneer pattern of water development and administration was relied upon. New sites were selected, companies of people were called and prepared for colonization, and upon arrival at the location the settlers worked as a group. Most canals, fields, and other resources were initially designed and built by common action, although management of specific farms ( or plots of ground within the community field) was private. 17 Even as settlement became more individualistic after the turn of the century, conditions of environment and remoteness required that new groups of settlers be self- sufficient for a time ( utilizing the pioneer customs) before the more sophisticated apparatus of government and economy were introduced. The cooperative process was utilized as the pioneer's chief method of settlement. 18 Groups worked together to overcome the obstacles of isolation and aridity to accomplish the ( Mormon) goal of territorial control and permanent settlement. Local leaders and their followers planned and implemented the specific projects needed to fulfill their call to settle a new area by building a functioning water system along with other necessities. 17 For at least twenty years ownership denoted only occupation, control, and a claim to a future title because legal titles were unavailable until the federal land offices were opened in 1869. 18 Leonard J. Arlington, Great Basin Kingdom, p 63. The Mormon response to the problems imposed by the settlement of the Great basin - a response which becomes ever clearer in succeeding decades - suggests that Mormon economic policies bore a greater resemblance to those of the ante- bellum northeast than did the economic policies of the West during the years when the West was won. Isolated as they were from American thought currents after 1847, and under the necessity of continued group action to solve the many problems which plagued them, the Mormons were not affected by the growing accommodation to the private corporation, rugged individualism, Social Darwinism, and other concepts which account for the rise of laissez- faire after 1850. It may yet be conceded that the well- publicized conflicts and differences between the Mormons and other westerners and Americans were not so much a matter of plural marriage and other reprehensible peculiarities and superstitions as of the conflicting economic patterns of two generations of Americans, one of which was fashioned after the communitarian concepts of the age of Jackson, and the other of which was shaped by the dream of bonanza and the individualistic sentiments of the age of laissez- faire. |